‘How We Hold: Rehearsals in Art and Social Change’ is an invitation to arts educators, facilitators, organisers and those who are interested in working collectively with others, who want to use creative practice to work towards change, through personal and social transformation.

Drawing directly from projects generated over a decade of Serpentine Education and Civic programmes, it gathers together project notes and documentation, conversations, commissioned texts and exercises to ask: Where do we go when things fall apart, when home has been taken away, when the cracks appear? How do we find moments of rest, joy and pleasure within ongoing crisis? How do we organise?

Designed to be used both within organisations and as a tool to critique them, it supports dissenting and oppositional conversations, and offers pragmatic challenges to neoliberal and colonial models of education and administration still found in museums, arts organisations and other institutions today.

The book uplifts and celebrates the creativity and resistance of artists and organisers, and the many people who have shaped these projects—from children in nursery to labour organisers, educators and carers, young people in neoliberal academy schools and those navigating the immigration system.

Images: ‘Everything Worthwhile is Done With Other People’, 2023, courtesy EWIDWOP Collective; ‘Here is the Place, a Moving Up’ commission by Adam James in collaboration with students from Gateway Academy, 2017; ‘On What Grounds‘, a Changing Play commission by Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad with Portman Early Childhood Centre, 2017; Rory Pilgrim, ‘RAFTS’, Barking and Dagenham Youth Dance, 2021.