2007
Project Link: http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2009/01/skills_exchange.html
With a view to encouraging intergenerational collaboration and dialogue, and the development of creative activities that are both stimulating and challenging, Skills Exchange will bring together age and experience with youth and ambition by fostering relationships between older people and artists, writers, designers and architects. The expertise developed over a lifetime is often overlooked, as people get older, particularly once they are over seventy. Past this age, people cease to be defined by their passion or individuality: often the work they have undertaken and the skills they have developed throughout their lives become invisible – their expertise is marginalised and they are defined simply as being old.
Area of investigation: Spatial realities of the Elderly in the 21st Century
For the first time in history, the number of people aged over 65 in the UK exceeds those under 16. If we do not place more resources into ageing research now, we will be unable to cope with the implications of age-related disease, dependence and frailty in 20 years time. It is estimated that by 2037, demographic changes mean that the number of carers could rise to 9.1 million. Today’s seniors were schooled before the rapid expansion of higher education. This means that their levels of formal education are much lower than that in younger members of society. Many have the lowest level of secondary education or none at all. The situation of the elderly must be rethought by taking into account their contributions to society. Strategies must be found to make it possible for them to participate in community life, while improving the spatial realities of the elderly. The situation of the elderly in relation to the digital divide depends highly on the environment, infrastructure and opportunities provided, as most elderly people are unfamiliar with IT and need encouragement and guidance.
National social and urban policies are closely interrelated. The objectives of these services are to protect the needy and the helpless, to equalise opportunities, and to establish a minimum material standard of living. Urban policy concerns disproportionate urbanisation and the size of metropolitan areas, the resulting drain of population from rural areas, and the government’s attempt to influence the spatial distribution of population between cities and rural areas. If social and urban policies are to complement each other, government should assume more responsibility.
How can one think of models for institutions and think tanks that allow for a critical and optimistic engagement with social, political and spatial realities? Our research and spatial strategising role at the Serpentine Gallery will attempt to understand and instrumentalise several layers of critical participation within the proposed field; based on a thorough investigation of spatial conditions as a means of a cultural investigation alongside teams of experts and institutions. Academic involvement will be fostered through a series of collaborations with other centres of knowledge production across Europe.
As an underlying thesis, the research will further enquire the role of the artist and architect in relation to contemporary institutions and the institutions’ role of participating in the socio-political environment. The research will present and discuss today’s need for actors operating from outside existing networks, leaving behind circles of conventional expertise. An alternative model of participation within spatial practice will be rendered, one that takes as a starting point an understanding of participation beyond models of consensus. Instead of aiming for synchronisation, such model could be based on participation through the conscious implementation of zones of conflict. If humans live together, spatial conflicts arise: a collision of opposite interests in using space. Spatial conflicts also cause conflicts between organisations, groups and persons. To immerse in the spatial realities of these individuals and groups can facilitate and understanding of the effects of what one might call design-components, be they spatial, temporal, social or economic in nature.
Existing realities will be challenged through conversation, debate, critical observation, careful documentation, selective and purposeful participation and interaction and inventive framework-proposals.
How can one facilitate a design process that is not situated in pre-established modes of practice? What could a polyphonic practice potentially be? Is it possible to curate issues of spatial and political relevance producing an effect that is measurable? How does one produce alternative types of knowledge that can be packaged and re-appropriated/ re-applied?