Being With Each Other in the Unknown: Polycrisis, The Art Workshop, and Rehearsing the Radical Imagination

This article analyses the participatory art workshop in relation to the contemporary polycrisis. Here, ‘polycrisis’ is a descriptive term used to understand interconnected global instability and a call for criticality and radical imagination. This is explored through the participatory art workshop ‘Practices of Refusal: Art and the Obsession with Participation’ that I collaboratively ran as part of Antiuniversity Now, a UK-based platform for radical learning. In this workshop, refusal and non-participation, typically feared modes of participation in group work, are explored as creative acts. In the workshop, we reenact activities from radical pedagogy and dialogical methods from 1970s feminist consciousness-raising groups to collaboratively build a toolkit of ideas for refusal and non-participation.

Through this research, I explore how the explicit and hidden curriculum of the participatory art workshop relates to the polycrisis. I argue that practices of refusal and non-participation are essential forms of agency, both as a means of practising resistance and radical imagination. Yet, practising being together in a liminal space of collective imagination cannot be overlooked. As part of this analysis, I explore how entanglements with institutions form the aesthetics of the participatory art workshop. Therefore, funding and organisational ties should be critically looked at when considering any impacts of art workshops.