Communal Knowledge is a one-year pilot programme of collaborative projects with local and international artists and designers that will employ different forms of action and critical reflection towards building an accumulative shared body of knowledge. It was launched in January 2010 following a six-month research and development phase, following The Showroom’s move to the Church Street Neighbourhood.

In the first year three projects were commissioned by Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Aural Contract, in working with young people from Marylebone Bangladesh Society; Mieke Van De Voort with young people from the Prince’s Trust and Quintin Kynaston School; and Ricardo Basbaumworking with Dance Physics.

These projects aimed to generate playful and experimental avenues for critical reflection on issues at stake in The Showroom’s neighbourhood, and ways to think about change on micro to macro levels. Projects will challenge how certain norms, values or imposed categories of thought enter into one’s ways of approaching everyday life. The emphasis was on finding ways to re-think or ‘unlearn’ established norms, values, codes, roles and relations, and to produce alternative body of knowledge gained through activity and experience.

This included temporarily mixing established groups, roles or relations through dialogue or role play; meetings between people who might not normally find themselves together; hybrid and heterogeneous modes of collectivity, identities, and codes of behaviour. The participating artists are already addressing such issues in their practices, and work with participatory methods.