Consultation (Counter) Cultures is a two-part event series that critically evaluates the dysfunction of public consultation practices in the context of urban renewal and discusses the role that cultural practitioners can play in transforming how the public engages in decision making processes. Two events will bring together artists, designers, activists, curators and legal professionals to consider how we can generate a systemic re-thinking of the conditions and approaches to consultation and crucially, how cultural practices can contribute.
Conducted by architects and planning professionals, consultation is frequently a performance of public participation in consensus building to satisfy legislative requirements with no genuine consideration of the stakeholders’ needs and desires. The spatial injustices resulting from these flawed consultation processes over the past twenty years of regeneration in London are evidenced by residents’ growing discontent. Residents’ groups and campaigners are now calling for a revised approach to engagement and representation.
AA tutors, Julika Gittner (artist/architect) and Claire Louise Staunton (curator) have for more than 5 years been researching and lecturing on public consultation, its radical history and the role of cultural practices within it. Together they have recognised how artists and cultural producers (including themselves) can be both instrumentalised in the process of consultation and become arbiters of a new, more democratic and resistant form of consultation.
Session 1: Infrastructures of self-representation, Thursday 23 January
Jesko Fezer (Architect/Artist/Designer)
Julika Gittner (Artist/Researcher)
Saskia O’Hara (Public Interest Law Centre (PILC)’s Gentrification Project Manager)
Chaired by Claire Louise Staunton (Curator/Researcher)
Session 2: The Resistant Representations of Artist-Activists, Thursday 30 January
Aysen Dennis and Alessia Gammarota (Artist and curator, campaigners with Fight 4 Aylesbury)
Tom Keene (Artist/Researcher/Activist with Save Cressingham Gardens)
Loraine Leeson (Artist/Researcher, Middlesex University)
Chaired by Claire Louise Staunton (Curator/Researcher)
