Expanding physical and psychological spaces

This year’s DCP programme will start in Autumn (October 2021). By this time the 2020/21 cohort will have completed their fifth Exhibiting Season which is currently taking place between Spring and Summer, benefiting from the space to breathe between the two.

As the year evolves and the pandemic continues, creating the space – physical and psychological – for this year’s Deepening Creative Practice with Organisations is on our minds.  Last year we planned for the programme to take place in the Jerwood Space, and following discussions with the participants it was transformed into a fully online programme. The learning experience has been profound and different to anything we had anticipated because the DCP temporary organisation constantly worked and unfolded with the context.

DCP has been developing as a community of practice, and the ways in which all those involved in the programme have responded were to challenge everyone to experiment in their own spaces, remote from each other, and working together through online, postal and other methods. Artist Sam Nightingale’s imagining of biomes became a powerful metaphor for deep attunement to the distance and proximity of those involved.

In inviting further applicants to join the second programme in Autumn, we want to continue to work deliberatively with those who have already joined and those still to join this year. Events beyond our control may determine what is and isn’t possible but the situation remains of the programme within a complex global reality of Covid, climate change, social inequality and more. We have been looking at what framework will support us in further establishing the DCP community over the coming year, and to use the experience as a point of enquiry– to question, challenge and inform the realities of organisational life in 2021/22.

In parallel to this process of thinking about DCP space, the Tavistock Institute is moving to a new home in June – a freshly configured space that speaks to current conversations about how organisations will work differently in future: how office spaces can not only be beautiful, through paying attention to both function and form, but also be creatively designed for people to reflect together, think (and do) and collaborate.

This exciting new framing of our home as liminal space has led to the inspiration that this will be the physical and psychological holding space where DCP will also take place:

• locating the next DCP temporary organisation within the Institute’s own dynamic explorations of the future workplace;
• enabling the containment of the paradoxes presented to all organisations because we will have the technical capability to work with those that are able to be there in person and those unable to travel;
• working with paradox, stucking and unstucking, co-constructing as we go – bringing together digital, face to face, as well as combinations of these.

We also hope that aspirations such as artist-led field labs and other locations for the artist interventions will be possible – rehearsal spaces, museums, companies. We envisage this may be mirroring organisational life in the wider world, and expect themes of ecology, politics, power, equity and equality to be resonant throughout the year.

Using creative, systems-psychodynamics, psychophysical and other Tavistock methodologies, DCP 2021/22 will support participants as they navigate these themes and dilemmas in their own practice. And of course, because this is a co-curatorial programme, we look forward to participants contributing to and influencing the conversations and decisions about spaces within DCP.

By bringing DCP to our new beautiful offices, rather than hiring an external venue, we are delighted to announce a reduction in the programme fee, now £5,750.

The next cohort of Deepening Creative Practice with Organisation is starting in Autumn 2021 and are inviting applications.

Download a brochure or if you would like to speak to one of the programme Directors, please email Emily Kyte