The project considers the exchange that takes place in artistic collaboration. This exchange comprises negotiations that are tacit, but nevertheless integral. The ongoing pandemic and the enforced dispersal of collaboration across sites and time zones has foregrounded the ways in which working together often takes place apart, while also expanding dialogue as performance. Practitioners from different disciplines––dance and architecture, we are particularly attuned to how the dynamics of collaboration create affective bonds, build trust, and can sometimes allow for a shared language of making. In performing this exchange, we hope to generate a larger discussion about the relationship between collaboration and immaterial labor. How does this work get divvied up, acknowledged and recognized considering the different situations, subjectivities and experiences comprised within any exchange?
The project is in its early stages and begins with artifacts of individual work that address the labor of creative practice. These are shared in the common folder available to all participants. On “Day 1: Perform”, we propose to engage in a “conversation” stimulated by the elements in the folder. This conversation will comprise a back and forth of unscripted /improvised, 45 second interventions (12 interventions in all) and will take place via Zoom with each of us on different continents. The conversation could comprise any modality of description (enactment, performance, movement, text both vocal and written, drawing, images, etc.) and will turn around our desire to share in the labor of making together. The intention is to heighten the “work” of exchange through its performance, so that its density becomes a palpable anarchive. We hope to thus engage with the dynamics of collaboration and bring forward otherwise latent issues: How does exchange take place? What is the role of affect? How do ideas take shape? What role does language play in their generation? How do we truly co-create? How does this companionship yield care and support? Particularly in the face of risk and precarity.
The film “Carrying Horizon” was a product of the three day conference and our exchanges with other participants, and more specifically the work of Pablo Alvez and Hélène Lefebvre.