What is the role of social media for the El Warcha project? What do we do with our Instagram, our Facebook, or our website? These have become extremely important questions in light of the Coronavirus worldwide quarantine and now that we have become so much more dependent on social media as our means of community engagement.
Last summer, I was in London for a couple weeks helping Ben and Ines at our new El Warcha studio. We had just finished a workshop and decided to unwind at a pub a few blocks away from Lowry house, a public assisted living house for elderly and one of the main sites for the EL Warcha London Studio. The workshop focused on building table legs by sculpting them in clay and then waste casting them in cement using plaster. The work was fun, but the participation dismal. Yes a few people had showed up, but in the end, hardly any of them participated and all but one actually showed any interest in what we were doing. As an El Warcha workshop, this was something we had often faced before in Tunis and something I would face again when starting the the El Warcha studio in Davis. It was a part of the challenge of the project: how to build interest, participation, and ultimately a community around art and design. The lack of participation still feels bad; a heavy weight that can crush passion and the optimism for success, but also a base of measurement that makes the really successful and popular workshops feel that much better. We retreated from this minor defeat behind a couple of pints and evaluated the workshop discussing what went well and what didn’t. Meanwhile Ines was posting photos and descriptions of the workshop on our social media. She showed us what she posted. The posted photos were great. They really made it seem like the workshop was a success. Somehow the photo of a couple participants poking at clay suggested an active and engaging workshop. Quite far from what all of us admitted we felt about it. So we talked about it. What was it exactly that we were doing with social media and why was it important?
To start, Ben was sure to criticize me for not posting on social media enough in Tunis. He had been picking up the slack by posting for us based on images we all shared with each other regularly through messaging. It was true, up to that point it was only Rania who had been doing posts back in Tunis. I didn’t even have an Instagram account at that point. A big problem considering that social media is key in promoting the project. It was key, as Ines put it, “for staying in the game.” All creative projects in our field have social media. It would be like we didn’t exist without it. We also talked about how it was important for funding. This is a lesson that I would later find out when starting the Davis, California El Warcha studio. Having a well established and active social media showed both financiers and potential partners that the project was serious and effective.
We agreed that social media was an essential part of El Warcha in terms of having a public presence, yet as a pedagogical tool, social media was failing us. Namely, if the point of El Warcha was also to build and disseminate knowledge about creating community through art and design, then it did no good to hide the challenges we faced doing this through polished Instagram posts. Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to present on social media the hardships and challenges as we experienced so that others might use and build upon what we do for their own projects? Naturally we all agreed that this should be the case, yet to do so would be risky.
If you browse the pages and posts of projects in our line of work on Instagram, all the projects, for the most part, seem amazing, polished, finished, and perfect. An Instagram reality that does not truly reflect the experience of doing artistic projects. By not following suit, we face the risk that our public and partners think that something is wrong with us or that our funders or potential funders think we are relatively incapable. We risk the survival of the project.
Earlier this week, while talking online together, me in California, Marlene in France, and Aisha in Tunis, I mentioned that I planned to write this weeks blog post about our use of social media. At this, Aisha pointed out another key challenge of the current nature of creative projects on social media. The fact that most projects you come across seem successful and polished makes the process of undertaking new projects extremely daunting, especially for those that have never done it before. Any of us who have undertaken collaborative, participatory, or community art projects before knows that the process is slow, full of setbacks, and emotionally challenging. It does not seem easy to arrive somewhere, whether a street, a square, a playground, or a community center, and start from nothing and get to a finished project. You have to build interest and partnerships, find allies, navigate bureaucratic hurdles, build trust with the local community, find support and funding, get material, encourage collaboration and creativity, and repeat it all over and over again each day for weeks or months before you even start to get somewhere. However, if you break it down bit by bit and day by day, it is something anyone with a little motivation can do.
While we want to succeed as best as we can in our own community collaborative projects, I am sure everyone of us on the EL Warcha team also wants to see El Warcha type creative projects spread. The challenge is how we might best use our social media, our main contact with the public, to promote collaborative art and design. Right now, during the pandemic we have been working on the Quarantine Play Manual, a series of social media posts that provide instructions for how people might be creative at home using household supplies. This project is one of the first times we’ve utilized social media beyond the mere documenting (sometimes in exaggerated ways) of our projects. Each week we’ve posted a new set of step-by-step instructions for a different at-home activity. Once the quarantine is over and we continue our usual collaborative project work, continuing this method might help us avoid falling back into the Instagram reality of project art. Instead we might figure out ways to recreate the step-by-step process of how our projects start, fail, grow, and eventually (but not always) succeed.
Justin Skye Malachowski
Writing from Davis, California