Following an open call for applications in Autumn 2022, bare minimum collective was awarded a 4-week funded residency. Cove Park’s programme of funded residencies support research, the development of existing and new projects, collaboration, interdisciplinary practice, and the production of new work and ideas. All national and international artists, cultural practitioners, and researchers, working individually and collaboratively in all art forms, in the creative industries, and across disciplines, were eligible to apply. Cove Park’s residencies also support individuals at every stage in their careers.
bare minimum collective
bare minimum is six-person interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. We believe in doing nothing or at the very least, as little as is required of us. We hate working, hustling, neoliberal self-improvement, wage labour, private property; most importantly, how work eats into our time, our love and our ability to make things in earnest. Read our manifesto.
Diamond Abdulrahim is a creative strategist, fashion researcher and writer working across advertising, branded content and film and arts programming. She is also an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, UAL. Diamond’s research interests are in the materiality of everyday life, primarily in under-explored fashion making and repairing communities. Her latest project is titled ‘Wearing Work: Bodies in Labour’ and through film, photography and creative writing will explore the cultural politics of uniforms.
Vera Chapiro is an educator and researcher, currently a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on questions of memory, coloniality and the politics of knowledge and ignorance, with a focus on contemporary French politics. Vera writes about and against contemporary formations of fascism and the alliances and systems that uphold those. She conceives research and education as practices of freedom, creating openings for epistemic justice and reparations.
Christie Costello is an art historian, artist and writer. She is a PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge’s History of Art and Architecture Department focussing on excess and counter-aesthetic practices in British and American dyke* self-representational practices from the 1980s onwards. She is a recipient of the Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholar’s Bursary and the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership.
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and Stuart Hall foundation researcher from London based in the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media at the University of Westminster. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021) and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. During the Cove Park Residency, she will be working on completing her debut novel, which traces the affective resonances of revolution across three temporal landscapes. Image by Robin Christian.
Christine Pungong is an artist, creative producer and curator who has held positions at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre, Victoria & Albert Museum and Sotheby’s London. She is interested in visual storytelling through the mediums of paint, photography and ceramics to explore themes relating to identity and belonging, space and borders, and the body as an archive. Her forthcoming work will focus on the philosophy and boundaries of art and medicine, grief work, pain as pleasure and the catholic imaginary. She has had her work featured in a number of group shows, and has independently curated shows at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and Bernie Grant Arts Centre, London.
Leo is a 28 year old queer elder who exists at the intersection of intellect and trash. They have a passion for geography, nature, visual storytelling and documentary, currently working in production. To balance out these interests, they spend hours every night watching episodes of the real housewives to pull together evidence for their claim that the real housewives of New York is the greatest American comedy (outside of The Sopranos).
Images provided by the artists.
First row from left: Diamond Abdulrahim, Vera Chapiro, Christie Costello
Second row from left: Lola Olufemi, Christine Pungong, Leo
