How Soft Infrastructures Tie Our Programme Together
Soft infrastructures are the social, relational and imaginative systems that allow culture to grow: shared knowledge, informal networks, mutual aid, pedagogies, community memories, peer-to-peer skills, and collective organisational behaviours. Unlike hard infrastructure (buildings, equipment), soft infrastructures are the conditions of trust, care, access, governance and learning that sustain long-term cultural life, especially in working-class and under-resourced contexts.
Our whole programme aims to build, test and share these soft infrastructures across disciplines, generations and communities.
1. Artist Development as Soft Infrastructure
Our Strange Exchange Forum, Studio Provision, Open Programme, reader residencies and publication programmes all operate as infrastructures of practice:
- monthly peer-led learning sessions become repeatable structures for knowledge exchange
- toolkits, worksheets, syllabi and publications form distributed infrastructures of access, especially for artist-educators
- young artist cohorts and workshop assistant roles build pathways into creative labour for those typically excluded
Here, soft infrastructure is skills transfer, shared vocabularies, and supportive peer networks
2. Pedagogies, Play and Embodied Learning
Our focus on alternative pedagogies, play research, embodied practice and radical education approaches already works as a para-educational infrastructure:
- forums on access and collaborative methods
- the Strange Exchange library as a long-term knowledge commons
- play research and embodied learning as non-institutional educational infrastructures supporting young people and adults
These create conditions for learning outside formal school systems, tying directly to themes of class, social history and community organising.
3. Community Memory and Social History
Projects such as Radical Archiving and Nippy Sweetie build soft infrastructures of community memory, especially of working-class and overlooked histories:
- documenting oral histories
- generating accessible records (zines, handouts, prompts, toolkits)
- hosting reading groups and intergenerational dialogues
This is infrastructure in the sense of making histories visible, accessible and usable, creating cultural continuity where archives are missing or erased.
4. Collective Governance, Organising and Mutual Aid
Our research and advocacy on community ownership is intended to make Strange Field a site where organising infrastructures can be tried, tested and shared:
- solidarity models shared across organisations
- governance experiments within collectives
- distributed performance and publication forms that strengthen community agency
This is soft infrastructure as collective capacity: the practices of self-organisation, mutual support and horizontal governance that underpin cultural justice.
5. Interdisciplinary Experimentation as Infrastructure
Residencies, multi-form projects, and collaborations with performers, dancers, musicians and local communities build cross-sector infrastructures:
- shared methodologies between art, ecology, social research and performance
- permeable boundaries between communities and disciplines
- triadic collaborations (Triad Collabs/Deviji) as modular infrastructures for encounter and co-making
These provide the structural conditions for experimentation, not one-off outputs.
6. Access and Distribution
Our emphasis on free access, distributed publications, quiet city-wide interventions and open educational resources builds soft infrastructures of cultural distribution:
- free-to-access libraries
- online resources
- Clay oven gatherings, intergenerational performance labs
- workshops embedded in local community contexts
The infrastructure here is low-barrier cultural entry points, hospitable spaces for gathering, and distributed cultural value rather than centralised output.
We welcome feedback and exchange at any time, if you'd like to get in touch you can contact us here.