On February 12th, CuriousWorks had its first Future Culture session of the year based on sharing learnings around community arts and cultural development. It was great to meet and connect with the 2024-25 cohort comprising of artists-in-residence: Emma Pham and Cassandra Li, as well as arts workers interns: Kobra Sayyadi and Kirsten Maglalang.

Here, Creative Producer Miranda Aguilar share their thoughts on the session.

As the first session of the year, it felt good to ground the program in community-based practice. Though I led the session, it was through a lens of mutual sharing and reflexivity. What does CACD look like to us? How can we ensure we’re always following best practice? 

Outside of my role producing this program, I have been a part of ACE’s CACD Professional Development Program for emerging Western Sydney producers. As a cohort, we all work in an arts organisation or in a community context. We’re learning more about community engagement through our TAFE NSW training, through masterclasses and reflection, through the different organisations and institutions we work at, and with each other. The session I ran was based on some of the learning I’ve experienced from the program so far. 

We started the session with a review of our social contract. A social contract is a shared understanding of how we work together and share space. I start all my projects and programs with a social contract, and often have social contracts on projects I enter as an independent artist. Taking the time to review our social contract not only meant that we had practical time carved out to introduce it to our newest staff member; it also meant we could review how we’ve honored the contract we’ve written, and how we can make the contract work better for us now that the program has been running for several months. 

During the session, we shared our different descriptions and perspectives of CACD through words and images; we looked at the human rights approach to cultural practice; and we explored the 5 Pillars of CACD practice through discussing our own experiences as facilitators, producers and participants.  Much of the info I shared in the slides was specifically from Paula Abood’s TAFE teaching from the CACD course. Just like the program, however, much of the mutual learning came from example and dialogue from our different perspectives and levels of experience and expertise. 

A slide of the five CACD pillars from our Future Culture session.

The team’s different descriptions and perspectives of CACD through words and images.

There are a lot of CACD things I’ve ‘known,’ but didn’t have language for; practices that I had seen implemented without knowing the history; ways of working that have been passed down and are at risk of being watered down without proper attribution and context. For example, my first experience with the idea of a social contract was when I was a participant in a youth group, and we were writing up our ‘group agreement.’ I didn’t know it was a CACD thing, and I didn’t know the term ‘social contract’ until I had already started using it extensively in my work. 

Our understanding of community arts and cultural development best practice is always evolving. Even in our session, there was a lot of discussion on what current and future practice should look like. Do these five pillars properly consider bias and reflexivity as a core practice? Should there be a sixth pillar explicitly asking practitioners to consider their place and what biases and learnings they need to unlearn or undertake? What about our approach to CACD? Is there a less anthropocentric approach to CACD we can take that includes a more environmental respect for the land and its non-human creatures? 

These aren’t rhetorical questions, but they’re also not questions that need to be answered right away. After all, one of the pillars of CACD is long-term process. We are asking questions, trying to implement best practice, reflecting on how we did, and then starting again. We are learning, sharing and growing together all the time. 

It’s probably why circles and cycles were such a prominent feature in our drawings of what CACD looks like to us. What does it look like to you?