What people said about participating in RADMIN (2021)

"... I liked the balance of humour, physicality and curiosity. There were rules but there was always the opportunity to intervene in them".

"... The events of RADMIN and other things that were going on in my life at the time - they fed into each other and mingled. It felt like a rich convergence, uncanny, things happened in the same place and time".

"... We had an amazing time joining as a group. We work together all the time, but to have the weekly prompts and to make the time together to do something different - it made us feel like we were somewhere else. There were the different activities each week but it felt like a strong thread between them. We spent a lot of time laughing, not something we normally do in our admin time. And unlike our normal admin, there was nothing in RADMIN we didn't want to do! It was about getting out of patterns, trying to get more playful and adventurous in our wider social-civic interactions - something we had lost with all the funding pressures".

"... At first I found it frustrating and irritating, then very interesting. I enjoyed the responsibility of making my own meanings out of RADMIN: no-one tells you what it should be. We live in a spoon-fed society - if you are writing something for a funding body, you say this is what I'm going to do, then you have to do what you said you would, then you report everything you did. With RADMIN it was more like, let's just do it and find out. It was about the process, that's the interesting bit, the gold. It was also about combining that with life - bringing the tasks we were set into what we were already doing".

"... I really enjoyed the sense of collective action that was woven through RADMIN, that imbues what we are all doing with more meaning".

"... It made me really think about habits and patterns. Often there's no reason behind something you do - you just do it and it becomes a pattern".

"... It enabled me to progress my practice, to use RADMIN as a lens or a prompt for things I need to do. There was also an element of total uselessness, in the spirit of art practice!"

"... It was different to any other group project I'm involved in, a total contrast to performing your professional identity, here there was a completely different kind of attention at play. The pandemic and polarisation or atomisation, the incapacity to walk in someone else's shoes - this project is engaging with that. It felt like a slow burn. There is a sea change coming and RADMIN is well placed to be part of that".

"... I thoroughly enjoyed the sensation of not knowing what was coming next and being challenged each week".

".. It was really nice to be doing something where the aim wasn't money or outputs but sheerly an experiment: the shift in attention that brings. And knowing others were engaged too brought courage".

"... What I most got out of it was overthrowing your own perceptions".

"... What we need is ways to collect and gather and be together in ways that we can challenge the system, and also just cope and exist within it".

"... A real excitement that there are people elsewhere who are thinking the kinds of things that we are thinking".

"... Being aware of that you weren't on your own doing this thing that was completely out of the ordinary, knowing there were other people doing it too, that felt really special".

"...It pushed me beyond my comfort zone but not beyond my capacity!"

"... I see RADMIN as having a long tail. The legacy for me is in terms of thinking about ways of organising, Sharing RADMIN with some work colleagues- that will be useful! It was also about slowing down. In paid activism the emphasis is on moving quickly, you lose sight of the value of slowness. The commitment to contemplation and ritual actions. It felt like an enriching experience, stepping into the unknown together".

"... As a collective our work often feels lonely - we self-organise and we do everything ourselves, the projects, the software, the cleaning - it's important and mindful work but we lack examples of others' experiences. RADMIN was the opportunity to think about the way we approach admin in general. To have radmin as a noun about how we work, to take that more seriously, to have a vocabulary for it and to delve deeper into what radmin could be - formulating that in words was incredible. Now we want to reach out to other cultural organisations and try to bridge connections, to deal with these questions together, not siloed."