How can we bring the neighbours in to the institution, not as witnesses of what happened
here, but as peers who have also something to challenge the institution with?
The Neighbours are a group of people who live or work in the area, convened by Tania, the
artist working on the Tate commission here, to explore how Tate could be a better institution,
and also to inspire people to take action. We’ve been looking at different ways of
trying to make art useful, and encouraging people to not just consume art, but become
active participants in art, and through that be civically responsible.
Even though it is Tania’s project, I felt like it is the Tate Neighbours, it was all
of us together collectively, so that whole process of coming together, meeting weekly,
having conversations about homelessness, migration, creativity, vulnerable communities,
I just found it real, to be honest. I found it was a real exchange.
For me, art is not what you see or you experience in a place, but the process individual people
have after they have the experience. And I think art is a way to know yourself better,
and to know yourself in situations you haven’t been in yet.
With this project, it is still an art project. We’re trying to prompt people to take action
in their lives, and also to prompt people to take action in SE1, or wherever they live.
I really like the idea of the randomness of the group, and I had a question for myself:
in moments like now, where nationalistic ideological tendencies are infiltrating the world, that
are separating people between us and them, can we create a group where people even have
contrary ideas, and we can make it work. The power of this collective group was that
we were able to bring all of these different interests together.
Everybody is finding in the group another side of themselves. And what I like about
it is that everybody is valuable and they know it.
I mean I’ve always been told that I think too much, and have thought of myself as more
of a couch potato, to be honest with you. And now, I do feel that I am an activist,
actively concerned and actively expressing myself in all sorts of new ways.
We decided to do a one month workshop in the Tate Exchange space. The idea is to use this
month for the group to invite other people in, for people in the community to join the
conversation but also to have let’s say a mental map of all of the places they can
go to that already exist in the area for all of these issues or interests they have.
I went to school like literally ten minutes down the road, and I remember coming here
as a kid, and saying, “The museum is boring, no one in there is like me,” so when I started
getting involved, especially with Tate Exchange and with the Neighbours, it just made my agenda
become more clear to me. I want more people coming from where I’m coming from, show
people the local area but also get more people coming to the Tate, because I think they actually
want to hear what the community think, especially with this programme. It might be somewhere
where they can actually just come and chill. I see people when I’ve been here, they just
come up and have a free cup of tea, and they have a conversation, and I think a lot of
times that’s what lost. Museums have such an important mandate to
be civic institutions today. They should be a sanctuary for immigrants, they should be
a sanctuary for people who are left out and people who don’t feel represented anywhere else
Tate as an institution is fantastic, but it
could be better. And it’s really important that Tate is challenged. Certainly I think
that art museums are really important institutions, they’re where we make sense of the world,
and the world is a hard place to make sense of right now. So if Tate can become a better
institution, in terms of its positive impact and footprint in the world, and Tate Neighbours
have been part of that, that’s going to be the power of what this project becomes.
From the meetings with the Neighbours, we came up with what was missing in the institution
for them to feel they were part of it, and through that we arrived to the conclusion
that we wanted to change the name of one of the buildings.
So one of the really exciting pieces has been to explore that fact, and to come up with
an idea that one of the Tate buildings could be named after somebody who contributes to
society in a way that’s not really about their own personal gain in any way.
Putting Natalie’s name on a building that is as big and as world renowned as this one
is huge. Particularly for people to understand that despite the fact that what you see is
flats that are ridiculously expensive and office buildings, there are communities, particularly
working class communities, in SE1 that have been here and have been doing work for a long
time, before any of this existed. Initially I was very shocked when I was asked
if my name could be put on the building and I realised that it wasn’t really just about
me. It’s about symbolising that there’s a different value system that’s not based
on money, that the values of volunteering, caring for your community, being kind, are
just as important as money, it’s actually going to provide a lot of space for thinking
and debate and hopefully inspire other people to really adopt those values and think more
about what they’re doing every day in their lives.
This is exactly what the work is about. The whole Turbine Hall Commission is about invisibility,
it’s about what you don’t see but it’s there and it’s important. Maybe people pass
by and see “Natalie Bell” and they assume it’s somebody with money, or somebody with
celebrity status, but it is Natalie Bell. A neighbour, somebody who has changed the
life of people, who is bringing all the values into consideration for us to accept what is
a citizen, and what is a neighbour.