Barbican Guildhall Creative Learning: A Bridge Over the Fortress Wall

This thesis examines issues of sustainability in the work of Barbican Guildhall Creative Learning (BGCL). BGCL occupies a contested space between two very different political agendas and communities. On the one hand, the Barbican is sited close to the Capital’s affluent financial centre, and its programming is designed to appeal to an international audience. On the other, there is deprivation and poverty in the local area. This thesis is interested in how a sustainable programme of arts activity can be created with local communities within this context. It interrogates arts projects supported by BGCL, each of which has been chosen to illuminate different aspects of sustainability. It argues that sustainability in this context depends on the interplay between both the temporal and spatial dimensions of the work. Drawing on the work of Rosi Braidotti, sustainability is shown to be concerned with ‘the embodied and embedded nature of the subject’ whose ‘sensibility to and availability for changes or transformation are directly proportional to (their) ability to sustain the shifts without cracking’ (2011, 310). Understood in this context the sustainability of the organisation, the project and the BGCL’s engagement with local communities is concerned with flexibility and resilience to change. This suggests that arts practice that takes place over time, and with an understanding of place and context, both enables participants to be supported as part of a process of ‘becoming’ and allows the department to build meaningful relationships with local communities. This will also be shown to depend on the relationality of space, where the relations between people, the local environment, the local and the global are implicated in BGCL’s participatory arts practices.