Beyond the Now is a syndicated social practice platform, founded by partners based and working in locations across the globe, which aims to open up new creative, cultural, and political affinities for a post-pandemic world.
The COVID-19 global pandemic has challenged what it means to have a socially engaged practice. With restrictions on movement and physical proximity in effect – and heightened activism around racial injustice – creative practitioners, activists, civil society organisations, and other actors are reimagining what community, resilience, and social justice looks like in this new reality.
The contributions to Beyond the Now address the immediate effects of the pandemic on our shared understanding of social art practice, and the necessity for and experience of solidarity in a time of crisis. The first season contains nine submissions from artists, arts professionals, and community activists, reflecting on the COVID-19 situation. Three submissions will be shared each month, between October and December, at which point the season will conclude.
Lab Project
The Lab category features emerging project concepts exploring future artistic possibilities. These sketches represent coculture's exploratory spirit, highlighting innovative ideas awaiting development.
While realization isn't guaranteed, this space invites viewers to envision the potential of transformative art and cultural narratives.
Concept
coculture is one of 7 partners in Beyond the Now – a cooperative social arts practice platform, initiated in response to Covid-19. Working in locations across the globe, we are a mix of small to medium arts organisations, including Counterpoints Arts (UK), coculture (Berlin), Ettijahat-Independent Culture (Beirut and Brussels), CREATE (Ireland); together with individual researchers working at the Open University and Plymouth College of Art (UK) and the Mozilla Festival (Amsterdam).
Our collective goal is to open up new creative, cultural and political affinities for a post-pandemic world.
Beyond the Now aims to learn from organic responses of solidarity that have sprung up from communities of place and interest in the context of COVID-19: to build a dialogue between everyday sensibilities and perspectives, disciplines and ways of working; creatively juxtapose and redistribute contributions to this platform with the aim of forging unlikely allies and alliances; and re-imagine the social and socially-engaged art in the light of the global pandemic.
Beyond the Now invites voices from diverse sectors and communities to explore, share ideas and creatively reflect on what narratives, mechanisms and tools might we use to navigate the uncertainties of the present? Where and what is the social, in a post-pandemic world? How is social justice to be realised beyond the now?
Contributions to Beyond the Now are published in themed and curated Seasons – Interdependence in Season 1 and Mutual Aid in Season 2 (both of which respond to the ways in which artists, activists and communities of place and interest have responded locally but also globally to the pandemic).
Featuring Ashish Ghadialli’s reflections on the edges of identity and the promise of a planetary humanism, despite or even through the pandemic; and Dr. Kit Braybrooke’s invitation to the kind of thinking that brings the notion of ‘we’, and the idea of ‘nourished’ digital public spaces in the post-Covid 19 world.
Beyond the Now was recently selected to participate in an international programme, ‘A Fair New Idea: Working Sustainably Internationally’. Initiated by the Flanders Arts Institute, this yearlong residency brings together 11 arts partners to explore and exchange new ways of thinking about and implementing international collaboration in the wake of the pandemic. Details of the selected proposals and those of all applicants can be found here.
In 2023 Beyond the Now launched the Collaborative Incubator Toolkit. This publication is the result of a long-form conversation in which journalists, digital activists and socially-engaged artists draw on their own experiences of migration and forced displacement to inform their criticisms of the way migration is represented by legacy media.
Current and Upcoming Events
Related Activities
