Runway x disorganising: Barry Esson and Bryony McIntyre — Arika

I didn’t start from a position of having a specialist knowledge necessarily, you know, it started off quite ad hoc. With our early programs, we were getting very frustrated with being limited to art forms. At the time — I might have a broader, more forgiving analysis of it now — but at the time I was very frustrated with experimental music and its lack of political discourse, and the way in which certain things were valorised as politically progressive, but were often self-exploitative and invested in an idea of the self which I just really can’t stand.

We came up with the idea for ‘episodes’, a word that didn’t have a fixed meaning already, not a festival or a biennial or conference, but something we could fill with our own meaning, that would develop over time, so something that happens in an episode informs what happens in the next one. There are a series of thematic questions that imply a trajectory and, hopefully, a deepening of knowledge. We tried to organise the episodes in terms of friendship and solidarity rather than being responsible for an art form, where you’re subsequently limited in how you move, and which seems to encourage very short-term interest in things that are fashionable at that moment.

We wanted to move through deepening relationships that were going to involve a recurring cast of characters that you’re in an ongoing relationship with. You work together once, and then the next time, it deepens and deepens again, and you move through friendship, you’re moving through their friends who they introduce you to, moving very slowly and deliberately through personal connections, a relational way of working rather than a transactional one.

There’s a set of actualities that underpin the curatorial organisation that we were trying to progress. And some of the organisational changes that we’ve gone through align with those curatorial changes, and some misalign for various reasons. We are currently a small arts organisation funded by an arms-length Scottish government body. But we started out just filling the gap, individually making stuff happen that wasn’t there. So, you make it for yourself, and you do that technically as a freelancer, working with partner venues who allow you access to their resources, their buildings, to fill that gap, that desire. And that’s how it started — Instal, Music Lovers Field Companion, Kill Your Timid Notion, and other projects. It was institutional partners seeing in us something that they didn’t have, and contracting us to fill their curatorial gap, allowing us to do that with a transaction of resources and access, to then apply for more money from other funders. That was the model until 2006, six years.

And then we recognised the frustrations in that model. We weren’t getting paid at all for our labour, and the reputational, creative capital that was being accrued by the partner institutions, and not the people who had originated and, in most cases, performed the labour of producing, setting the scene, and creating the ground.

It is a siphoning of power from cultural producers into institutions in order to maintain themselves, rather than for us to put it back into the cultures that we were involved in.

So, by structural necessity that we identified, we tried to move away from that relationship into a different one where we had more autonomy and agency. We would have to form an organisation. That happened in 2006, and it is interesting how the symbiosis of what you have to do to access funding does influence what you end up doing. I think that’s the core of your questions here. At the time, I don’t think we were questioning that, we just had to do it. And it’s interesting to think how that one act has influenced how we’ve been structured, what we’ve done, and how we continued over the years. We were constituted in 2006, and that allowed us to apply for money on our own terms, and to have agency, and a name that could gain a reputation for the things we’ve done and therefore continue to receive funding. I’m being raw and cold about this, but I think that is what you want, the raw facts.

We managed then to pay ourselves eventually as employees of Arika, and as soon as that happened, these questions of organisational structure — the politics and responsibilities — became apparent, because up until that point we were founders, and it was just the two of us having to negotiate what we did between ourselves. It was an entity in itself, but as soon as other people were involved with responsibilities, then Arika became its own thing because Arika had a responsibility to those people as well. Whether we continued individually or collectively, we had responsibilities to each other in our entanglement. What is the corporate body, how do you manifest it, and in what situation?

We trundled along like that for a while with one other person working for us. And then incrementally a few other people began to work for us. And I think it was about 2012, moving through the transition away from artform-specific festivals to episodes, and through a political consciousness-raising that was going on both personally, but also within the research practice, expressed through the events, we were beginning to recognise that we should live our values and ethics, curatorially, for want of a better word, practically and organisationally. That actually is really hard, as we are still trying to get funding every three or four years. How do you navigate the responsibilities that you have to adhere to, to allow you to continue the possibility to access that funding?

In 2015 and 2016, we were acknowledging this as more of an issue and tried to move toward flatly organised structures. At that time there were five or six of us, not full-time. We did that totally DIY; no research, no models, apart from folks that had experience in anarchist organising. It was a challenging process that ultimately didn’t go very well. It was great to try and there was tons of learning. The ultimate contradiction was in people’s utopian vision of how collectivisation can work. Ultimately Barry and I were a bit of a block because we were the founders, we were full-time, and everyone else was part-time. There was a material and existential power dynamic that perhaps at the time we weren’t being transparent about, or really addressing. 

We currently have interests in everything that Arika does. And then we have staff that implement the goals that we write together. We are at this juncture again, trying to critically reflect on how our values and ethics are implemented through our organisation. We are currently doing a lot of work on our company handbook to make sure that our policies are in line with what we want to offer as employers and employees.

That is internal work, but it does relate to wanting to create conditions which means that when other people come into Arika, it is more transparent about the situation, so if things arise, there is something to fall back on. That’s not inflexible, we can always adapt. But there is something there. And it also, I think, comes from something we’ve acknowledged over the years, but not massively done anything about, which is overproduction.

We have definitely been doing that for years, burning out, saying we’ll do less, but actually not doing that. There is a contradiction, in terms of wanting to do stuff in the world and having passion and motivation and energy to want to do more, but not having the capacity or resources. And that’s a kind of frustration that then feeds back into how you are organisationally structured

What can you do with that? If you’re having to do everything an organisation needs, there are some things that you can do, and there are some things you just can’t do, even if you might have the desire to do them. That is what we’re negotiating organisationally at the moment, thinking about what different structures there might be, what co-operative models might be employed, or to just understand — what the limits are of Arika’s organisational structure that we are willing to bend, and which ones we aren’t.