In the frame of Collective Agenda,  Council curated Collectively, an international forum with 80 participants on the art of thinking, working and living together. This text is a presentation of the event, which took place at Konstnärsnämnden in Stockholm, 24-26 May 2019.

Collectively gathers participants coming from the arts and beyond, sensitive to developing new ways of working, thinking and living together. They are often motivated by precise social concerns and research interests; many have developed specific tools, strategies or languages; through collaboration they articulate specific ethical positions and experiment with alternative forms of practice.

The forum is conceived as a self-organized sharing space: the relations between participants will be developed through various scores, instructions and protocols proposed to be tested together. During the day, workshops are also proposed by the participants in the studios and spaces of Iaspis. Each day ends with a dinner and evening of performances, screenings and talks.

If art collectives, and the various forms of collective practice in the field of culture, are often understood in opposition to the artist as individual genius, echoing non-hierarchical forms of organizations and alternative ways of living, today this form is not necessarily a synonym of subversion or emancipation. Parallel to recent developments of network technologies, many collective methods and values have been assimilated by engineering, management, marketing, and by most contemporary political ideologies. It becomes necessary to inquire into how collective practices can foster better social understandings, encourage new forms of solidarity and improve living conditions for everyone.

Collectively creates an environment to test, share, learn and unlearn different forms of knowledge and life tactics, a space to present unforeseen associations between a diversity of contemporary practices and to speculate on the hopes they generate.