Welcome to Dr Kate Rich, our first Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow We are happy to be joined by Dr Kate Rich, as Brave New Alps’ MSCA Fellow between 2024 and 2027. Kate’s MSCA Fellowship centers on the everyday work of administration as a regularly overlooked place for critical, creative and collective practice. During her time at ACElab Kate will investigate the frictions between EU policy ambitions for a greener, more equitable economy and the actions of small and grassroots cultural organisations who are working towards these ends – made vivid in the form of regulatory frictions that often hold such endeavours hold back. With the Fellowship, we enter three years of exchange and learning with Trajna (SLO), Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons (NL), The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (BE) and FoAM (BE/CRO). Abstract The research for FRICTIONS starts from the substantial gap between European policy commitments for a climate-neutral economy and the reality on the ground for many small-scale initiatives across Europe, facing regulatory systems that do not fit the intricate, locally embedded work that they do. FRICTIONS engages with this impasse at a practical level, taking the day-to-day practice of administration as a place where thoroughly different protocols, relations and ways of thinking about regulation might be collectively imagined and forged. The research approach departs from notions of progress and modernity that characterise much of transition discourse, to concentrate instead on systems change at the micro-level of habit and everyday process, with a particular focus on procedural spaces and relationships as the places where things often feel stuck. Drawing on my 30+ years of practice as an artist-activist working across art, business and social fields, the research objectives are to 1) unearth, illuminate and negotiate the kinds of regulatory frictions that small, sustainably-minded organisations regularly encounter, and the actions they are already taking in response; 2) devise and deliver real time, open-ended, adventurous experiments in administrative practice that navigate complex regulatory systems across different EU jurisdictions; and 3) establish new channels, procedures and vocabulary to promote and celebrate administrative capacity as a critical place to strengthen and sustain culture-led, grassroots organisational work. FRICTIONS will engage methods from participatory action research and tactical art, working collaboratively with four exemplary small-scale cultural initiatives (BE/CRO/NL/SLO), and establish a new research centre, the Institute for Experiments with Business (IBEX), as a platform to continue this work beyond FRICTIONS. The Postdoctoral Fellowship is funded through a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (grant agreement no. 101147188). PrintFriendly
