Week 5 | Workshop on Production with Rachael Disbury – Shuwen Chen / Curating (2021-2022)[SEM2]

17 February 2022

Workshop on Production

In this workshop, Rachael will use her own organisation as an example to show us what to do as a curator to ensure that what we ‘produce’ is deliverable and meaningful.

At the beginning of the workshop, Rachael introduced her organisation: what it does (film, current social projects), who it is staffed by, and herself as director (what her job entails – writing grant applications, deciding on the direction of the organisation, considering the audience, etc). Although Racheal said that her organisation currently has only about six people, they have a clear division of labour and the projects are well organised.

While not every student will be a curator, Rachael says it is important to understand how organisations work.

How to maintain quality in the curatorial process and deliver within strict constraints was the focus of this workshop. Also, how to create different parts of a project and who to arrange to take on was the goal of this discussion. (Of course, as a team with many different skills, it is also important to help each other.)

My notes are as follows.

External:

Determine what resources you have: what kind of technical support do you need? Do you need workshops or studios? Can you find support in the areas of craftsmanship, skills and materials?

Analyse the audience: Determine who will be our audience and help to promote it later (platforms such as social networks).

Sponsorship (funding): how to determine if you need a sponsor (commercial or not), looking for brands or companies that are consistent with the values of our organisation. Or only work with social interest groups such as charities?

Marketing

Contact with local groups

Internal:

Workshops: members sit around a table to discuss, name things of interest and develop a framework for decision making. (But curation and production cannot be isolated from the context in which we name them.)

Interviews with artists: getting to know the artists we work with.

Toolkit: spreadsheets with timelines, where everyone in the team is assigned roles. Control when and how things happen.

By the end of the workshop my mind was full of new knowledge. Although I don’t think I have what it takes to be a curator, I like to work in a structured way.

Rachael’s explanation of her own project gave me a basic understanding of the workflow and distribution of roles in a team, and set me up to work closer to the archives in the programme meeting.