September started off with the third Resource Roundtable in our series, an intimate and insightful conversation on practicing gender awareness.
Redefining roles
During this roundtable, I was struck by the generosity with which people shared thoughts, questions, hopes and challenges around practicing gender awareness. The richness and relevance of the attendees’ contributions made me wonder if their role was any different to that of the guest contributor. And if the difference vanished organically, perhaps it could also be removed deliberately.
The guest contributor we invite to each roundtable comes prepared, with resources to share, an overview of the questions that will be put on the table, and a wealth of related artistic projects and personal experiences to draw from when reflecting on these questions. On this occasion, our guest Anders Duckworth brought their lived experience and personal creative practice concerned with gender awareness to the roundtable. Of course, event attendees were likely to have received some form of preparation or food for thought in the emails, newsletters, social media posts or other marketing materials they had come across before the event. Maybe they had read a detailed description of the roundtable on Eventbrite at the time of registering. Maybe not. Or maybe they had forgotten what it said. In any case, while Anders had a planning meeting with us, the other attendees didn’t and joined the roundtable unrehearsed.
What brings some attendees closer to the contributor’s role at the roundtables is that they actively engage in the conversation, either by asking questions that arise in their own practices, or by sharing previous experiences and personal thoughts on the topic. Their questions and interventions deeply enrich each discussion and create circularity in the exchange. Contributing attendees make the roundtables relevant to their own practices, and often prompt the guest contributor to share more concrete examples as well as offering general considerations on the topic. Eventually, when insights from the roundtables land in our toolbox of resources and Instagram summary, they are listed as anonymous points, rather than direct quotes tied to specific names. This is because the group’s thinking unfolds gradually and collectively over the course of the event.
Quality over quantity
The September roundtable felt particularly well suited for a blur of boundaries between the ‘co-host’, ‘guest contributor’ and ‘attendee’ roles. With only five of us in the virtual meeting room, my marketing manager mind felt disappointed at this low attendance, categorised as a quantitative failure. But the quality of the group conversation made up for the number of absences. If anything, the small number of people present on Zoom that night afforded a healthy form of intimacy, particularly helpful to approach a delicate topic like gender.
Numbers aside, what I began to wonder was if the roundtables’ format could be a purposeful positioning of all individuals on an equal level, as co-thinkers, listeners, and contributors. I started to question whether the framework of our event had acknowledged that all artists in the room had become co-creators of a form of collective knowledge. Having shared this thought with Mikaela, we are both keen and curious to try out an alternative roundtable format in a few months’ time and, if successful, to use it as a framework for the design of our next round of roundtables. Time will tell which approach achieves the aim of engaging everyone attending as contributors in their own right.
Yanaëlle Thiran