5:
Building Tom, Together
Towards the end of the holidays, we were approaching the opening of Tom, finalising details and opening the first show on the first week of school. At this point I was working on the space mainly with Seung Ji, who has graciously offered her help and seems interested to run the space with me. Now that Tom has is more than single-handed effort, a bit of the load was taken off me.
I also started to think back to the intentions of starting the space, knowing that I knew from the start that a space had to be a collective effort, and about community. The more people getting involved with the space, the more meaningful the project will be. I guess I sometimes forget this because I often find it draining to communicate with a lot of people at once and this project was a way to push myself out of my comfort zones and engage with people more.
The model that I had envisioned the space to take after also involves taking the space as a shared responsibility by the community. Tom will have a cafe if someone donates a coffee machine. Tom will run higher budget shows if we collect enough donations. Tom will sustain as long as people want us to sustain—the audiences, the school, the artists. This model was something I learnt from other artist run spaces (wares by Godwin Koay and soft/WALL/studs), who function on similar models, asking for people to be involved in making things happen and for audiences to share the responsibility of sustaining the space. By allowing others to extend a helping hand is also an important way of making people feel attached to a space and its programmes.
The last thing that I was thinking about is also the importance of shifting the space away from being a solo project, where Tom is heavily attached to myself. Firstly, I knew that by thinking of a space as a person, I’d like to one day think of her as an independent being. Secondly, I was also against making a space that was too male-centric, and I saw the importance to loosen up my grip on the space and allow others to contribute to the project.
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