By Jack Clarke & edited by Ciara O’Rourke
I arrived in Doncaster with the sort of brain you get when you’ve spent too much of your week speaking in complete sentences to too many different kinds of people.
Half host. Half unpaid therapist.
I’d come over for Beyond the Scroll: Rethinking Socially Engaged Practice — a one-day symposium, workshops and evening social, and that’s how I entered ArtBomb which sits on Hall Gate in what used to be an estate agents. A place once built to sell square footage now being used to hold ideas, arguments, anti-capitalist books, film work, synths, crochet, zines and whatever else can survive the thoroughfare of Hall Gate’s pavements. It connects through to the Doncaster Unitarian Church behind it, and in front of that a courtyard, a hidden pocket that makes the whole thing feel less like a venue and more like a living, breathing organism.
This matters.
This matters because space does not arrive with one fixed destiny. It becomes what social life does in them. Space is shaped by the people moving through them, by the histories they inherit, by the labour and imagination poured into them, and by the power structures trying to stabilise or monetise them. As Lefebvre The Production of Space argues, space is not neutral, it is produced. Produced physically, talked into being discursively, and lived through bodies, routines, symbols and habits.
Beyond the Scroll was never going to work in a conference centre or some polished black box that smells faintly of grant money and institutional ego stroking. It needed the ghost of Flares nightclub to sit shuttered just opposite. It needed vape shops nearby, the rumble of traffic, the sound of ping pong upstairs and the constant possibility that someone might walk in halfway through a serious conversation.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed fascinated by ArtBomb. It is one of the few places I know trying to produce a different social space in real time, and doing so in a town centre that still carries all the usual British symptoms of hollowed-out civic life. Like I wrote recently about Mocha Parade, a shopping precinct back home in Salford that used to carry everyday graft and gossip, now replaced with a Lidl. Regeneration, they will call it. Civic renewal by discount retail. One more levelled shopping precinct away from the total extinction of local culture.
There’s a drifting sense now that any public place is only public until someone finds a way to price it, fence it, or convert it into something measurable. Paul O’Neill gets close to this in Curating After the Global. He’s clear that contemporary art hasn’t just travelled through globalisation, its helped build the routes. Biennials, mega institutions, residency circuits, art fairs, all of it feeding into a system where culture becomes part of the experience economy of cities. Even the more critical projects often circulate within the same same infrastructure, moving from one context to another, carrying discourse but also carrying value.
What interests me in his writing is where that system starts to strain, where the promise of global circulation gives way to unevenness, to places that aren’t quite plugged into the network in the same way, or are only visible to it when they can be extracted from. That’s where the pull back toward locality feels less like nostalgia and more like necessity. Not local as a branding exercise, but local as a condition you can’t ignore.
In a place like Doncaster, you feel that tension properly. You can see how some spaces get folded into investment logic and others are left to drift. You can see who gets access to culture that travels and who is expected to consume what’s left behind. It’s close to what Qalander Bix Memon writes about with the zones of being and non-being, that uneven distribution of recognition, value and attention. Certain spaces are treated as if they matter by default, others have to constantly justify their existence, or worse, are rendered invisible unless they can be turned into something useful for someone else. He’s honest enough to admit that even the most critical contemporary art often remains entangled in the exact structures it claims to resist.
It’s easy to be seduced by the finality, the inevitability of locality becoming consumed by the capitalist agenda. But Memon also points to something else, or rather revisits something Lucy Lippard named much earlier: the lure of the local. While localness can be eradicated, it has the power to do quite the opposite: embed itself further. The attractiveness of orientation and securing one’s identity to where you actually are, what people around you actually need, and what forms of contact are still possible there. All in the palm of your hand, for those willing to feel it’s presence.
ArtBomb works in that terrain. It isn’t pretending Doncaster is Berlin. It isn’t trying to import the aura of a cosmopolitan elsewhere and plaster it over Hall Gate like a vinyl wrap. It is starting from the fact of Doncaster itself. A mixed high street, a church with a long memory of dissent built into its walls. A temporary cultural ecosystem built in and against the normal flow of commerce. That, in O’Neill’s terms, is part of what curating after the global has to look like now.
Less borderless fantasy, more situated contact. Less abstract circulation, more friction with actual place.
The church matters more than just as a backdrop. Founded in 1692 by Protestant dissenters who were already pushing against the authority of the Church of England, the building carries a history of people refusing to sit comfortably inside imposed structures. The original chapel was deliberately hidden from the road after others like it had been attacked and burned for their so-called heretical views. Even later, when it moved toward Unitarianism and absorbed other liberal groups, open trust at its core, no fixed doctrine, no enforced line, just a shared commitment to thinking and living together without being told exactly how to do it. That kind of history doesn’t sit quietly. It lingers. You can feel it when the space gets used properly, when it stops being just a building and starts behaving like a place where people are allowed to argue, experiment and get things wrong in public.
That’s the lineage ArtBomb is stepping into, whether consciously or not. Not a clean break from the past, but a continuation of that same refusal to let space settle into one fixed use.The day began with Mike’s framing and a film, then Shannon Chambers came in with meditation, which in lesser hands could have tipped into a kind of wellness LinkedIn fog. But it didn’t. ‘The Space Between Stimulus and Self’ was a useful way of forcing the room to feel its own habits. I kept thinking while it was happening about Mike Watson’s Hungry Ghosts in the Machine, which had also been feeding into the event, who I spoke to all the way back in 2024 promoting his book for radio.
One of the most useful things in that book is the insistence that digital culture does not just distract us but also trains forms of deadened repetition, a sort of lifeless attention, endlessly looking without properly meeting the world. Watson’s section on nihilistic meme culture and the production of doom makes that point well, that misery turns aesthetic, analysis becomes vibe.
That was hanging over the room too. We weren’t there to pretend none of us use these machines. We all do. But we were trying, awkwardly and honestly, to ask what kinds of public life are possible when so much attention is captured before it ever becomes action.
Eelyn Lee’s keynote was brilliant for that reason. Eelyn has the sort of practice that moves fluidly between institutional recognition and grounded speculative thinking, and she brought both. Her talk on socially engaged practice did not fall into the trap of making ‘social’ art sound like a nice add-on, a kind of cultural side salad for struggling places. She was sharp on what these practices can and cannot do, and how they are always entangled in place, in migration, in the conditions of Yorkshire, in the digital present. I kept thinking back to Parallel State, that earlier project of hers and Helen Kilby Nelson’s asking what a Northern town might look like in a breakaway imaginary free from the old dead binaries and prejudices. I’ve always had a soft spot for that provocation because it doesn’t ask you to escape place, it asks you to reimagine it. If Doncaster were self-governed, what would that mean. If we emerged from lockdown and the broader wreckage of the last decade actually willing to reject some of the old “normalities,” what might we keep, and what might we refuse.That sits close to Bauman’s idea of the interregnum, which O’Neill also picks up, borrowing from Gramsci. The old order is dying, the new one not yet born, and in between you get monsters. That line gets overused because it’s good, but it remains useful precisely because it explains the mood of a lot of cultural work in Britain at the minute. Institutions still functioning, but thinly. Publics still present, but fractured. National stories still being sold, but increasingly unbelievable. Tech still promising frictionless life, while most actual people feel more exhausted, surveilled and atomised than ever. Beyond the Scroll made sense because it accepted that interregnum feeling without trying to smooth it into a nice answer.
Simon Pickles and the Pin Back ’Tha Lugholes material took the room somewhere else again, toward ecological listening, sound, and the ethics of artistic production. It was also one of those moments where the AI question entered more concretely. Should artists use it. Must they. Can they avoid it. If the tool is already here, what obligations follow from refusing or accepting it. There was no easy consensus, which was healthy. I’m always a bit suspicious when rooms agree too quickly about technology. Usually means everyone is ducking the harder problem.
And then Linda Cassells, Sue Hare and Lyndon Watkinson, working as Futures Past Coalition, gave one of the most intense things I’ve seen in ages. We took over the upstairs hall, usually home to Church of Ping Pong, and transformed it into this makeshift performance chamber with a screen, rope, divided space, cards on a makeshift screen, black on one side, white on the other. The cow bell sounded thirteen times like a clock gone wrong in Orwell’s world, and suddenly the room was organised, split, implicated. Linda moved through the space with a chain dragging behind her, another body in white briefly blocking her path, “Tolerance is a Paradox” scrawled across cloth like a warning or accusation. She would take people by the hand. Look them in the eye. Repeat “I am human” and “You are human” until the phrase stopped sounding like a platitude and started feeling like something fragile that needed defending.
The call and response was devastating in its simplicity. One side of the room gave a line, the other returned another. Propaganda. Division. Control. “The propagandists purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” That line hit hard. Then “Hear the smoke, whistle through the gaps,” repeated until it deteriorated, language literally breaking down into “the gaps.” The whole piece understood something that doomscrolling often flattens, that memory is not just recall, it is compulsion. Fixation. Return. Trauma looping. Linda’s reflections at the end, on South Africa, on apartheid, on what doomscrolling means when memory itself is the scroll you cannot stop moving through, gave the whole performance another weight. Not doomscrolling as trivial digital bad habit, but as psychic pattern. The thing you keep revisiting because your body learned to survive by scanning threat. That shifted something important for me. We talk about doomscrolling as if it is just a stupid modern behaviour. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is also an old wound given a new machine.
