PROPOSED THEMES

Confidence

We have had lots of conversations about how CPP is fostering and developing confidence, within places, artists, communities. So we’d like to look at self-confidence, collective-confidence, how it is created, sustained, damaged, lost.

People

This is intentionally broad. We want it to include the importance of individual input, commitment and passion – whether that’s a project director or a local resident; the nature and complexity of communities/groups; the importance of relationships; the significance of personalities and interpersonal chemistry; the impact of leadership and the idea of networks, partnerhsips and connections built between people.

Time

This theme has emerged again and again – the pressure of a time-limited project; the need for time to develop relationships, ideas, trust. We also interested in speed and slowness. And we’d like this theme to include ideas of sustainability and legacy – what is left/happens afterwards?

Taste

We arrived at this theme via conversations about artistic quality, leadership and artistic vision. We’re interested in who gets to decide what ‘good’ art is (or indeed what ‘art’ is) in the context of CPP. Are all community-led decisions valid and valuable? And ditto for decisions made by arts-professionals. And is there a conversation to be had about snobbery?

Local

We have chosen ‘local’ rather than ‘place’ to reflect the specificities and scale of the CPP projects’ relationship to place. This might also encompass a conversation about local/regional/national/international art/artists and how ‘local’ can have negative associations of low ambition, narrow vision etc.

Language

How do we talk about art? How do we talk about community? Does it matter if someone participates in an art activity but would never call it that? Language can enable communication and it can build barriers.

Failure

CPP is an action research based programme and as such presumes that some things will work and some will fail. But how do we talk constructively about failure? What do we even mean by it?

Decision-making

The thing that makes CPP unique is its focus on community-led decision-making. We’d like to interrogate how this works (or doesn’t). Who is making which decisions and what difference does that make?