Notes on a research proposal: the speculative space of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums

How do we sustain creative work in the face of burnout, institutional crisis, the end of funding, the mess of life? Like the workshops that it addresses, this article is a deliberate attempt to resist closure. It draws on the ongoing work of our “Speculative Space” project, which uses “SF as a creative practice for engagement and critical reflection within GLAM space”—galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. This project has comprised a series of workshops oriented around site-specific small acts of collective making. Over the last three years we have gathered in the back rooms of the Winchester Gallery, the Women's Art Library, the Whitechapel Gallery, Science Museum London, the Museum of English Rural Life, the Natural History Museum, and in the digital institutional spaces of Teams meetings. Each workshop was fragile and fleeting, and the record of the work which lingers in photographs, quotes, and ephemera is only an echo of the true outcome which was in the act of gathering, the trust engendered, and the space created for concerns to be voiced. How then to document this work, and to answer the institutional demands to validate its worth using the metrics of academic research and funding frameworks?<br/><br/>In answer, this article consists of a series of images of scanned and annotated pages which revel in relational complexity. They are layered and non-linear, and while this reflects our ambitions for this work we do not want this form of representation to be an act of exclusion. Embedded within this work is metadata including the original bid and tracked changes as alt text, and image descriptions for each page and the photographs within, in a further digital layering of code and content.