BCC members, Jade Foster and Yewande YoYo Odunubi have carried out ongoing research from September 2021.
Following from 'Meandering Networks, Mapping Nations', Pace & Flow is a research programme inspired by the three main cycles of an ecosystem: the water cycle, the carbon cycle, and the nitrogen cycle. These three cycles working in balance are responsible for replenishing the ecosystem with the nutrients necessary to sustain life.
Abstractly relational to the three cycles, Black curators have a vital role in sustaining and building diverse culture in the sector. BCC is like ecology and is a cultural landscape in itself that feeds into something broader in the art world. To relate BCC to this ontological figure of thought is to resist anti-blackness and social death. Humanising and understanding the collective as something living and thriving, which keeps functioning regardless of hostile cultural landscapes, is an act of self-love and defiance.
As a collective and agency, we encourage growth in light of new ideas. We cyclically lean on each other and other Black cultural practitioners to sustain our practices. This programme, therefore, actualises a way for research to harmonise, be in conversation and feed into each other organically and generatively. As the main cycles of an ecosystem comprise long-term processes, similarly, we consider this project a small contribution to establishing and documenting the life-long practices that will continue to be used as a resource for ourselves and others; years after.
BCC CIC was awarded funding by The Big House via Real Creative Futures Digital. The programme is funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and Art Fund.
Jade's research proposal
Undertaking international travel, Jade will engage with artistic research and exhibitions internationally to understand curatorial practice outside of their context. The research will support them to learn about different organisational models and spaces for reflection, research, and experimentation centring BPOC artists and curators. This will allow Jade to adopt models, practices, or ways of working that could benefit Black curators in the UK.
Jade visited HANGAR, MOVART, and Not A Museum in Lisbon, Portugal in 2021 and will attend documenta fifteen in June 2022. It is the first time in documenta's history that the artistic directors are a collective. The Jakarta-based artists' collective, ruangrupa, has based documenta fifteen on core values and ideas of lumbung (Indonesian term for a communal rice barn). lumbung as an artistic and economic model is rooted in principles such as collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation.
Yewande's research proposal
Working between her curatorial and artistic point of enquiry; “what does the body need to dream?” and propositions raised through Black Curators Collectives’ (BCC) 'Meandering Networks, Mapping Nations' programme, Yewande is interested in exploring what conditions, tools, pedagogies/frameworks can help facilitate space and a site(s) of dreaming for Black cultural and art practitioners. Yewande will navigate past and contemporary ideas and cultivations of divergent spaces and practices, particularly across and within the African, Black and Caribbean continents and diaspora, to piece together resources and knowledge that support Black practitioners to play with more expansive and embodied language(s) and frameworks that can shape, grow and sustain our practices.