This Learning Lab was formed via collaboration between Create Ireland and Counterpoints Arts. It brought artists, activists, policy makers and racial justice/human rights advocates and activists together, to think about how we might practically put the principles around ‘equality, diversity and human rights’ into practice.
The creative case for diversity is an attempt to re-unite two conversations that have been in danger of becoming separated. Instead of having a conversation about diversity on one side of the room and a conversation about how we make profound, or great, or excellent art, on the other side of the room, let’s have one conversation about art and how we make it with the true value of diversity and equality at the heart of it.
Hassan Mahamdallie, The Creative Case for Diversity
If we have now arrived at acknowledging the genealogy of violence and injustice in our institutions, public spaces, and personal lives, then the hard work of the days and months to come is to unlearn the practices and behaviors that have emerged from this condition, and seek to build anew along antiracist and decolonized lines.
Yesomi Umolu, Artistic Director of 2019 Chicago Biennial
COVID 19 has laid bare the stark inequalities in contemporary society – across health, housing, work and racial justice. We are living through a dramatic conjuncture, marked by both the global pandemic and the witnessing of the forces of racialised violence in the US and elsewhere. Many of those inequalities and structural injustices are not ‘new’ but have deeper histories shaped by comparative systems of oppression. They are historically, geographically and structurally connected.
The Learning Lab coincided with the European Union marking the 20th anniversary of the Race and Equality Directive (June 29th) and in the context of the Irish Art Council’s Equality Human Rights and Diversity Policy and Strategy (2019).
This Learning Lab accommodated an opportunity for collective/concrete ‘futures-thinking’, to help us to imagine how policies of equality, diversity and human rights (values inscribed into many Arts Council’s policies) might be practically implemented through new models of cooperative and participatory arts commissioning/programming; newly formed cross-sector infrastructures; and new ways of sharing and redistributing resources and more equitable ways of working.
The Learning Lab opened via a conversation with Hassan Mahamdallie, creative writer and dramaturge and one of the primary thinkers and authors behind the ‘Creative Case for Diversity’ (ACE, 2011) and Nike Jonah, Creative Producer, Pop Culture and Social Change at Counterpoints Arts. Their contribution was followed by a series of short provocations, which responded to some of the following questions:
How can we begin the process of decolonisation in order to make civic spaces and ways of working more equitable and just? How can the arts and culture sector decolonise from within? Who will be part of this cross-sector conversation and what might decolonisation look like in practice?
The comparative nature of this discussion was/is intentional, co-designed with the explicit aim of initiating a conversation between actors located in different geographies, institutions and practices, many of whom are shaped by and are responding to different ‘genealo[gies] of violence and injustice’ (Yesomi Umolu).
