Starting From The Endz
Learning from locales as a global pedagogy
words – resolve collective
location – croydon, england
Starting From The Endz began as a workshop that we, RESOLVE Collective, developed with young people from Coram’s Field Youth Centre – a historic safe space for young people aged 8-19 in Camden – in 2019. As part of a collaborative workshop with EYESORE Magazine, a London-based print organisation that discusses cultural, social and political perspectives of the built environment, we became interested in formats that could be orientated towards a variety of sub-themes with different methods: from exploring the radical histories of community print with DIY printing to mapping the emotional cartographies of our local areas.
Over the last year, Starting From The Endz has become a pedagogical framework for ‘interdisciplinary studies’ in the built environment, concerned with trans-local approaches to building liberatory, planetary frameworks for spatial design. For us, trans-locality names an approach to championing local material and knowledge as a resource for radical transformation in our neighbourhoods and communities; starting from, but also between, our endz. As such, our pedagogical framework looks at acts of capacity-building in – and learning from – the London Borough of Croydon, where our organisation is based and where we spent much of our time as young people. Here, we are working with local young people between the ages of 16-25 from underrepresented and marginalised backgrounds, to equip local practitioners with the suitable tools to confront the urgent social-political, land economic and environmental challenges that manifest explicitly in our built environments. This is local work with broader vision: to imagine and rehearse radical alternative futures at the scale of our own neighbourhoods, globally.
Throughout its evolution, Starting From The Endz has been guided by the overarching ambition to approach ‘thinking-through-making’ – the critical analysis and expression of ideas through creative acts – as a means of platforming young peoples’ tacit local knowledge and world-building. What we call ‘tacit local knowledge’ is a constituent part of this local work. A term borrowed and augmented from the fields of organisational theory and knowledge management, tacit local knowledges are both shared and divergent insights into a locale gained from experiences that are difficult to codify, quantify, validate or explicitly transfer to others outside of the social organisational contexts from which they were derived. It forms a currency with which we believe meaningful socially engaged spatial or creative practitioners operate in urban environments today; however, it is often devalued or disregarded in the contexts of formal education and training.
Armed with the format and emergent pedagogy of Starting From The Endz, we are now testing and piloting projects that directly engage in valuing tacit local knowledge. Across the years, this has meant its subversive inclusion in the realms of art, design and architectural education in partnership with local authorities, institutions, third sector funders and grass-roots organisations. But, increasingly, our commitment to this idea has forced us to liberate ‘thinking-through-making’ from the confines of institutional learning and smuggle this fugitive pedagogy out to the youth centres, streets, parks and town centres of our built environments, where tacit local knowledge is an argot – not an exhibition. The images that accompany this text, in part, visualise these languages of local knowledge. Like the tacit knowledge exchanges they reveal, they detail conviviality, collaboration, frustration, graft and joy in our processes but are demonstrably incomplete; rather than exhaustively conveying this short history in its entirety they are promises; intimations of a continuum that is Starting From The Endz.
Starting From The Endz, London, 2018
During EYESORE Magazine’s Imprint Fair in 2018, in the basement of the Building Centre in London, we worked with the brilliant young people of Coram’s Field Youth Centre experimenting with DIY hectograph printing as a means of exploring the UK’s histories of radical Black and Brown community printing. Examining the work of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent’s regular publication, FOWAAD, the young people documented and reprinted their experiences of their neighbourhood through a printing technique that used everyday materials bought from local shops. It was the beginning of a longstanding and precious relationship we have developed with the youth centre. (Photocredit: Ganesha Lockhart, 2018)
The Garage, Sheffield, 2019
Emotional Mapping is a seven-step mapping process that was inspired by personal discussions we were having as a collective in 2019, around the cartographies of gang violence in London. It was concretised in workshops in Sheffield that year, with young people from Longley Park Sixth Form College, The Sheffield College and local residents from the Manor and Castle Development Trust for The Garage. It augments the participatory mapping approach of Kevin Lynch in his composite citizen image maps of the late 60’s, but specifically embracing the inherent performativity mapping collectively. The process frames experiential convergence and divergence as a way of understanding a place, making it an apt tool for negotiating tacit local knowledge. (Photocredit: RESOLVE Collective, 2019)
Playing Pretend, Hull, 2019
Playing Pretend, Hull, 2019 In 2019, we made our first serious attempt at formulating a syllabus with, and for, young people, breaking away from the format of stand-alone workshops. As part of Play Pretend, a meanwhile space and design syllabus made in collaboration with students from three primary schools across the city of Hull, we sought to expose the participants to complex urban challenges in cities today by centring their lived experiences and imaginations. They visited a plethora of organisations and businesses across Hull, recreated shops from local highstreets with crisp boxes sourced from corner shops, and mapped their worlds on the floor of Hull Central Library – demonstrating the power of pretend for our future built environments. (Photocredit: Tom Arran, 2019)
Breaking the Façade, London, 2021
“Who cares?” was the essential provocation of Breaking the Façade, an installation and syllabus we led for the Design Museum’s Ardagh Young Creatives programme. Across the summer, young people explored questions of ‘care’ in the built environment and the role of the ‘carer’ in the design industry through upcycled local material production, co-created installations and forming their very own collective: Studio Crypt. The final installation, which addressed the facades that the young people believed adults in their lives were putting up to disguise the truth, was made entirely by the group from materials salvaged from the nearby high street and processed by the young people at the Design Museum; a testament to how building together is a vital tool for young people to interrogate the world around them. (Photocredit: Justine Trickett, 2021)
Visions For Northolt, London, 2021
Visions For Northolt was a community-led strategy project for Northolt in West London, working with local people to understand their common values and goals for their area. As part of this work we staged Northolt Day, a day-long event that moved through multiple green spaces in the area with events and workshops to celebrate local people’s knowledge of their area. An integral part of this itinerant festival was a bricolage of plywood boards, painted using salvaged printer ink from a local industrial area, that moved with us and enabled us to record the dreams and visions of young people in the parks. Here, local materials became a language through which we could articulate everyday experience and prospective futures. (Photocredit: RESOLVE Collective, 2021)
Made On Location, London, 2021
Tacit local knowledge became a term that we detailed and articulated collectively during Made On Location, an artist residency, workshop series and installation for the V&A East in 2021. Across the year, we worked with a network of youth infrastructure in the ‘Olympic Boroughs’ of East London: Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest and Hackney. In the first workshops with young people from the Blackhorse Young Responders in Waltham Forest, the idea of tacit local knowledge was brought to life through their mapping work and co-built interventions that drew from local materials and experiences.
Reviewing Made On Location has reinforced the urgency with which this arrangement of resources is needed in the face of ongoing cuts to state-led youth provisions in many of the ‘Olympic’ boroughs, and the difficulty with which practitioners like ourselves must negotiate extractive landscapes within the ‘Olympic’ spectacle. The challenge is then to build, advocate and deconstruct in these landscapes of knowledge extraction, whilst maintaining the agency of the young people that populate it. (Photocredit: Xenia Moseley, 2021)
Wasserbotschaften, Hamburg, 2023
The neighbourhood of Wilhelmsburg, Hamburg, consists of a series of islands in the River Elbe – Hamburg’s historical raison d’être and occasionally, also, its bête noire. Whilst designing an exhibition at the MARKK in Hamburg called Wasserbotschaften [Water Messages], we situated ourselves in the lived realities and stories of residents of Wilhelmsburg, especially in its stadtteilschulen and youth programmes where most students, like us, boasted notably non-European origins. Working with clay that we dug from the banks of the river, it became a medium for retelling their relationships with the primordial waters that populated the mythologies of their “homelands” and surrounded their island homes in Wilhelmsburg: waters for swimming, waters for avoiding, waters for contemplating, waters for storytelling. The earthen ensembles of small boats, water snakes, leaves and other artefacts created by the young people were eventually displayed in the exhibition alongside [and sometimes inside] the vitrines of objects that were centuries old, telling trans-local tales. Like seashells, we used them to listen to ambient stories of our immediate surroundings and heard in them the sounds of the world’s oceans. (Photocredit: Paul Schimweg, 2023)
Tools For Solidarity, Ramallah, 2023
In Ramallah, for Tools For Solidarity – a project between RESOLVE Collective and The Mosaic Rooms that worked with schools and young people at the Qattan Foundation in Ramallah, Palestine, and Earls Court Youth Club, London – our approach to tacit local knowledge took an acute importance. We worked with students from Al-Fajr Al-Jadeed School in Kafr ‘Aqab, students from the Palestine Red Crescent Society School for the Deaf, and students from Al-Mustaqbal School in Ramallah to co-design a ‘paper brick’ press through a design journey that explored local mapping and an array of design exercises, all attempting to tease out their tacit local knowledge and non-verbal understandings of solidarity practices. Even prior to the current genocide in Gaza, many of the young people understood deeply the value of, and the threat to, local knowledge in the all-encompassing violence of Israeli occupation. (Photocredit: Qattan Foundation, 2023)
It’s Nelson Init, Nelson, 2024
Nelson, a town in Pendle, Lancashire, has a secret weapon. A group of young people assembled by This Is Nelson – the arts and culture strand of the Nelson Town Deal – and led by situated arts organisation, In-Situ, are leading the charge on rethinking what communal space means to the town’s youth population. Working with the group over the last year as part of our collaborative project, It’s Nelson Init, we’ve transformed the attic of an old church and computer store into a programmable youth space, embarked upon site visits and adventures to Liverpool, London, and their own neighbourhood, and made prints, maps and zines of the dreams that Nelson is made of. Generations of structured disinvestment and stigmatisation make it all too easy to overlook places like Nelson, and the communities in them, when considering what – or who – agents of change look like for the UK’s built environment. But, as they will tell you themselves, without the local knowledge and experience of young people in towns like Nelson, we are committing to change without justice or equity. (Photocredit: Graham Kay, 2024)
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