In-Situ is Ten!
- Natalie Hughes
- Dec 15, 2022
- 2 min read
This text was commissioned in partnership with Corridor 8. To mark our tenth birthday, we invited writer Natalie Hughes to reflect on In-Situ’s journey and approach so far.
Dominator Culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.– bell hooks[1]
In Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003), bell hooks draws on her personal experiences as both a teacher and a student to lay out her vision of a learning environment that is free from any form of oppression. She aims to create a space for people to think freely and feel safe enough to make mistakes in the company of one another, and learn from them together. Most importantly of all, the book emphasises the joy of learning and how one must view it as a lifelong process. hooks frequently returns to this idea of learning as a process throughout her text, resisting a model of education that leads solely to qualification.
Reflecting on In-Situ’s ten-year journey from a barely funded practitioner-led research project to fully fledged NPO (National Portfolio Organisation), I am reminded of hooks’ text and the alternative reality she embodies through her teachings. In-Situ isn’t an educational institution, nor are its members teachers, however, its founding principle of ‘embedding art into everyday life in Pendle’ works on a very similar premise. This is to say that the organisation employs artistic practice as a conduit to birth the latent possibilities of the area; possibilities that had previously lain dormant because of the capitalist (un)reality we find ourselves stuck in.
