Everything is scattered and the tower has collapsed

We are excited to invite contributions to a stream we are convening at the The 11^th Art of Management & Organization Conference (New Total Arts for Sustainable Futures) taking place in Nancy, France.

The stream will expand upon the inclusion in the 2022 conference of morning social dreaming matrices (Lawrence, 2005) as a practice to surface and give voice to the unconscious processes that relate to the task and work of those gathered there.

The concept for the stream originates from social dreaming matrices that happened at the Liverpool conference and the drawn (Dent, 2022) and spoken associations to the dreams. It foreshadows the context of AoMO2024 taking place in Europe (Alsace) on the line of fracture between Germany and France when the trauma of Brexit, Covid, the tangible affects of climate change and quite likely the continuing or aftermath of war in Ukraine will likely still be present.  The organisation ideology of globalisation and Western hegemony as a safe and indistinguishable totality to hold and contain our identities and guide our actions is no more and the experience of fragmentation of long held ideologies is experienced at the individual, group, organisational and societal levels 

The untenable old paradigm of a global centrality of Europe, and Western countries, has been challenged and critically reassessed. A clear example of this in the re-evaluation of objects and museum collections. A physical representation of context being irrelevant, denying difference and unifying the product whether an individual or an artefact. Recent closing of Medicine Man at the Wellcome Collection in London; the location and mapping of ancestral indigenous Australian artefacts in British and Irish museums (Scunthorpe and Nugent, 2021), to name a few, speak to this. An assumption of this stream is that there must be an organisational equivalent of the museum giving back and re-evaluating the relation between object and context, between centres and peripheries, between holders and owners.

This stream will ask ‘what is the organisational equivalent of the museum giving back?’.  It will be a whole system research enquiry taking place in the temporary organisation of the Nancy conference that looks at the re-evaluation of societal (meaning social science) and artistic relations for aesthetically sustainable futures. The notion itself of ‘evaluating’ and ‘re-evaluating’ will be critically explored. The stream is interested in human responses to fragmentation, creative and/or defensive – for example how this takes place through the technocratisation of evaluation (Rodriguez and Acree, 2020) and art.

Acknowledging that disciplinary difference can be conceptualised as a fragmentation itself against plurality and the impossibility/challenge/labour of making sense of the whole not only as a given but also as a result of a dynamic inclusion of diversities we invite multi/trans/inter/intra disciplinary teams and individuals to propose interventions that will work as active explorations within the conference or temporary organisation. Your proposed interventions could be through:

• In the moment ethnographic participation; deep observation of the conference itself through attending other events and actively and performatively making sense of what is happening.
• Sentient and unconscious excavations such as social dreaming.
• Playing with theories of objects and artefacts of organisation i.e object relations as texture and surface making (Diamond, 2004)
• Aesthetically exploring the implications of the technicalisation of evaluation and its promotion as a social practice
• Embodied and sensory explorations of value to upend power relations.
• Performative, artefactual, embodied expressions and exaggerations of the technicalisation of artist action.
• Deep exploration and enactment of replication or scale and context.
• Storytelling about arts as social practice in organisations.

In addition to submissions we invite proposers to express their interest in joining a stakeholder group to co-design the stream; its form and attitude and its interventional task. The stream itself will work across time, task and territory of the conference.

Please submit a 750-word proposal with images if applicable using the ‘Send your proposal’ button and form on this page.

Proposals are due by Thursday 15th February 2024. Please note that the proposers will need to fund their conference attendance. 

Antonio Sama

Antonio Sama has always been interested in the relation between theory and practice and how individuals, groups and communities generate ideas from practice and how practical experiences shape ideas. A verse of an Italian song says ‘If I can eat an idea I have done my revolution‘, the nurturing relation between ideal and real has always intrigued Antonio’s intellectual curiosity. After graduating from the Tavistock Institute AOC programme and...

Juliet Scott

I am an artist in social practice. Through drawing, paint and print, I study groups of people and objects and their ecological relationships within a wider landscape. I elaborate this into interactions, interventions, installations with individuals, groups and organisations creating challenging and complex settings for meaningful learning and social change. I call this ‘sentient excavation’ – deriving from leading the Institute’s archive, and which is an...