Y2 Priorities – Portfolio of Experimentation, REBEL & Capstone project

I’ve spent the past week with an old friend from the UK, who was visiting me here in Mexico. We’ve known each other since we were about 3 years old, but I don’t think we’ve ever spent such a concentrated period of time together. Inevitably, we ended up talking a lot about our lives, our work, our hopes for the future and the choices that we are currently weighing up. It made me realise how many competing priorities I have at the moment. How many things are on my list of ‘like to dos’.

I’m in the process of working out how I build a life here in Mexico (or between here and the UK). This MA was a stopgap, in a way. Along with existing work commitments, it’s given me two years of financial stability when I don’t need to actively pursue other activities or work. But this time next year, things will shift. I’ll have a lot of time freed up, and I’ll need to start earning significantly more money in order to be financially stable. I have plenty of ideas for how to go about this and I’m lucky that the financial pressure on me isn’t so great that I can’t experiment a bit. But I do want to use this last year of the MA to set myself up for what comes next. 

The ideas I talked about with my friend were wide-ranging and sometimes contradictory. I can’t pursue them all. I’m going to have to make some choices about where to focus my time and energy. There are some common threads, and also some curveballs. I feel myself pulled towards both maintaining my location independence (which feels hard-won, at this point) and putting down roots and feeling more connected to my local community. 

I did a values test recently, which highlighted how important a sense of belonging and community is to me. It also framed my unrelenting desire for newness, change and adventure as a core value (and not a childish lack of commitment, as I’ve sometimes felt). Both of which feel like important things to keep in mind. But whatever I do next, I know that I want my location – the fact that I am based in Mexico for much of my time – to be an advantage and not a drawback (as it often feels in my freelance work). 

Some of the ideas I discussed with my friend were:

• Getting back into journalism by pitching articles as a freelancer – writing about culture, art, food & travel, potentially for both international and local English-language publications. I’d love to use my experience, skills and knowledge to get to know this place better and to share its beauty with others. 
• Deepening my practice as a communications specialist working remotely with international artists by developing a workshop guiding artists on how to write about their own creative practices (and perhaps later a book/workbook – this would build on my Chronicles submission, which took the form of an interactive workbook). Of all the communications work I do, I find helping artists to articulate their work/practice the most enjoyable and rewarding. 
• Developing my own writing practice across creative forms and journalistic/non-fiction. Specifically, I’ve been nurturing the seed of an idea for years now: I want to write a book about corn. It would be part travel log, part historical/cultural narrative, including recipes, exploring how corn and corn-based dishes have shaped cultural identities in the different countries I’ve travelled through/lived in (UK, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Canada), from my perspective as a British person who grew up growing and eating sweetcorn. (Building on this article I wrote.)
• Pushing forward my project on Decisions, which I started in Unit 3 through my curated conversation. I have the idea to develop an ‘Archive of Decisions’, which would take strategies from the field of co-creative practice, which my arts communications practice is rooted in. I’m interested in what might emerge when multiple voices and experiences are brought together through the lens of talking about the decisions that we make. 
• Pursuing a practice-based PhD, which somehow bridges my connections to Mexico and the UK, and could lead to work on research or creative projects in the future. I’m not interested in pursuing a traditional academic career but am drawn to the opportunity for further self-directed academic enquiry. I’m not sure what thematics I’d want to explore. Building on my professional work, perhaps co-creative practice, international artistic exchange, methods of communication & evaluation. 
• Venturing into the tourism industry here in Mexico, perhaps offering tours, packages or experiences, or setting up a space that could host digital nomads and/or artistic residencies and retreats. This would likely be in collaboration with my partner, who has connections in the tourism industry here through his work in water sports. 
• Indulging my passion for coffee by training as a roaster and barista and opening a small space in the town I’m living in – it would be the first to offer high-quality, freshly roasted, ethically sourced coffee. I’d invite local visual artists to showcase and sell their work from the space and host artistic events such as readings, music or performances. 

Some of the common threads I can observe in these ideas are:

• Developing my writing & communications practice.
• Creating space and hosting experiences.
• Creating bridges between the UK and Mexico – for tourists and artists.
• Food & drink as an intercultural practice.

This final year of the MA is rich with opportunities to test and explore different avenues – through the portfolio of experimentation, REBEL unit and the capstone project. Some of these ideas feel more suited than others to these opportunities; some ideas could be applied to multiple briefs. I need to be conscious about not submitting the same work for multiple units if I’m developing a single idea across different projects (e.g. decisions).  

Here are some ways I could pursue these ideas through the project briefs:

• REBEL:
  • Follow the process of developing and pitching an article for publication (this is something I’ve done a bit of in the past but it’s a process that involves a lot of rejection and I struggle to motivate myself to do it, so it could be interesting to reflect on this); 
  • Follow the process of developing a workshop for artists helping them to write about their practice; 
  • Undertake a writing course and reflect on the process (something I’ve wanted to do for a while).
• Portfolio of Experimentation:
  • Set myself a series of creative writing tasks/prompts and see what emerges; 
  • Set about specifically exploring my ideas related to corn through writing, recipes and perhaps other mediums; 
  • Experiment with and set myself challenges around pitching – reflecting on the rejection/failure inherent in this process; 
  • Explore ways of collecting decisions for an archive and of processing the material that I receive – I started doing this in U3 but didn’t use this work in my final submission. 
• Capstone project:
  • Developing and presenting a public Archive of Decisions (could be an exhibition/installation, a book, an online space, or something else) and reflecting on the process, including creative decision-making;
  • Developing and publishing a longer piece of writing about corn as an aspect of cultural identity – perhaps what could be a chapter of a book;
  • Publishing and finding ways to activate a workbook for artists that guides them through the process of writing about their creative practice. 
  • Developing a cultural event or space here in Mexico. 

Considering the three pieces of work that I will complete this year, it does feel like I need to take a coordinated decision – one that takes all three opportunities into account. That’s not to say that things won’t shift in their development. I won’t actually begin the capstone project until the new year (although I will be working on the proposal this semester). 

Perhaps I shouldn’t worry too much about the capstone project at this time. I’ve created a diagram of the main ideas I currently have for the capstone and how my focus for REBEL and the Portfolio of Experimentation might feed into/support this. 

For me, this demonstrates that:

• Some form of creative writing development will support all of the areas I’m interested in for my capstone.
• Focusing on creative writing and pitching might be doubling up, or closing doors early – both lead most strongly to the corn project.
• The ‘Cultural event/space’ idea is the least formed, and in fact some of the other ideas may fit into this, so really Decisions, Corn & Artists’ workbook are the three main ideas I’m currently working towards. 
• I wonder if focusing on Decisions for my Portfolio of Experimentation and my Capstone, on top of my curated conversation for Unit 3, may risk doubling up my work or narrowing my focus too much (especially when this avenue doesn’t have a clear path to future work). 

So, perhaps I’m best off developing a communications workshop for REBEL and focusing on pushing forward my writing practice for my portfolio of experimentation (perhaps including experiments with corn and pitching but leaving it open enough to see what thematics emerge). 

Next steps

We were set the task of writing a personal statement about our practice last week. By coincidence, I’d just set myself the task of writing a short, professional biography of my future self – a thought exercise trying to conjure the direction of travel I would like to take. I’ll keep working on both of these and perhaps they’ll also help clarify my priorities and next steps.

Writing this out has helped in terms of clarifying the options I am considering. I think I will share this blog with a few people and perhaps I can move towards a decision through conversation. I’ve arranged a tutorial with Paul re REBEL for later this week.