In Joyful Militancy (2017), Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery reveal that "freedom was once inseparable from interdependence, close ties, and kinship: I am free because of others I can depend on."
The cultural practitioners invited to take part in the fourth Impulse session have been working within collective settings and pooling resources as well as knowledge. For them, independence and long-term sustainability have come to signify a deepening of our interdependence – to peers, a larger network, environment, and other-than-human.
The current art economy relies heavily on an informal network of support – where unpaid and invisibilised labor is common – to be able to sustain itself, which favours a productivist approach and offers a fertile ground for exploitation and abuse.
Against the backdrop of competition and rentability as core managerial values, in a time when institutions and artists are asked to partake in the 'productive' economy and adopt their techniques and mindset, this session will discuss 'collectivity' as a long-term and sustainable mode of organisation, and what this entails in terms of imagination, tools, resources, values and praxis.