About the Author: Rox facilitates ambitious art and culture made by extraordinary people and is the Project Manager for the Global Co-commission ‘A Feral Commons’. She is also a Programs Advisor for the Global Cultural Districts Network (GCDN) and a Producer at Quaternaire, a producing and international booking agency whose current collaborations include Akram Khan Company, Brett Bailey, Handspring Puppet Company, The Tiger Lillies, and William Kentridge.
Project management is a thankless task; the best compliment I can receive is ‘Who are you?’. The role is to be invisible, much like a puppeteer moving strings or rods, I desire to move seamlessly in keeping with my surroundings.
Managing a co-commission of public art across three continents with as many and more time zones doesn’t appear to be a small undertaking. The plethora of cultures, agendas (political and otherwise), and the bureaucracy of working in public spaces add new dimensions… ‘How is it done?’ I hear you ask…
Contrary to what it looks like, the answers are simple. A Feral Commons has intricacies like any project of its scale, but the guiding principles are in keeping with lessons my work has taught me time and time again.
The Local Voice
Alserkal Avenue, Kingston Creative and Victoria Yards and their respective artists have more in common than the oceans and lands that divide them. Fundamentally, they are missions and people of service who know their audiences. And if there’s anything the COVID-19 pandemic, out of which the co-commission was born, taught us, it’s that you ignore audiences at your peril. The heart of A Feral Commons is to look at what and who each cultural district serves, to find the common ground. In this case, it is our impending climate emergency and the ways in which this manifests in different localities. The strength of the co-commission is the respect each artist brings to the context in which they are working, their cultures, geographies, localities, histories and futures. This is only possible by commissioning artists from within each region, as they are privy to and respectful of regional intricacies, best practices, timescales, and politics. The three commissions are aesthetically very different from each other but they have some key aspects in common: they have the same raison d’être, shared processes from inception to realisation, and the same respect for the local voice. My job as the project manager is to follow suit and treat every person, place, and stakeholder with equitable respect.
Trust
Trust can be viewed as being composed of three parts – I picture these as the three points of a triangle:
Listening
Listening is a misunderstood (and, as a result, underdeveloped) skill in the West. However, within the context of this work, it’s very useful because it elicits both information and understanding, which speaking does not. The task for a project manager is to ask questions and really listen to the speaker (fully listen – with ears, eyes, mind, and whole heart). It’s one of the few methods to truly collaborate.
Listening and responding to what is happening, hand in hand with trust in all its glory and operating with respect for local voices leads us to the art of adaptability. Has the project gone the way the initial plan intended it to? No. Being adaptable is maybe the biggest part of the job because we come out better humans, with arguably better art, because of it…and isn’t that the whole point?