Summary: Nonsite is an emerging collective of Bay Area artists, poets, activists, archivists, independent scholars and non-traditional learners whose aim is to bring a range of communities into contact and conversation across disciplines, nourishing new forms of artistic collaboration, self-organized pedagogy, and public participation. The project’s organizational framework will include exhibitions, publications, performances, colloquia, readings, archives, study groups, and hybrid events, all of which will act as points of leverage for ongoing cultural engagement and social action.
Description: The Nonsite Collective responds to a comparative lack of sustained community response to, and use of, localized aesthetic production. To remedy this gap, Nonsite works across often hardened cultural boundaries—between disciplines and communities—to nourish self-organized engagement around art, understood as a social practice. Nonsite proposes a community-based model for engaging with culture, whereby creative works and their effects are not isolated and discrete but are rather linked up, elaborated on, and archived within a web of community responses and reuses. In this model, collectively proposed “curricula” become series of art and research events and an ever-evolving archive becomes the “object.”
Forms: One main mechanism for coordination and participation in Nonsite’s activities is an on-line symposium and website, which we envision as itself an interactive collective artwork. While documenting the collective’s own activity and organizing a visual record of the project’s history, the archive also functions as a reservoir of materials for future use, and the location of further production, as well as the scene for community-building, discussion and critique. Integral to the work of growing new communities and audiences will be an open invitation to participate in this self-archiving practice. In addition to its online archive, the collective is already in the process of organizing several curricula, which include an array of activities and events. Some past events include:
Motivation: Nonsite’s curatorial practice of organizing its various activities as “curricula” is motivated by a desire to nourish a needed ecology for sustained socio-aesthetic engagement across projects whose relations aren’t always legible given normative divisions of cultural labor.
Impact: Nonsite’s impact will be immediate: support for local artists. Aiming to construct a missing social structure, the collective will make new interlocutors and participatory audiences available to all participants in Nonsite’s activities. In short, local outreach and community-building constitute our priorities.
Location/Timeline/Distribution: Nonsite is not anchored to any one location or venue, but rather makes use of provisional locations, both institutional (SF Camerawork), public (cafés, parks, neighborhoods,) and domestic (participants’ homes). For timeline and distribution plans, see Budget.
Webhosting = $ 600.00
Currently, our website / wiki — nonsitecollective.org — is hosted ...
The Draft Proposal is the collective’s inaugural text. Currently, it exists on our website, and as a small xeroxed “advanced reader’s copy” (see support materials). This text is intended to undergo immediate revision as discussions around its ideas and language begin to develop. Within the year, Nonsite intends to publish a second version of its draft proposal, and a “Collective Annual” drawing on archived discussions and symposia, including visuals assembled in relation to the collective’s ongoing socio-aesthetic activity. The collective will use of a print on demand service to publish these documents, and intends to print enough copies to disseminate widely, both at its events and by US mail.
In order to make curricular readings available to all interested participants, Nonsite requires, as part of its operating costs, a budget for photocopying. This will enable the collective to produce Nonsite Collective “readers” comprised of materials related to the collective’s various researches to sustain discussion around ongoing and future collaborative projects. In addition, this budget item will fund occasional printing of event-specific materials for onsite distribution.
Calendar postcards and postage = $ 400.00
Nonsite will produce and disseminate occasional calendar postcards publicizing its events and activities. This budget item will help to fund production costs and postage.
TOTAL GRANT REQUEST = $ 3000.00
Grant History: Nonsite Collective applied for a very small grant from the Collective Foundation during the latter’s exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in May 2007, but the collective was not awarded this grant. Nonsite has received no other funding, nor has it applied for any other grants.