'Making Futures: the crafts in the context of emerging global sustainability agendas' will be held on Thursday 17th and Friday 18th September 2009 within the magnificently sited Mount Edgcumbe estate on the River Tamar opposite the city of Plymouth, Devon, UK.
Conference aims:
The aims of the ‘Making Futures’ research conference are to improve understanding of the ways in which the contemporary crafts are responding to ideas and agendas connected with global environmental and sustainability issues. Also, to try to discern whether these new imperatives present opportunities for the crafts to redefine and reconstitute themselves as less marginalised, more centrally productive forces in society.
Context:
The crafts, perhaps more than many areas of creative practice, have instinctively strong affinities with concerns for environmentally responsible and sustainable development. For example, Western craft ideals (perhaps less so realities) have typically sought to mobilise aesthetic experience as a key dimension and expression of responsible living in the face of mass industrialization - through their empathy with natural materials and the natural world, and through ‘slow’ and cooperative models of living. Indeed, important initiatives in pursuit of ethical and sustainable development objectives continue to take place within craft enterprises and agencies today. But the fact remains that our understanding of the interactions between the contemporary crafts and the modern environmental and sustainability ‘movements’ remains largely uncharted, unrepresented and under-theorised.
The ‘Making Futures’ conference will take up this challenge at a fitting moment: the contemporary crisis in the ideology and practice of unfettered market-led Globalisation all too clearly substantiates long-standing calls to accountable and sustainable modes of development. ‘Making Futures’ will therefore explore the ways in which environmental and sustainability discourses might be leading to new formulations, or re-articulations, of craft practices, identities, positions and markets, in ways that might engage more directly with contemporary social, cultural and economic needs. Perhaps even (dare one be so bold to suggest) to recover ideological purpose.
Scope and definitions of environmentalism and sustainability:
Needless to say, environmental and sustainability issues constitute some of the most pressing economic and cultural challenges facing societies across the globe. Climate change, environmental degradation, the loss of indigenous species and cultures, resource depletion and rising costs of materials – all these gathering factors are forcing wider changes in thinking and behaviour that point to the urgent need to develop new socio-economic paradigms, practices, and ideological rationales. In the case of this conference, these imperatives will be structured relative to the crafts through three overlapping sustainability related perspectives:
- Social Cultural Equity and Engagement: the cultural contexts that shape the meanings of the crafts in relation to environmental and sustainability agendas. This includes the crafts in relation to ideals of community equity and engagement, especially in respect of local and indigenous peoples and traditions, and ethical processes of making and selling.
- Environmental Stewardship; for example, the crafts in relation to the sourcing of raw materials, to making and production processes, and to marketing and distribution methods.
- Market Positioning & Economic Viability: or example, the crafts in relation to changing social attitudes and consumer behaviours in respect to environmental and sustainability agendas; including their comparative positioning to industrial forms of production and/or ‘fine’ art practices.
The conference makes no assumptions as to the weighting that specific contributions might assign to each of these perspectives. Moreover, we are interested to explore how craft enterprises and agencies are attempting to integrate and balance the (sometimes competing) demands of these three. A better appreciation of the factors determining such interactions might help us to recognise both the challenges and opportunities associated with reframing aspects of both crafts practice and crafts education in the future.
Participants, geographic range and practice-based definitions:
‘Making Futures’ invites submissions from craft practitioners, curators, historians, theorists, campaigners, activists, and representatives from public and private institutions with an interest in the relationship between the contemporary crafts and sustainability issues.
The conference scope is international and will welcome accounts from non-western contexts, especially those experiencing rapid industrial and urban development and newly expanding consumer markets. These will be contrasted with analysis from within the so called post-industrial ‘leisure economies’ of the West in order to generate comparative insights and heighten awareness of the trans-national nature of many of the issues. The conference is therefore interested in inputs arising from across the full spectrum of crafts practice today. This includes makers of individual works who place a premium on traditional processes, locales, skills and haptic qualities; designer-makers producing limited editions and batch-produced artifacts; and artist-craftspeople whose work might be more conceptually-based - perhaps consciously drawing upon cross-disciplinary and hybridized practices to critically reflect upon global dialogues and forms of exchange.
It will be seen from the above description that the focus of ‘Making Futures’ is on the contemporary crafts as typically understood within an 'applied arts' framework. Nevertheless, the conference is also open to approaches from cognate areas of practice which can cast light on the themes through productive associations with these more circumscribed understandings. Music and dance, for example, could be thought of as having much in common with the applied arts notions of craft that the conference is largely taking as its centre of gravity.
This inclusiveness of practice and trans-cultural perspective will in all instances be grounded in studies that evince convincing connections with ethical, environmental and sustainability concerns. 'Convincing' in this context does not imply ‘authentic’. Indeed, the conference is interested in inquiries that might wish to explore possible exploitative or deceptive (intentional or otherwise) and propagandistic connections between the 'crafts', 'environmentalism' and 'sustainability'.
Formats and indicative topics:
‘Making Futures’ will seek to bring a number of perspectives to bear upon the conference themes and issues:
- The evaluation of significant practice-based case studies, past and present, that exhibit substantial concerns for conservation, indigenous rights, the environment and/or ethical sustainability issues. Case studies might typically relate to practitioners, processes, products, projects, enterprises, collectives, institutions, agencies, ideas and allied movements, campaigns, initiatives, and curatorial practices and strategies.
- Examinations of the broader contextual formations and critical discourses in which the crafts and sustainability issues are made manifest. This would include perspectives derived from historical, technological, social-cultural, philosophical-aesthetic, anthropological, and/or political and economic models of enquiry.
Conference topics that might be considered include, but are not restricted to:
- Explorations of how ethical, sustainable and environmental principles are manifested in and through particular materials, processes of extraction of resources, processes associated with making, and processes associated with the supply and distribution of products and materials to markets.
- The movements and stresses between past and present sustainability needs, between traditional cultures and modernity, between rural and urban cultures, between developing cultures and craft markets in the developed world. How these are expressed as tensions and flows between local, regional, national and global levels of resolution.
- Labour theories of value in respect to the crafts, and reactions to mass production and consumption that intersect with sustainability and environmental agendas; for example, so called 'slow design', the ‘cult of the imperfect', 'amateurism' and forms of customisable production as critical responses to de-skilling/re-skilling and subsumption processes. And how discourses of ‘community’, ‘sustainability’, ‘nature’ and ‘aesthetics’ (etc) might endow the commodity with symbolic market value.
- Expanded conceptions of authoriship and/or collaboration in relation to the crafts and environmental and sustainability concerns, that challenge accepted ideas of practice and the 'consumption' of the artefact or experience, perhaps seeing these as sites combining composite agencies and identities.
- Ethical and philosophical-aesthetic reflections that relate the crafts and sustainability concerns, including those that explore the possible slips and/or ambiguities found between rhetorical performance and situated experience, (for example, in terms such as 'ethical production', 'sustainable markets' and 'ethical consumption'). And whether, to what extent, and the ways in which working to sustainable development principles might be said to produce 'better' craftspeople, work, and/or audiences.
- Sustainability and environmental activism and the crafts; for example, contemporary crafts practice as a means to empower self and others to gain critical awareness of the habitat, to engage in grassroots activism and community participation. Also, possible blending between the digital media technologies used to give voice and empower activists, and the crafts.
- The developing legal infrastructures determining environmental protection and sustainability agendas, nationally, at the European level, and internationally, and as they might impact upon craft. This might include possible crafts-based connections to IPR issues and concepts of open source and copy-left distribution.
- Reporting structures for communicating progress towards sustainability, (what they are, how they operate, and what they might become). Including systems for reporting and transferring good practice to educate independent practitioners, SME’s, audiences and markets; the kinds of sustainability information and goals that need to be transferred and the networks for doing so at local, regional and international levels.
- The implications for crafts education and curriculum design, including practical measures and proposals for presenting change.
