Tell Me Something I Don't Know | Looking back and reflecting with Rebecca Lee and Ian Nesbitt

The Commoners’ Fair (2016). Photography by Reece Straw, courtesy of Ian Nesbitt.

Jade Foster recently interviewed Rebecca Lee and Ian Nesbitt about the origins of Primary’s informal talk series Tell Me Something I Don’t Know,  its trajectory since Ian’s initial event during Intersections (2016), and its continuation as a long-term programme of regular events, led by Rebecca, as part of Making Place (2017 - present).

Their conversation further lent itself to discussing the framework of long-term social practice projects and Tell Me Something I Don’t Know as pedagogical models that distinctly shift the way people share knowledge and learn collectively, in the city and across the visual arts sector more broadly.

To challenge the politics of isolation we need tactics for togetherness card at The Commoners’ Fair (2016). Photo courtesy of Ian Nesbitt.

Jade: Can you tell me how Tell Me Something I Don't Know began? What were the original conversations and starting points that inspired the ongoing series of events?

Ian: I’d been commissioned by Rebecca Beinart from Primary to deliver a six-month project as part of Intersections. So the initial concept began early on in Primary’s process of setting roots in the Lenton and Radford community – the locale of Primary.

We started to make connections with the people that live there, remapping the area and the wider city so that, rather than street names, bureaucratic ordering and data, we focused on the interconnection and experiential connections between people and communities. I think the work that I had done up to that point felt like a good way to start to have those conversations.

The project went through a lot of different phases. It set out as a residency within the Radford Skills Exchange, which was the local time banking project. The group I would be working with was within a database of 400 or 500 people who were members of the time bank. And so, at that point, I took the basic process of time banking as a concept to work within. But then the organisation closed its doors unexpectedly part way through, which led to these ideas coalescing around Primary, and ending up as The Commoners’ Fair, which took place in November 2016.

The first Tell Me Something I Don’t Know happened throughout the day at that event; I think there were about 15 presentations. The idea for it came out of conversations with Rebecca and my own thoughts around devising a platform of some sort for a kind of informal, egalitarian alternative education.

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know! short talks sign at The Commoners’ Fair (2016). Photo courtesy of Ian Nesbitt.

Rebecca: Yeah so, we kind of had a chat before The Commoners’ Fair, and I think it was probably around after you discovered the skills bank. So it was around that time that we have Social Practice Social, but before it was called an engagement subgroup, and I was part of that which fed into Primary’s engagement programme planning.

I work with sound in my own work and interviewing in different kinds of forms is something that I do quite a lot. A couple of years before that I'd done a project in Lincolnshire called Outside Broadcast, working with people to share the current and past histories of their villages, their personalities, who lives there, just going along to whatever was happening, guided by the recommendations of the people I met. So inviting people to share was a crucial part of what I'd been doing to that point, and I had an interest [in] how art programmes and projects could be shaped by what different people personally valued – their hobbies, their daily routines, their families and friends, rather than imposed ideas.

Outside Broadcast (2014). Photo courtesy of Rebecca Lee.

I'd been thinking about Primary and how we could develop ongoing, long-term engagement projects - as part of what Ian was saying about where Primary sits in relation to the rest of the neighbourhoods. I think I was on [Ian’s]  residency...when I read an interview with Laurie Anderson where she was talking about a set of talks that she set up. Laurie was curator at John Zorn's club in New York ­(sounds so fancy!) and on Sunday nights she set up a talk series. She invited a friend of hers; he was really really interested in boilers, and he did a talk alongside someone who talked about making a bicycle  out of 700 parts they had ordered online. She said in this interview [that] she felt it was way more interesting than artists giving talks about their work because people weren't selling themselves, people were just sharing, they weren't pitching. Ian had been thinking about forms of sharing, so we had this conversation in the playground and kind of talked about why we were both interested in this sort of idea.

At The Commoners’ Fair, at the initial Tell Me Something I Don’t Know, there were talks such as: ‘A disabled person working with banana farmers in Uganda for her PhD’; ‘Local waste initiatives’; ‘How to make candied Scotch bonnets’; ‘The story of the first traveller site in Nottingham’; ‘Sharing kombucha’; ‘A piece of software that could eventually replace taxation and government’; ‘Commons churches and justice’.

Ian: I think that because of the process of bringing [The Commoners’ Fair] together, I spent the previous few months talking to lots of people within lots of different projects and contexts just because they were in the local area.

So I carried these printed postcards around, that said ‘Tell me something I don't know’ and were blank on the back. Then I asked people who I was meeting to just have a think and if they thought they could talk about something just to jot it down on the back. This formed the bulk of talks that eventually happened on the day.

Rebecca: I’m quite keen on things that get set up and can continue. The Commoners’ Fair went really well and the Tell Me Something I Don't Know strand as part of it. As you can hear from the titles that were shared, they exist on different levels. There’s something exciting about how people talk and how people individually express themselves differently. People are presenting anything they know about, or it might be quite personal in some senses - different ways and forms of sharing.

I have been putting the archive on SoundCloud recently, and wanted to connect it back to The Commoners’ Fair and make sure it's clear that it began from there, and from your research as well, Ian (for people who might not have engaged with your residency). We have tried to do Tell Me Something I Don’t Know every other month from that point. In the first year, it was four times, and it’s going to continue, but I wondered what it’s kind of like for you, Ian, having it continue. It doesn’t happen with projects that often.

Ian: I was coming into Primary on the back of three or four years of back to back six to nine-month commissions. I have a frustration towards the growing sense that across social practice – the problem is that we're in and out of places. I think at that point I was coming to the commission at Primary with that very much in my mind. In fact, I haven't worked in other organisations in the same way after Primary. It's a testament to Primary, because I have seen so few opportunities that allow such in-depth work with some certainty of legacy and continuation.

I am a filmmaker most of the time, so often what I am leading towards in these types of projects is a screening. There is all this work trying to express what you're trying to do and build a network of people around the project. Then when the screening happens, everyone gets it and wants to be involved, but it’s finished. The screening when you share it with a wider audience needs to be halfway through a process. The reason I mention that is just to illustrate that it’s nice to have been part of starting something that’s still happening four years later.

The work I was doing at Primary would feed into the next engagement series, which became Making Place, which was really key to how I developed them. I was completely down with the idea that you, Becca, would be continuing to grow and build Tell Me Something I Don’t Know.

I don’t feel any ownership over it because if I wanted to do it somewhere else, then I could, and I’d have this amazing archive and background of it that exists as a result of the work that you've done and now and an online audio archive.

Rebecca: Yeah, there is so much!

Imran delivering a presentation at Tell Me Something I Don’t Know (December 2017). Photo by Reece Straw.

Rebecca: People get what is about quickly. We have done thirteen Tell Me Something I Don’t Know’s, with a few being held at Radford and Lenton library which has been really nice. There were a couple of people who'd been to nearly all of them and they become regular audience members and I joked with them that, “Oh, well, maybe you want to do one too”, and they were like, “No, no! We don't want to do a talk, but we want to come.”

The range of talks and things is kind of amazing. Artists have found it quite freeing not to be asked ‘tell me about your practice’, which is actually the worst question I would ever want to hear from someone, but instead ‘tell me what you're interested in’.

Talks have touched on everything from local topics, like the history of the Savoy Cinema, the work of the African Institute in Lenton, and living alongside the River Leen; or person journeys, stories or passions, with titles as wide ranging as ‘Extreme Method Acting’, ‘Mountains and ways to avoid falling off them’, ‘Does the Queen have a passport?’, ‘My mother’s embroidery’, ‘Geekhood, my son, and I’ and ‘How to make biryani’. The titles feel quite important - I always ask people to name their talk, give it a title. There’s something in that process that holds them and what they are sharing: it collects their thoughts and sets the tone, which they get to decide. 

The conversation moved to discuss the impact of long-term social practice projects and pedagogical models that shift the way people share knowledge and learn collectively in the city.

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know (July 2019). Photo by Reece Straw.

Jade: Primary are interested in ideas around collective learning, not only between artists, but how we collectively learn with audiences, participants, with communities and people involved in previous projects. How do ‘we’ - as you guys were saying - create a programme that feels more accumulative, gradual and feels more naturally intertwined, so it develops into something long-term. This is really important I feel for socially engaged practice and social practice in the arts.

Still, I'm interested in the idea of removing the need to perform or the performativity when presenting. People then can actually show or share the knowledge that is of value to them—not thinking of something that's of value to somebody else but actually finally breaking down these barriers to find what is of value to you, that you feel you want to share.

Therefore, that kind of model and framework allows for knowledge and the sharing of knowledge – with no prerequisites – to be accessible for people regardless of education or background. It becomes about how you kindly bring people into a space and what framework you create to allow people to enter it in a similar way – non-hierarchical, from different perspectives.

The framework is what is interesting about Tell Me Something I Don’t Know. Can you comment on this?

Rebecca: The way we often talk about it is - perhaps this comes from kind of funding and marketing language, in which we categorise people quite critically as participants, artists, expert facilitator, practitioner, audience member, advocate. Then I think one of the things that happens - that I like about Primary - is people are many of these things all at once quite often.

As we're going along and inviting new people to come to speak, I'm always trying to think about having a real mixture of people. There are some people here who just come to Primary stuff. I'm thinking about Adrian Shaw, who often comes to art stuff around the city and everyone knows him. He then gave us a talk about science and art; it was an amazing thing. We all have seen him about, but we've never had that conversation.

For me what's nice is people like that - hopefully they may come as an audience member or fit in a participant category, but they've got stuff to share. The way you described it was really nice today, that kind of almost 3D sort of feel to it and the people are shifting around all the time.

I’m very conscious about asking people for something. There's an issue, and Ian would know this as well, when it comes to social practice, asking people for stuff often assumes everyone's got something to give. It's really important that I try and make sure it's clear that it’s an exchange, so speakers get a meal in exchange for talking.

The Commoners’ Fair (2016). Photo courtesy of Ian Nesbitt.

Ian: I need to go back to the original incarnation at The Commoners’ Fair, as I've never actually quite managed to come down to [the] regular events. So, my experience of it was limited to the initial event.

Something that I hadn't planned for or thought about was how the space would feel. We set up the mezzanine space as a walkthrough space, so we were kind of a little bit anxious about how that might work and whether it would hold an audience, because people would just drop in and out as they [walked] through.

I was thinking about the practical elements of the space and how we were using it, but as it turned out it was really delightful. There was a sort of removal of quality judgement; the democratisation of the format meant that it no longer mattered whether something was objectively a good or bad talk in and of itself - it seemed less important or interesting than the fact that it was just happening. There were all these people like Becca was saying who had never done it before, some of whom had a lot of knowledge about their subject matter, and some people who would just maybe do a demonstration or song. They all added equally to the experience.

At its best it begins to ask questions like: what is education and how can we approach those questions more collectively and without hierarchy? Differently to traditional education or how we understand knowledge and learning in a wider sense, in our institutions and systems. Tell Me Something I Don’t Know kind of undercuts all of that and does away with it.

Biographies

Rebecca Lee is a musician, composer and audio practitioner. She makes performances, installations, broadcasts, often in collaboration. With a particular focus on the relationship between sound and music to place as well as exploring different forms of narrative, she moves between public realm, contemporary art, experimental performance and DIY art/music spaces.

Rebecca has been commissioned by Radar (2019), In-Situ (2018), Nottingham Contemporary (2016-7), The National Trust at Belton House (2015) and Biddulph Grange Gardens (2014), Fermynwoods Contemporary Art (2011), SYSON (2014); shown work at Full of Noises, Aid and Abet, MoHA Austin and Barracao Maravilha, Rio; produced Outside Broadcast, a community radio project with Transported (2014) and coordinates the Tell Me Something I Don’t talk series at Primary.

Rebecca is often informed by the perspectives of stakeholders connected with the places or subjects of her work with these voices sometimes becoming or shaping the work itself. She regularly teaches and facilitates others to explore develop audio projects, most recently on the Complimentary Education programme at Fermynwoods Contemporary Art and for the past 3 years as contributing artist for Youth Landscapers, a creative research project for young people in the National Forest.

Ian Nesbitt’s socially engaged practice seeks to create spaces for exchange that go beyond the everyday, spanning interests in grassroots politics, walking, community self-organising, emerging social movements, and ethnographic film. His projects explore notions of identity and community through making work collaboratively, often using chance interactions to open up personal and shared terrains.

He is a founder member of the artist and community organisations Annexinema, Out.Side.Film, Open Kitchen Social Club and Social Art Network, and co-convened the first Social Art Summit in November 2018 in Sheffield.

He has delivered events, commissions and exhibitions for Nottingham Contemporary, In Certain Places (Preston), Millennium Galleries (Sheffield), Eastside Projects (Birmingham), Bloc Projects (Sheffield), G39 (Cardiff), Primary (Nottingham), Junction Arts (Derbyshire), Social Housing Arts Network (nationwide), The Falmouth Convention (Cornwall), and Amorph Festival (Helsinki). He was artist-in-residence at LU Arts (Loughborough University) for the 2018 - 19 academic year.

His films have been selected for screening at festivals including Oberhausen, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Liverpool Biennial, Berwick Film and Media, Flatpack, Abandon Normal Devices, and Glastonbury, screened widely in galleries and artspaces nationally and internationally, and broadcast on BBC2, TVE Spain and TG4 Ireland.