Proposal Idea

When we were last together, we all came up with some good ideas. I think the one we decided to act on was the idea of creating a space where different groups of society can join us in a life drawing class. The politics behind this was to try and examine whether leisure and free time was just a preconceived notion, and whether we actually make the most of our supposed free time.

We wanted to look at those who had the time but not the resources, and those who had the resources but not the time.

However, I believe we are selling ourselves short with this initial proposal. Although I love the idea of creating a space where people are free to create in their spare time, I feel by trying to aim at specific groups we ourselves are unintentionally creating a divide and a limit on peoples abilities to make the most of their free time. By segregating, we are not tackling the issues and politics that surround the work/leisure conundrum. To truly see the politics i believe our intervention needs to be accessible to all and not just certain social groups. We need to challenge the 'normal' that I have mentioned before, and create something that can make every body's day just a little abnormal.

Additionally, the life drawing itself is just one form of creativity and by only offering this to the public we are ourselves conforming them to our desires and our limits of leisure. We need to offer something that allows everyone to feel 'free' and to create and enjoy. As mentioned in the 'Proposal Inspiration' post, we need to allow everyone to do something that they individually WANT to do.

I think we really need to look at what actually is spare time, and how far we want to push this. Are we going to simply just understand spare time as the time when we are fully finished with our work or objectives for the day, or can spare time be conceived as any space of time that is not taken up by anything in particular?, ie: waiting rooms, queues, on the tube, waiting for your coffee. These are all examples of free time in the everyday mundane but they are not really capitalised on.

I really liked how Nadia came up with the proposal for challenging the public directly, by approaching the business men whilst they were walking down the street (which could be seen as free time), and encouraging them just to do something/anything. I think we need to run with this idea and start to think of guerrilla style interventions, that will challenge the public to do something with their 'free' time, to change it from wasted time to real leisure.