London Craft Week: Q&A with communeEAST

Calling itself an “ideas and vision institute”, London’s communeEAST is a platform that aims to collaboratively question creativity and the wider world. In practice that means online and digital residencies, discussions, hackathons and exhibitions, with a public-facing programme called #communepresents.

But if this all sounds like a serious business then you’ve misunderstood communeEAST’s flavour. Yes, the team are keen advocates of using a S.T.E.A.M objective stance (that’s science, technology, engineering, art, mathematics) to give a fresh perspective on the creative industries, but the delivery is true performance art. Its Frieze week take-over of Ace Hotel’s Hot Polloi restaurant, for example, saw fetish films and immersive installations by artists Dominic Myatt, James Cooper and James Massias political poetry projected and painted over bodies and walls, which also ended with soiled tablecloths, nudity and some rather red faces. Given their mantra is “to provide a happy ending though a sensory climax of aesthetics and truth”, you can assume that you’re in for quite the wild ride.

As part of London Craft Week, communeEAST is hosting a panel discussion on the value of time as part of The Flipside, a exhibition-come-performance space nestled in Selfridges’ central London store. Embark on some time-travel, and expect to have your definition of craft blow wide open, with a panel of experts that take making to the extreme.

Given London Craft Week is but days away, we wanted to catch up with communeEAST co-founder Leanne Elliott Young to find out more about what communeEAST is all about.

What does craft mean to you and how does it intersect with communeEAST’s mission?

We were excited to be introduced to the London Craft Week programme as craft is something which is usually misconstrued and not really observed in the right parameters, or more ones that are too rigid. You automatically assume mung bean curtains and vine leave basket weavers, or an old man with a 10-year spoon whittling habit. For us craft has a less literal path, you can craft an idea, a state of mind. It’s championing the detail and artisan within this. To note, we are not dismissing heritage crafts, more disrupting and unsettling the language and the space craft sits within.

We’re told your London Craft Week event will be “a conceptual discussion on time and luxury dystopian futures”. What does a luxury dystopia look like?

For us at communeEAST luxury dystopia is now, and it sits within the abject. There are many intense dialogues currently on ‘the future’; every industry is tackling and contemplating what this ‘future’ is. Within fashion and luxury specifically there is a great debate on authorship, re-appropriation, tech, AI, sustainability and what the future is or could be. The world is changing. The way we interact, love, shop, think, so we wanted to look into the future at #flipside and contemplate and question what this vision for the future is. Time is objective and as fluid as one’s perception on reality, this feeds into the narrative of worth within luxury. The two are one conversation and one which we shall be exploring within the 1 hour, 60 mins, 3600 seconds, 10,000 grains of sand and 1/24 rotation of the earths orbit around the sun at #communepresents.

We are specifically interested in the dystopia, especially the energy fear delivers. Fear has great collateral as it provokes constant contemplation and that means a possibility of change. Dystopia isn't just a sub-genre, it’s a reality we all face. Using time as a narrative for this discussion felt right: it means also that we can traverse from the now to the then and what could be.

How has communeEAST evolved since your first few projects?

We started with conversations in common places. These subtle transactions within our community always became staunch alive moments. So really communeEAST’s first project was listening and conversing with no fixed objective. We wanted to curate spaces for thinking, dancing and being. We found that we constantly were in communication with a wide range of industries with interesting perspectives. Our communeEAST pool traversed not only industries but beliefs, borders and mindsets. We were inspired by the conversations this created, the heated and progressive exchanges outside of echo chambers.

The first project (along with communeEAST) was conceive at Art Basel at Miami Beach and then realised at the Ace Hotel for Frieze London. A 360 take over of the Hoi Polloi restaurant over two days, we held explosive and intrusive collaborations and an open dialogue between choreographer Holly Blakey, poet James Messiah, fine artist and tattooist Dominic Myatt, film maker James Cooper and fashion designer Caitlin Price.

For our London Fashion Week Men’s project, the Discovery Lab, we debated the future forecast of fashion and how AI will imprint. It was quite different, less physical, but the point of communeEAST is to shift and blur parameters, so one project to the next will spike rather than sit in perfect unison. The evolution was to realise the power in something which was quite natural to our framework, diversity and objective, cross-discipline conversations.

Our mission is to blur parameters and ignite conversations with objective perspectives, this meant for us clearly a S.T.E.A.M narrative. Our IRL and URL residences also sit within this framework.

Why are events like London Craft Week important for communeEast?

This event for London Craft Week was especially important for us, as it allows a broader audience to engage and be apart of the wider vernacular of craft. We were thrilled to be involved especially within Selfridges #flipside exhibition as it hosts some real contemplations of the what the future is.