FRICTIONS - Blog post 1

03.03.25

Reflections on taking up a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (FRICTIONS) at the not-for-profit research organisation Brave New Alps.

My research with FRICTIONS engages with the regulatory frictions encountered by small, sustainably-minded cultural organisations from the standpoint of emancipatory administrative practice. It's the kind of research that doesn't slip easily into a specific academic discipline or knowledge category – although the tensions and possibilities it investigates might be seismically sensed across many areas of scholarly life, in the ways that regulation and administration play out there too.

As an artist and trader, admin has long been an area of fascination for me, despite or because of its lowly status, perceived lack of creativity and rarely celebrated knowledge. In FRICTIONS, I will work with small-scale cultural institutions around Europe, to reimagine admin as a kind of maker space where thoroughly different protocols, relations and means of organising can be tested and forged. As such, it's auspicious that this Fellowship is hosted by Brave New Alps, at their railway station base in Rovereto in the Italian Alps, where as part of the community academy La Foresta, they are reclaiming abandoned railway infrastructures for diverse community services and resources. It makes for a vital outpost from which to consider the way that our institutions and infrastructures shape what is possible to do.

Setting up shop

The first task on landing here as Brave New Alps' inaugural MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow has been to figure out, together with my hosts, how the implements and procedures of an academic Fellowship would map from the scale and heft of a University to that a small (yet fierce) research institution such as this one. In blacksmithing, the first thing you learn is to forge your own tools. Here it's been unearthing and adapting the management, accounting and reporting infrastructures and equipment that a research project such as this one relies on. The opening months of the Fellowship passed through a meteor shower of questions. Which digital infrastructures to use for archiving, dissemination, project management, general communications and record keeping? How will research outputs other than journal articles, book chapters and academic conference papers get formulated and shared? How to even describe the working practices we are initialising here: as non- or post-University research? Or perhaps as its own creature, that doesn't need referencing against the University at all? It's painstaking work, but the administrative devices, procedures and knowhow we assemble in the process should serve us well, in the larger project of holding open these other/alter spaces for practice-based research outside the University.

There is also the larger plane shift, or möbius loop, that FRICTIONS is effecting: to consider the forcefields of regulation and administration as not (only) obstacles to get through in order to arrive at the research action, they are also the subject and substance of the research. So the administrative excesses that the Fellowship demands become valuable items of study in themselves.

The idea with FRICTIONS is to open a test space amidst the day to day urgencies of organising, that works to dislodge the default patterns of administration (managerial, defensive, competitive, propertarian, risk-averse, efficient) and the dominant shapes that organisations take, for other, other-worldly modes of working. Ones that might be more in tune with the logics and dynamics of the projects and organisations we could be working in (peer-to-peer, care-centred, locally-rooted, activist-leaning, relationship-based and inherently diverse).

The time and space that FRICTIONS marks out is an opportunity to identify, report on, maybe theorise, definitely materialise and possibly proceduralise these other ways of organising. A kind of living lab, taking regulation as the background condition and admin as our medium. And not just talking shop, but with direct application, in how this would render in the multiple trajectories that organisations can use to continue their work. Workshops, seminars and administrator gatherings are planned in IT, BE, NL, CRO with BNA and project allies TITiPI, Casco and FoAM.

Further reports to be filed here, on an occasional basis.