What does it mean to create in a world where everyone is a creative?
To create is to think, to dream, to imagine, and to build possibilities. In endless formats, it is the ability to transform an idea into a medium we can interact with.
While studying abroad at Goldsmiths, I have been immersed in the most beautiful creative spaces I have ever seen. In all corners of my life—classes, internships, exploring London—they have pushed me to reposition my understanding of what it means to live as a creative in 2023.
In April, I started interning for Every Future Foundation, a small racial justice education charity based in Camden Collective. Collective is a free workspace community for start-up creative projects and businesses, and walking through its creaky floors and plywood walls would reward you with a makeshift yet innovative work environment.
“We don’t have many rules at Collective except: don’t be an arse. We are not a giant corporate building. We’re a small team that expects our members to contribute to our community and help keep this space running.”
In everything from washing dishes to hosting events to collaborating on projects, Collective functions uniquely as a community of creatives—its dynamic, innovative, and leftist atmosphere is resistant to an intensely professional capitalistic image of work.
But even a community like Collective can be swallowed by the pressures of capitalism. While on an orientation tour with 30 creatives applying for membership, my awe of Collective was interrupted by the competitive energy I felt in a space that is supposed to be collaborative. I realized here that in 2023, the word “creative” is no longer just an adjective to describe being creative. You are now a creative—a title that can be personified, embodied, and capitalized on.
On one hand, this phenomenon creates opportunities for new understandings of identity. People are the work that they create, and this introduces the world to powerful art, inventions, ideas, and communities. I’ve spent hours in Black Queer Creative spaces in London where community members are vulnerably sharing creations. For example, Saatchi Gallery’s The New Black Vanguard exhibit had a section called “New Gazes,” all about increasing the visibility of diverse Black life across the Diaspora. It displayed how “this community of photographers make images that establish the significance of the Black figure—and even more radically, the Black creator—as a new ideal in contemporary culture” (Saatchi 2023). I immediately felt how powerful, fulfilling, and revolutionary it was to be in this space that would not exist without creatives. I believe art is precious because it is fueled by us—our feelings, our experiences, our desires—and the embodiment of “creative” amplifies this tenfold.
On the other hand, we live in a capitalistic society which means this embodiment can be driven into consuming us for capital gain. It puts a pressure on being a creative, something that was painfully obvious as I was surrounded by them at Collective. In her Guardian article, Jess Cartner-Morley grapples with this phenomenon in a discussion on Instagram’s social impact over the last decade: “The layout of Instagram, a steady sequence of same-size images, turns us all into celebrities” (Cartner-Morley 2020). Once we are all celebrities—or creatives—the “monetization of Instagram” meets “the size and strategic importance of the space Instagram was coming to occupy in our lives” (Cartner-Morley 2020). A space originally designed as (and still is) a creative haven for photography became flooded with advertisements, brand deals, promotions, and the birth of influencing. I remember when adults said that the jobs I would have one day didn’t exist yet. I always thought this meant working at cool innovative companies creating inventions that were out of our scope of imagination in the mid-2000s. I realize now that those “jobs” now involve being a creative—a position that capitalizes on creativity and the oversaturation of media arts.
The age of technology gives us ALL the ability to be media artists. In other words, we are all ushered to create and consume, a cycle that perpetuates capitalism while also building beautiful spaces for creation and connection. This collection of photos and videos represents my journey in coming to this conclusion over the last four months. Some depict the beauty of creative spaces. Others are a snapshot of the strain of capitalism on creativity. All of them, however, are visuals of new realizations in how I understand creativity in the age of Media Arts.
Views from Collective:
Views from Saatchi Gallery's The New Black Vanguard:
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