In the 21st century, a plurality of knowledge systems and practices will be critical for responding to increasingly volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) contemporary societies [3]. However,  any attempt to envision co-existing frameworks for pluralities must first begin with a series of acknowledgements about the deeply entrenched inequalities and inherited power dynamics that shape society and socially engaged art practice today. The first acknowledgement is that so many of us have been trapped by the industrial global economy, and its accompanying frameworks of separation and artificial scarcity. All over the planet, residents and communities have had their people-place relations repeatedly silenced, suppressed, or systematically distorted. For example, in the UK, communities of individuals have little or no attachment to their natural environment. They do not know the plants that grow near to them nor the herbalist practices from which they might benefit. They are isolated from local knowledge-worlds of the soil, sea, and air and ignorant of the more-than-human worlds they live in. Art workers aren’t sure what aspects of living in a carbon-intensive society they can cease or rescind whilst maintaining a precarious working life and securing basic services, such as housing and healthcare. Curators and conservators have little understanding of the sacred life cycles of the natural and human remains in their collection, a relation often important to the communities from which the remains originate. 

The disconnect between how people come to know about their lifeworld does not end there. A residential district in inner London isn’t aware of the wealth that their community generates and how they might leverage this value for a healthier and supportive future. An artist and educator remarks that because of where he grew up and where he went to school, he was never meant to know what carbon is. A disabled artist feels ignored when they tell others they cannot grow their own food and rely on medical plastics to enhance their quality of life. Across the sea, an archaeologist observes ancient healing and fertility sites are eroding due to man-made climate change, and with them the customs vital to communities required to repair their world today. In the rainforest, an artist is producing low-impact art materials at the same time he is fighting the destruction of his natural environment and home, vital to life on this planet for all. Each of these examples comes from real-life moments in commissions that took place as part of Sunlight Doesn’t  Need a Pipeline, an art, climate justice and collaborative learning project I have been curating since 2020.  On one hand they reveal a kaleidoscope of rifts between people and their lifeworld’s. Rifts that are often happening in ways that are deeply felt but little understood. On the other hand, the examples demonstrate that art workers are involved in layers of unacknowledged care work, as well as (re)building relations between people and place that have long been eroded through the expansion of capitalism and  Modernity. 

The second acknowledgement I must make before exploring pluralities of practice is that curating, as a  professional discipline, is built on the perceived freedom of the West to gatekeep the world’s knowledge and culture, so that some voices are more audible, and some stories and experiences are more easily believed. Curating has its roots in the colonial project. Founded on expansionist pursuits of Western knowledge, and concepts of labour and individualism developed by Enlightenment philosophers, collection and display were imposed throughout the globe through European colonial and settler-colonial projects. The creation of curation in museums and institutions in the West literally created walls around knowledge,  limiting its access and, in many instances, knowledge was forcibly removed from the land and from the relationships of those sharing the land. From health and trade to culture and science, there is a long and violent history of communities being marginalised from their own stories and practices. This has been exerted as a form of governmental control providing a means for a small elite to acquire knowledge for the purposes of power and leadership. Those within the walls became knowers; those outside became non knowers. These are some of the histories that curating inherits and benefits from in the present. 

Acknowledging that Modernity and racial capitalism [4] has created a million cracks in our worlds by creating frameworks of segregation tells us that any shared future must involve collective wisdom, ancient and modern. Art workers bringing communities together and creating collective spaces for self-knowledge are continually building and maintaining connections as part of multiple and layered forms of care work. In  their book, Care Work Dreaming Disability Justice, activist, poet and artist Leah Laksmi Piepzna Samarasinha reminds us that “the care work we give is essential to building movements that are accessible and sustainable.” [5] For myself and the coalition of artists and researchers involved in Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline, carefully growing networks became a sacred social economy at the heart of the project. It meant that we were able to deeply connect with others and understand our work through their eyes.  Growing networks was also an exhaustive process of externalised support and was often invisible to the institutions we worked with. For example, Sunlight had ten commissions. Each started from the place that none of us are technical experts on the climate but many of us are deeply invested in natural environments and ecosystems, whether this is people or planet. Over two years I worked to support each commissioned artist to reach to individuals and communities located all over the planet, so that they could engage in situated and complex dialogues about what climate justice looked like art workers from all walks of life. 

Collaborating with various and diverse art workers embedded in marginalised contexts and whose stories need to be told was not about centralising knowledge as part of a curatorial impulse but about weaving connections into bonds as part of an alchemical act of peer-learning. The result is a rich eco-system of ideas placing value on relational work to form communities of capacity in the face of the uncertainty that lies ahead. It goes without saying that this type of work necessitates high levels of trust and emotional labour, the mental and emotional work we do to maintain relationships [6]. This support work also rests on a  carefully nurtured network of friendships that are built on the idea that everyone benefits, rather than connections built on a set of preconceived outcomes.

Our worlds are linked by little threads. For example, buying fast fashion connects us to the women and children in South Asia who are exploited to make these garments. Many forms of art, activism, or research follow these connections, making lines through things so society can shift perspectives and see alternative pictures. Threads allow us to empathise and understand our boundaries and responsibilities to one another.  Working relationally doesn’t only require a lens to examine how the world around us works, as Professor of Africana Studies Shawn A. Ginwright tells us, this type of work asks us to pivot and use a mirror to look inside of ourselves [7]. This is not a quick fix, it is an embodied process where we face our fears, insecurities,  and dreams. Yet, when we practice self-reflection and introspection honestly and vulnerably, we also can affirm our connections with others and the world around us to make better decisions. 

Working relationally requires something deeper of its practitioners, something that goes beyond active listening and checking in about what is useful. It encompasses internal work, a considered and embodied process that is in opposition to what current funders, institutions and commissioning bodies ask for or recognise. In other words, working relationally is not just about reaching outwards to create community bonds it also facilitates radical physical-psychic change in ourselves, and the various worlds in which we exist and to which we aspire.  

Making connections in ourselves, between each other and with our life worlds, is a complicated care economy little discussed in the cultural sector. It is one that illustrates that caring for each other sustainably is far more complex than at first it may seem. Modernity is a trauma. Borders—political, psychic, social and cultural—surround us in every part of our waking lives. The disconnect brought about by Modernity’s impulses has fragmented our collective psyches, and its effects are still with us. Curators and artists who work in relational ways work hard to create temporary unities and imagine/project possible wholes out of the given fragments. How might we begin to acknowledge the collective healing that happens in artistic and curatorial webs of care and how might they show us plural ways of living and being in uncertain times? 

Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha tells us that sick and disabled Black and brown queer people have long used “care webs” to support one another. Care webs are where groups of disabled, able-bodied, and not disabled individuals, work together for long periods of time to provide care and access to resources for each other [8]. Members might help someone pick up their medicine, organise a taxi to take someone somewhere, be relied on for emotional support, or do care work. All of this support is self-organised from within (ontonomy) and at the local level (autonomy). This decentralised mutual aid proliferates nearly every city without the help of state funding or institutional backing, and shifts the idea of access and care of all kinds (disability, child, economic) from individual to collective while working through the raced,  classed, gendered aspects of access and support. This means care webs, and the disability justice activists who practice them, have a lot to teach us about what support looks like in socially engaged art practice.  Self-organised artistic and curatorial projects that build networks share similarities to “care webs”. They work in coalition with other art workers, activists, residents, and communities to visit each other, organise ideas, support each other realise projects, and represent at their events and much, much more. This is not just the physical and emotional care and support work that is external to artistic practice, it is the practice,  and it is a part of a deeper process of collective healing. 

In an age of precarity, it is increasingly necessary to account for the externalised care and emotional labour that artists are engaged in as part of a wider strategy of artistic rematerialisation of people-place knowledge relations. Creating collective access becomes a key act of holism of healing work. The art worker works hard to create a space in which others can create temporary unities and imagine/project possible wholes out of the given fragments we currently have. Moreover, recognising the shift towards a wider ethics of interconnectivity is imperative for society to step through the wounds of Modernity and connect with each other and all other living beings on the planet. Figuring out how we can build and support a community to access their own knowledge, that is also a circle of influence that works from the  bottom up, is a radical act.