ABOUT US
Alt_D is an alternative graduate showcase for, and by, ECA students. We felt that the ECA was not representing us adequately and were enraged by the mishandling of our complaints, so decided to represent ourselves in our own, democratic terms.
Beyond this, we want to restructure the way that we celebrate artists through community support and collective actions. We want to highlight that there are a lot of ways of defining success, moving away from narrow institutional definitions. Our platform can be understood more as a collective: a grass-roots initiative to encourage each other to continue to create in spite of the difficulties we have faced and will continue to in the future.
The university broke their promise to us when they failed to deliver what we were led to believe was going to be an exciting and revolutionary online space. They gave us a clunky, difficult to navigate and ugly website. It was essentially an up-cycled version of the website template which has been in use for at least the past six years, including only minor changes, and excluding any of this exciting content they had talked about.
Most importantly, however, they also failed to represent student voices, including us only in a performative dimension. They aimed to keep us at bay with empty words rather than actually hearing what we had to say. Students were met with patronising responses when issues around how the website had not met our expectations were raised.
At the heart of this all is an attempt to give us all a great online show. We should be recognised because of, and not in spite of, the current circumstances. Our cohort deserves to be celebrated for their hard work and talent.
We would like to give a special thanks to all of those who contributed to the site and helped support this project, including;
Ross McDonald
Brian and Lesley Robertson
Anna Gormezano Marks