This text is featured in Collectively, a publication derived from the eponymous international forum with 80 participants on the art of thinking, working and living together, organized at Konstnärsnämnden in Stockholm, 24-26 May 2019.

In 2019, together with Raimundas Malašauskas, Johan Pousette, Claire Tancons and Kathryn Weir, we developed a forum about collective practices. We invited 80 participants of different generations active in various regions of the world to share their work in the studios of Iaspis in Stockholm. For three days, we all formed a collective body that critically reflected on the art of working, thinking and living together. Today, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, this project becomes almost fictional as something impossible to organize, but I believe that the questions raised during the forum are still relevant even now and exercise our collective imaginary.

Our collective body was not only composed of people who identified as ‘art collectives’, and the forum didn’t show works. Even if many questions raised by collective authorship about anonymity, horizontality or liquidity are still urgent, the term ‘art collective’ does not embrace the diversity of contemporary collective practices within and beyond the cultural field. Furthermore, most collective works of art do not include traces of the many agents who collaborate to produce them, i.e., their ‘ecology of practices’. ¹ The main concern behind Collectively was collective ways of doing — the ‘collective effort’ ² — which became the suffix in the forum’s title, Collective-ly.

This text assembles several notes I took before and after Collectively. The first part is dedicated to my own understanding of the ‘collective’, the difficulties encountered when curating collective practices and how we worked through them. The second part addresses more specifically some of the workshops that took place during Collectively.

COLLECTIVE HOPES AND DISILLUSIONS

Explicitly or not, collective practices determine much of what we do. They are qualified by terms such as participation, group, collectivity, ensemble, collaboration, community, cooperation, sharing, assembly, commons and networks. As a white, cis-gender teenager born in the early eighties in France in a middle-class family, my desire for social emancipation was nurtured by the collective values and practices surrounding squat movements, rave parties, anti-fascism, alter-mondialism and cyber communities. Yet, my disillusion was encouraged by other collective values and practices carried by social networks, coworking culture and reality TV. From this background, I understand the term collective as an ambivalent term. Often celebrated in the art world as a critique to the fable of the individual genius and of conservatism, the collective has also been a fertile ground for cultivation of elitism, patriarchal order and abuses of power. ³ Back in 2005, when I started working as a curator, two influential projects shed light on the renewed interest in collective practices: Collective Creativity, an exhibition curated by What, How & for Whom (WHW) at Museum Fridericianum in Kassel and Taking the Matter into Common Hands, a symposium curated by Johanna Billing, Maria Lind and Lars Nilsson at Iaspis. While Collective Creativity was exploring the polyphonic serendipity of the creative process, the symposium, Taking the Matter into Common Hands, addressed the problems of working together (the literal definition of ‘collaboration’). These two projects had a deep resonance in my own curatorial and collective practices, more precisely, the knowledge and experience that can only be elaborated on collectively have since become a central part of my work. Today, the hopes and disillusions of the collective remains. On the one hand, the translocal networks and the commons ⁴ are becoming a major model for decolonized art organizations. On the other hand, many historical values from collectives — such as inclusion of cultural diversity, horizontal governance, alternative ways of living and awareness for societal and environmental concerns — have also been assimilated by capitalism and most political movements.

With almost 30 years of ambivalent feelings about the term ‘collective’, I considered the invitation to curate Collectively as a possible contradiction in terms — one single curator working on a forum about collective practices in an established public art institution. How to reconciliate the rigidity of formal and informal hierarchies inherent to state-run institutions with the longstanding struggle for independence, autonomy and experimentation of many cultural organizations and communities? How to accommodate the singular vision of a curator with the forms of collective knowledge and experience that cannot be produced by the work of one individual? How does the collective practice transform the conventions of curatorial practice? Our answer was to conceive this forum as a device to work the trap we — as institutions and curators — would otherwise inevitably fall in. ⁵ We tried to embrace the contradiction with an open, experimental and critical spirit, ready to embark on experiences without univocal and unilateral answers.

HOSPITALITY IS ‘MAKING ROOM’

I like to compose curatorial formats that derive from the inner process and necessities of a project. Even if it implies slower and longer curatorial work, this elaboration leaves room for institutional experimentation. This means the possibility to critically reflect on the standards and infrastructure of an art institution such as its exhibition, discursive, editorial and production formats, as well as its economy, decision processes, internal and external communication, politics of cultural equity and other structural factors that all give shape to a curatorial project. Through this process, it is possible to work towards challenging the canons and, as we tried to do for Collectively, test new formats.

The structure of Collectively followed some principles of self-organization; there was almost no fixed programs, only meals and events were planned in advanced, while the rest of the time remained free for anyone to propose an activity. Some resources at Iaspis such as the studios, the kitchen, furniture and technical equipment, were also available. A board installed at the entrance displayed the programs written by the participants during the days of the forum. ⁶ Everyone was asked to propose workshops to share their collective practices and ‘relational scores’. Relational scores are simple instructions that replace hospitality rituals usually performed by institutions during an event, such as introductory speeches, presentations of the participants, etc. Here are two examples:

DOEMS, by E.

Two microphones, two people at a time.
It could go on for as long as it does.
Each time one word by each, one by one.
Example:

X says peach
Y says bite
X says go
Y says slow

it goes on till it goes on. Then the next duo
can have a go and a third and so on if
there will be any.

Or :

TWO MINUTE POEMS, by Angie Keefer

Send a minute poem to someone. Ask
someone to send a minute poem to you.
If it feels too difficult or takes more than
one minute to get the ball rolling, just
start over. For example, I sent this to
my friend:

“For a bird, heading rapidly towards the
ground is not the same as falling.”

And they sent this to me in response:

“Fresh loaves, scent of cloves, all the
computers in the room are not enough
to solve the problem of the peeling
paint.”

And we didn’t worry very much about it.

Relational scores and the open program are devices for hospitality; they ‘make room’ as Raimundas Malašauskas said. These devices critically reflect on the institutional control over major components of a collective dynamic during public events such as time, language, space and bodies. They offer the possibility for each participant to choose the language and conditions to engage in relations with the other participants. They also reflect on one of the main aspects of curatorial practice — programming — by allowing for more time and space for an activity. Programming is often associated with writing; it proposes a storytelling or a chain of thinking to an audience and, at the same time, gives legitimacy to the curator’s authority. Instead of proposing a comprehensive overview of a phenomenon, Collectively created the conditions for a multiplicity of topics and relations to emerge.

The closest metaphor to describe the work of preparing for Collectively is expressed in Masanobu Fukuoka’s book, The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming (1975). Written as a reaction to the damages of the monoculture model of the Green Revolution, the book describes Fukuoka’s elaboration of the principles of natural farming, the composition of a symbiotic ecosystem where every plant, animal and bacteria contribute, directly or indirectly, to the cultivation of food. He explained the necessity to adopt a more holistic perspective and to concentrate on the many consequences every act can have on the ecosystem. The invitation to Raimundas Malašauskas, Claire Tancons and Kathryn Weir to take part in the conversations around the forum, the careful composition of a coherent group of participants, the conception of the relational scores and the open program as well as the conversations I had with participants in preparation for the forum were dedicated to composing this symbiotic ecosystem.

It is impossible for one person to write about all the activities that happened during Collectively and I am grateful that Iaspis took time to collect a diversity of perspectives about the forum in this publication. From my side, Collectively allowed me to reflect on three dimensions of collective practice: collective knowledge composition, the ecological body and radical differences.

COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE COMPOSITION

PASAR ILMU, by Gudskul

Choose a space, sit down
Wait for headmaster to enter the space
and start the session
Follow the headmaster’s instructions
Pick a stranger to partner with you
Enjoy being both a student and a
teacher, consecutively
Sign for and give away the card-certificate
to your partner
Keep in touch with your partner, who
once has become both your teacher
and student
Replicate, copy and improve the model
whenever and wherever you like

farid rakun, from the Jakarta-based collective Gudskul, proposed two workshops based on the mutualization of knowledge. First, with KAR-OK, he invited us to elaborate on the karaoke playlist to be performed on the last night of the forum, raising discussions about glittery celebrations of cultural diversity and resistance to imperialism in pop culture. farid introduced the workshop with the definition of ‘karaoke’ which means ‘empty orchestra’. It was the perfect invitation to articulate our collective imaginary. Then Pasar Ilmu (Knowledge Market) was a public event where each participant was invited to share a piece of personal knowledge with someone else. I taught how to publish a book to a stranger named Karl in exchange for learning about the history of the Stockholm archipelago. I imagined this simple situation happening in a utopian village once a month with neighbors sharing their knowledge with each other, like we sometimes do when a garden produces too many vegetables for one family or when children’s clothes become too small. Many collective practices carry a form of utopia with them. Georgy Mamedov from the Bishkek-based art and activist collective Smychka introduced us to the TRIZ technique — a problem solving and forecasting tool based on the counterintuitive association of ideas. TRIZ was conceived by Soviet pedagogue, inventor and scientist Genrich Altshuller (1926–1998) following the assumption that the genius was a capitalist fable and that literally everyone can become an inventor by thoroughly following algorithms for resolving contradictions inevitably occurring in the inventive process.

These three workshops were experimentations with the social dimension of collective thinking. Through them, collective intelligence is more than just the simple complementarity of individual expertise. Collective intelligence is a continuous elaboration through the (mis)translation of each other’s perspectives. They proposed situations and methods for the subtle work of applying words to knowledge that had not found a language yet.

ECOLOGICAL BODY

The omnipresence of environmental crises and digitalization makes our codependence with ‘nature’ and ‘digital’ more visible and slowly transforms the common understanding of the collective as a human-to-human relation. Several participants proposed workshops to discuss ‘ecological bodies’, ⁷ meaning the many levels of entanglement of human and more-than-human bodies. Today, thinking and doing with the complexity of ecological bodies is one of the main fields of collective experimentation in academia, activism and the arts. Collective tools are used to find better descriptions and performative strategies to deconstruct capitalism’s “continual, never-finished, cutting off of entanglement.” ⁸

Fernando García-Dory described the polyvalent and mobile ecosystem of INLAND, a rural platform that focuses on “economics of art and land, organized utopia, and the ways we interact with the biosphere.”. ⁹ Fernando’s description of INLAND challenges the notion of discipline and territory. He switches with agility from art to geoengineering to economy, making a number of relations between these heterogenous fields. INLAND articulates the local and the global scale, constantly changing the perspective of their description and showing the many ways the local and the global are interconnected. Another kind of environmental awareness is present in the practice of Art Labor. Inspired by reincarnation and animism, their workshop trained our attention to understand and feel the ecosystems contained in the Vietnamese coffee we brewed. While drinking the coffee, I thought about the generations of living organisms contained in the earth where the coffee beans grew, that cohabits with molecules from decomposed matter and are transformed with the systemic effects of industrialization.

RADICAL DIFFERENCES

Several participants, such as k.ö.k, Hyphen,Werker Collective, Laura Huertas Millán, keyon gaskin and WochenKlausur raised questions around the problem of speaking on the behalf of a group one does not belong to. WochenKlausur shared tools and strategies they have been developing since 1993 to become the ‘instrument’ for the social and political struggle of vulnerable communities — a meaningful inversion of the critique of instrumentalization of groups defined as ‘vulnerable communities’ in ‘community art’ in the early nineties. A debate emerged during Hyphen’s workshop about the position of privilege from which each of us were speaking. The emotionality of the discussion was proportional to the emergency of this question for racialized and non-binary participants.

The awkward idea of a consensual celebration of the commonality of the community can only emerge from a privileged position. I learned from working with people for whom structural violence is part of daily life that equality depends on the possibility to let conflict exist and to represent it. In their performance, Positions, Public Movement orchestrated “a demonstration based on a series of physical positions taken by [the public] according to a list of statements. Two ad-hoc blocks of people were constantly formed and reformed, one in front of the other.” ¹⁰ Even if we were often confronted by a series of double binds, we all took positions. It was a game where we could literally put ourselves in our ideological enemies’ shoes while feeling that we belonged to the same nonconsensual group.

In their performance, this is an artwork / this is for you. / you are a community. / you are my material. / this is a prison. / leave when you want, keyon gaskin performed many gestures adapted from the all too familiar and outrageous police repression and criminal repertoire of gestures used against Black people. Virtuosic and heartbreaking, the performance played with the limits between the representation of violence and real violence, putting the audience — mostly composed of white people — in an uncomfortable introspection about racism and the exclusion of Black people.

From Collectively, I learned that working, thinking and living together is about making room for misunderstanding. What if empathy was not the feeling of having something in common, but about being aware of the potentiality of composing with our radical differences? This impulse is nicely represented in this last relational score:

BAD CHAMELEON, by Raimundas Malašauskas

You are a chameleon who has a difficulty
in deciding whether it wants to mimetize
with the environment or to express its
inner impulse. You have a difficulty in
separating the two. You follow both
drives. You stay pretty bad at it.

All my gratitude to the participants who accepted to be involved in this experimentation: to Johan Pousette and the Iaspis Collectively team; ¹¹ to the guest curators Raimundas Malašauskas, Claire Tancons and Kathryn Weir; to the Council team Sandra Terdjman, Giulia Tognon and Gaëlle Porte; to the Fylkingen team; ¹² to Frida Sandström; and to Laura Huertas Millán.