This page gives a longer response by the Utopias Bach partners to the 500 character space on the ACW completion report form, in response to the question:

“Please confirm that your employees were paid at least the national minimum wage and that any freelance workers you engaged were paid at least the minimum level of fee agreed with the relevant trade union or professional association”

We would welcome the opportunity to talk through these issues with ACW. The more you dig into this the more confusing it becomes. It is truly a totally inappropriate and impossible to answer question to answer truthfully without writing an entire book about it, and even then! But then we can also see the issue from ACW’s perspective, that there is a requirement to report ‘upwards’ (and with public accountability) to show they are contributing to fair pay for creatives (and others)…

Neither Utopias Bach nor Plas Bodfa has any employees. And in terms of ‘paying freelancers at least the minimal level of fee…’ while acknowledging efforts with payment according to the NMW/accepted freelancer fees, we’d like to share our learning about the complex nature of payments in an organic, diverse, grassroots initiative, with a strong collective sense of reciprocity and shared ownership such as Utopias Bach.

Some involved in Utopias Bach have paid jobs, some are freelance creatives, some freelance psychotherapists, educationalists, community workers. Some are on benefits. Some are pensioners. Some are full time carers or child-care. Some are established artists with income streams, others starting out. Each of us has different motivations and financial circumstances and needs. All have brought different things in different ways to Utopias Bach, and benefited from different aspects, in different ways, only some of which are financial. Challenging assumptions of rewards and recognition being simply financial, recognising other needs and motivations is important to challenging the capitalist norms within which we are living.

With socially engaged art and collaborative working,  it is often, perhaps always (as a direct result and even the whole point of the nature of the work) impossible to draw a line between participant and contributor and initiator. The conception of ‘artist’ as creator/producer and  ‘audience’ as a passive recipient no longer applies. This leads to questions about who gets paid, for what, and how much, at what point. Many change their role and relationship with Utopias Bach over time, perhaps starting out as a participant at the Collaboratory meetings (but the Collaboratory is shaping Utopias Bach, so perhaps they are not ‘just’ a participant anyway), and then going on to take part in or run an experiment, perhaps as a participant and then on a micro-residency. Some may find that what they are doing with Utopias Bach gets funded as part of something else they are doing, or feeds into some other project, or that some other project feeds into Utopias Bach. 

We consciously managed our way through this complexity through:

• offering payment for specific tasks, leaving it up to the recipient to decide how much time they spend on that task (eg seed funding, documentation, hosting a collaboratory, core partner time, Awdur Preswyl, Participant Observer)

• offering payments to support people to do the things they want to do, at a level they need to do that (allowing for diversity in financial need), and redressing structural inequalities around hierarchies, colonialism and white/middle class norms  eg gratitude payments for those taking part in Merched y Tir. As the initiator of the  ‘Exercises for White People’ experiment said “We had to name the discomfort around being paid for this work, that people of colour have to do this work (understanding their race and what goes/comes with it) for birth in order to survive in a white supremacist world. That for white people it’s part of the privilege that there is choice around engaging with whiteness. And then artists like the three of us are getting paid for it feels wrong. We talked about donating a proportion of our fee to Black Lives Matter UK or a similar charitable organisation but I felt like (due to the precarity of being a freelance artist, especially post covid) I needed to leave that to individuals to decide” 

• offering retrospective payment where someone has spent time or created something extraordinary that is of value to the collective

• regular discussions about equity, equality and compensation (financial or otherwise) within the Core Partners meetings, the Collaboratory and experiments.

• acknowledging discomforts, confusions and imbalances within experiments, individuals and the projects as a whole, financial and otherwise

LESSON LEARNED #14: The notion of ‘set levels of fees’ does not apply when working in socially engaged art (nor perhaps, if we were honest, to ANY art)

By setting requirements for funding recipients/contractors to ‘confirm’ that a socially engaged art project is paying at a certain ‘level of fee’, funders are perpetuating patriarchal, simplistic and divisive culture

We feel this is a critical and timely point, and would like to ask for the opportunity to meet with and share our learning and questions around this with Arts Council Wales, other funding bodies, arts institutions and C&F projects.

To be a freelancer in the arts and cultural sector, one must act as a chameleon, constantly in the process of changing colour, morphing, choosing when to blend in and when to stick out. One’s left arm must feel comfortable existing within institutions, writing clear statements about process, fitting in to existing hierarchies and deadlines. One’s right arm peruses passions and personal projects, creative and pleasing activities whatever that may be. The left foot needs to keep control of all other practical aspects of life – family, income, dinner, taxes etc. The right foot is grounded at ‘home’, in whatever form that may take. The ‘home’ of friends and peers, the ‘home’ of place and time. The tail manages time and the future, balancing energies, production and opportunities, completion, and beginnings. The head, ohhh the head. The head must keep the beat - dancing, resting, speeding up and slowing down. The head must know when to act and when to do nothing. The head must smile, it must sleep. It has the power to engage and anger, show compassion and excitement, open up or look within.

The five core partners all entered the project as whole beings, our full selves undivided by the categories and hierarchies of institutions and society. Throughout the project we took on different roles, wore different hats, had various titles and responsibilities, but made a conscious attempt to stay whole. For this reason, money does indeed become complicated, confusing and irreconcilable. Those who gave the most of themselves and their time and energy no doubt gained the most in personal development, connections, opportunities, joy, feeling of community and connectedness, intellectual inspiration and feeling of accomplishment. But these were the same individuals, in a purely financial sense, that were most poorly paid for their time. 

Ourselves aside, we tried our very best to be ‘fair’, acknowledging time, efforts and outputs of those involved with Utopias Bach with the prescribed financial remuneration.  For the most part, this gave us great pleasure to do this, knowing first-hand how rare it is to be paid for activities of this nature. It felt good for our projects and actions to be assigned some value within the financial system. (whether or not we agreed with the financial system to begin with, it is the reality of our time and place) It became more complex when it came to acknowledging our own time and efforts. It was most comfortable for us to move through the project placing everything that we did into the purposefully abstract category of ‘core partner tasks’, while knowing full well that our work far exceeded the 32 days for which we were officially paid. While in the end, none of us felt resentful of either our work or our pay, we did feel increasingly confused about the unsaid conflict/relationship between payment and work in the arts and cultural sector as a whole, as clearly expressed by Wanda Zyborska in her statement below:

“An interesting and problematic polarity arose within the wider group of professional artists, theorists and practitioners that I might identify as amateur/professional [ie taking part from a personal interest vs earning some or all of their living in this way]. This manifested as a different approach towards time and money. Those towards the 'professional' end of the polarity chose to spend hours concomitant with their budget allowance in allocating their hours spent on the project. This is according to Arts Council policy and no one in the group had any real disagreement with it. However, the majority of those working in Utopias Bach consistently gave many more hours than they invoiced for. The problem arose when allocating money for experiments and documentation, where different rates were negotiated, creating an imbalance and inequality between payments. Most artists will recognize this behaviour, it has certainly been my practice for over 20 years, and has been the only way I could reconcile my passion for the art and its quality, and the budgets I have been able to obtain through grants etc. It was unthinkable for me to limit the time I needed to spend on the art in order to fit the agreed allocation of funds. Artists have long debated between ourselves the unhelpfulness of such behaviour as mine and others, undermining as it did the attempts of other artists to ensure that artists are properly paid for their work. I tended to find this polarity (so far) to be unreconcilable. As I needed to do the art, and was unable to change the conditions, I continued with my behaviour. Plus I hate money and refuse to be dictated to by it, in some kind of commodified bottom line, a bottom line that to me would result in low quality. In the meantime I lived with the contradiction, and supported publicly any campaigns by artists for better payment. I agreed to go ahead with a 'properly paid' experiment, with all hours accounted for. This made me feel uncomfortable and guilty, but curious to see how it would work, and surprised at the somehow radicalness of this experiment for the money reason, and curious to see how it would pan out and how we would all feel about it. “