Planning as Sense-Making

From October 2026, we’re rehearsing. Preparing, practicing, reflecting, repeating. In this rehearsal, a dress rehearsal, Deveron Projects is the protagonist. Who is she? How does she dwell here, within her communities? What does she carry with her? What makes her? 

Organisations like Deveron Projects aren’t fixed. They are made of us, but also bigger than us. Becoming and feeling, forgetting and learning, sometimes purposeful, sometimes lost. They are born, they transition and they will end. They plan for their future. How does this planning happen, and who does it? What assumptions are being planned from? What ways of knowing is it based on? Whose futures is it planning for and on what terms?

Over two years, artist Jack Ky Tan will be working with Deveron Projects to transform planning. Through a series of iterative residencies, Jack will call and respond with our team, trustees and communities, collaboratively rehearsing as artwork. Attempting to embody and practice planning as an equitable worldbuilding activity, we will lean into alternative approaches to planning such as feminist (counter)planning, abolitionist and queer planning, to realise alternative planning practices in Deveron Projects and with them, create alternative futures within our work.

Jack Ky Tan is a UK based interdisciplinary artist working across performance, sculpture, installation and institutional critique. His practice is an ongoing exploration of social justice that blurs the boundaries between, art, law, governance, and consultancy. Looking toward alternative knowledge systems, Tan interrogates the legacies of empire with a particular interest in Southeast Asian and Tropical epistemologies of resistance. His work attempts to rethink our entanglement with the human and more-than-human worlds, and looks towards alternative ways of living and working.