BE PART, Gordon Douglas – DIY17: That’s Governance!,Scottish Sculpture Workshop, 27.10.2020 — 19.11.2020

That’s Governance! invites a group of participants to work together and propose a non-human candidate to hold a position on Scottish Sculpture Workshop’s Board of Trustees. Applying games and exercises in deep listening and roleplay with puppets, the workshop will encourage a playful response and challenge to the perceivably immoveable conditions of governing. What can we achieve by heightening our grasp of organisational advice from non-human actors, and what can we complicate by attributing social purpose to phenomena as critical or reformative tools? The workshop is open to people with keen interests in performativity, and who want to embrace further affinities with deep ecology, queer theory, actor network theory, and alternative structures of governance. 

The workshop responds directly to artist Jack Tan’s quotation that “a truly queer, feminist, anti-racist, posthuman board would dance a tango with Governance– resisting, releasing, evading, acquiescing, rejecting”, and will expand outwards from Scottish Sculpture Workshop towards challenging broader conditions of governance. The resulting conversations and collective proposal will ruminate on the performativity of personhood, eligibility criteria and barriers to governing, anthropomorphic hierarchies relating to non-humans, and considerations within collaborative decision-making.

To find out more and apply, visit: http://www.ssw.org.uk/diy-17-2020-thats-governance/

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Scottish Sculpture Workshop, 02.11.2020, events

sketch for multi-headed puppet for several performers (2016), Gordon Douglas

Scottish Sculpture Workshop, sketch for multi-headed puppet for several performers (2016), Gordon Douglas, 02.11.2020, events

About DIY 

DIY is an opportunity for artists working in Live Art to conceive and run unusual research, training and professional development projects for themselves and other artists, supported by Live Art Development Agency. This is the fourth year SSW have participated in the DIY network, and this year it forms part of their BE PART fieldworks. 

 

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Scottish Sculpture Workshop, 02.11.2020, events

About Gordon Douglas

Gordon Douglas is a performance artist based in Glasgow. He devises embedded positions, games and events that set out to reimagine organisations, and investigate the performativity of working together. His practice is founded on a commitment to (and scepticism of) collaboration, and aims to generate social byproducts by playing through, or exhausting, perceived institutional systems. This research has seen him take on a variety of roles including time spent with: The NewBridge Project, Newcastle (2016); Edinburgh College (2016-17); Travelling Gallery, Scotland (2018); and Cooper Gallery, Dundee (2019). Recently, he conducted an extensive ‘performative audit’ of power, access and accountability within CCA Glasgow’s open source policy (An Opposites Programme, 2018-19). The non-human agent he shares most in common with is blu-tack.

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Scottish Sculpture Workshop, 02.11.2020, events