Resources

Language: English
Author: FailSpace Project

"FailSpace — also known as Cultural Participation: Stories of Success, Histories of Failure — is an AHRC-funded research project exploring how the cultural sector can better recognise, acknowledge and learn from failure, particularly when undertaking work intended to diversify and grow the people who are taking part in subsidised cultural activities."

Language: English
Author: Tate Galleries

A Tate podcast series exploring the topic of failure. "What does it mean to fail, and how can it lead to success? We hear the human stories behind art and failure."

Language: English
Author: Jenny Sealey, Artistic Director & CEO, Graeae

The Living Declaration aims to raise awareness about the challenges facing disabled people under Covid-19 and beyond.

Language: English
Author: By Jessica Grose, NY Times article

An article about children and parents dealing with Failure. "“Everyone is actually a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets, and that mixture continually evolves with experience" Kyla Haimovitz. No matter what you say or don’t say to your kids, you’re not going to get them to achieve perfect equanimity about every loss — it’s more about getting them more comfortable with failures big and small."

Language: English
Author: Elizabeth Day

How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is a podcast that celebrates the things that haven’t gone right. Every week, a new interviewee explores what their failures taught them about how to succeed better.

Language: English
Author: Creative Europe Desk UK

Creative Europe Desk UK feature on the PUSH+ Failure Lab held in September 2019 in Hasselt, Belgium.

Language: English
Author: Federica Buzzi

While Le Corbusier’s Modulor Man created a normative standard for the human body, it was by itself already the result of modern architecture’s project for human betterment.

Language: English
Author: Nan Spowart

An article in The National about the Failure Lab and the three artists taking part from Scotland.

Language: English
Author: Lindsay Baker

Failure has become a hot topic in Literature but if it brings eventual success, can it still be failure?

Language: English
Author:

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

Language: English
Author:

Famous failures!

Language: English
Author: Will Smith

Will Smith Instagram on Failure and Success - Inspiration

Language: English
Author: Jemele Hill

Jemele Hill in TED-talk on success and failure

Language: English
Author: Denzel Washington

FALL FORWARD - Denzel Washington

Drijft het talent van je kind naar boven of moet je het stimuleren?

Translation: Are your child's talent apparent or need they be stimulated?

Language: Flemish
Author: Nico Schoofs en Dominique Soenens

Both parents and children are allowed to fail as that is very OK!

Language: English
Author: Kayle Crosson

Article in the Irish Times about the connection between failure and clowning. “One night, before class, I sit with Toto and ask him a few questions about the art of clowning. For a good part of our conversation, I try to unpack why failure is so integral to it. “Because if you don’t accept your failure, you close the door of play,” he says.”

Language: English
Author: Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Anne Enright, Howard Jacobson, Will Self and Lionel Shriver.

Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Anne Enright, Howard Jacobson, Will Self and Lionel Shriver reflect on their own disappointments in life, love and work. “Failure is just another name for much of real life: much of what we set out to accomplish ends in failure, at least in our own eyes. Who set the bar so high that most of our attempts to sail gracefully over it on the viewless wings of Poesy end in an undignified scramble or a nasty fall into the mud? Who told us we had to succeed at any cost?”

Language: English
Author: Jennifer Stahl

Mikhail Baryshnikov‘s speech at a graduation ceremony for dance students. “As young creative artists, and really as human beings, you have to be open to failure," he said. "Failure is a part of learning.... As a very old dancer, I have had many, many opportunities to fail. It happens. Projects collapse, knees blow out, money dries up. But you as artists, and as young people discovering what you care about, you must be generous to that spark inside yourself that made you love dance in the first place."

Language: English
Author: Jarlath O’Brien

“With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation.” 

Language: English
Author: www.culturalparticipation.com

A link to fill in the FailSpace ‘Honesty Box’, an online survey that forms part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project, ‘Cultural Participation: Stories of Success, Histories of Failure’.  We believe that it is important to create a safe space to discuss and ultimately learn from failure. As such, the ‘Honesty Box’ survey is fully anonymous - and invites sharing of any thoughts, experiences or observations about failure in a cultural participation project/s that you might not feel able to reveal publicly. If you would like to find out more about this project or survey, contact Lucy at l.wright1@leeds.ac.uk

Language: English
Author:

Ruth Maleczech (January 8, 1939 – September 30, 2013) was an American avant-garde stage actress.[1] She won three Obie Awards for Best Actress in her career, for Hajj (1983), Through the Leaves, (1984) and Lear (1990) and an Obie Award for Design, shared with Julie Archer, for Vanishing Pictures (1980), which she also directed. The video shows her in 2012, one year before she died, reflecting on, Beckett's line FAIL BETTER.

Language: English
Author: Samuel Beckett

A video of Samuel Beckett's work of which FAIL BETTER is part of.

Falen is het nieuwe slagen

Translation: To fail is the new to succeed

Author: Michiel Hulshof

Provocative but interesting Dutch text pleading to instal an 'institute of fail-ology', as any form of success is based on a much larger form of failure.

Language: English
Author: Brad Aronson

Funny and hilarious but interesting overview of some brilliant failures.

Language: English
Author: MOX

The Museum of Failure in Los Angeles is a collection of over 100 failed products and services from some of the world’s best-known companies. Visitors will get a insightful and entertaining glimpse into the risky business of innovation. For every mega-success like the Apple iPhone, VCR and Ford Mustang, there’s a couple of Newtons, Betamaxes and Edsels that crashed and burned before them. This collection is carefully curated by licensed psychologist and innovation researcher Dr. Samuel West, and it hopes to convey that the acceptance of failure is necessary in order for innovation and progress to truly succeed.

Language: English
Author: Success

The sweetest victory is the one that’s most difficult. The one that requires you to reach down deep inside, to fight with everything you’ve got, to be willing to leave everything out there on the battlefield—without knowing, until that do-or-die moment, if your heroic effort will be enough. Society doesn’t reward defeat, and you won’t find many failures documented in history books.

Language: English
Author: Richard St. John

TEDtalk - Why do people succeed? Is it because they're smart? Or are they just lucky? Neither. Analyst Richard St. John condenses years of interviews into an unmissable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success.

Language: English
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

TEDTalk - Elizabeth Gilbert was once an "unpublished diner waitress," devastated by rejection letters. And yet, in the wake of the success of 'Eat, Pray, Love,' she found herself identifying strongly with her former self. With beautiful insight, Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple -- though hard -- way to carry on, regardless of outcomes.

Language: English
Author: Alain de Botton

TEDtalk by French philosopher Alain de Botton. He examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work.

Language: English
Author: Sarah Marsh

An article exploring the impact of exam stress on teenagers' mental health.

Language: English
Author: Donna Ferguson

Guardian article exploring rejection and failure - "Usually, the connection between rejection and success is kept private. But a public outpouring recently on social media – not only by celebrities but by others using the #ShareYourRejections hashtag – questions why this is so. What is there to fear from rejection? And why do some people seem to cope with it better than others?"