The resilient city, reciprocity within creative ecologies

This paper will focus upon three central ideas:

• The City of Glasgow and the Art School
• Resilience and creative pedagogies
• Future strategies and creative ecologies

The historical integration of the school within the city has created various aspects of cultural advancement and distribution. In relation to political environments (with particular reference to the 1970’s and 1980’s) the School of Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art has engaged directly with the city, in fact transforming artistic practice through that engagement. This integrative approach has maintained a resilient strategy that comes once again to the fore in the current complex and changing political landscape in which we find ourselves. The School of Fine Art is focused the disciplines nested in artistic practice. At the strategic core of the School of Fine Art is a commitment to studio based practices (and learning) thinking through and across disciplinary areas.

We are critically aligned to the development of resilience through practice. In the School of Fine Art the commitment to discipline is pivotal to our strategy for curricular and creative resilience. Our conception of studio is a place of practice and practice of place: a site of insight. The production of new knowledges takes place in the studio as a hub for innovative exploration. Our approach to teaching mobilises multiple modalities of studio as a porous pedagogic space, which operate within and beyond the walls of the academy. The social textures this space and critical dialogue generates new knowledge(s) within and across the field.

Distribution is a heterogeneous field of enablement: Shaping and re-shaping. The practitioner imbricated in differential fields of practice engages in iterative adaptation, a complex interdependence: ways of being and becoming resilient. The creative ecologies of Glasgow are a dynamic and multi-faceted emergent network through which there is a symbiotic engagement and co-learning through the professional advancement of multiple practices. Emergent networks are a transformative affective space through which interdependence becomes a mode of sharing knowledge within which artistic research is core to the process. Learning from the creative ecologies of the city could facilitate new adaptive knowledges and patterns of global engagement and reciprocal distribution.

This paper will focus upon the City of Glasgow and the Art School, resilience and creative pedagogies and future strategies and creative ecologies. It will open discussion around the central tenets of resilience aligned to art practice and the creative ecologies of the city and beyond.