Kneed is a resource made by Leonie Rousham and Ishwari Bhalerao to support and encourage art and cultural workers who are trying to work collectively, sustainably and with accountability. We call this ‘Collective Sustenance’. Kneed explores and questions forms of ‘kneading’; as process, labour, physicality and time and ‘needing’; as nourishment, sustenance or an expression of obligation, in order to try and imagine an alternative work/life balance.
Nancy Fraser reminds us that ‘Capitalist economic production is not self-sustaining, but relies on social reproduction [care]. However, its drive to unlimited accumulation threatens to destabilize the very reproductive processes and capacities that capital and the rest of us - need’. In light of this, through building networks, running workshops in the form of ‘silent conversations’ and a podcast series, we attempt to reflect honest and realist representations of how culture is currently sustained and what it is exhausting. On temporary billboards, dissolvable tablecloths, picket-lines and protest banners we focus on imagining a trajectory of making that supplements us with what we need. Our ideas are currently rooted in trying to understand (and cope with) the state of art and architecture education under neoliberalism, creating a space which prioritises care, conversations, food and process, as a form of resistance.
kneed.co.uk
