Collectivity and Collaboration in the Arts: Practical Tools

Online course by Node Center for Curatorial Studies with Larre Collective, Priscila Clementti

Duration: Oct 19 – Nov 16, 2022
Fee: 174€
Max seats: 30
Enroll before: Oct 15, 2022
Live sessions: 2 hrs/week

Collaboration between art professionals is becoming an increasingly common dimension of contemporary artistic practices. This course provides participants with the key tools, tips and knowledge to cope with the collective and collaborative practices that are shaping today’s art world from a process-based and learning perspective.

Drawing from its experience, art collective Larre will offer a series of care-driven tools and actions to deal with the challenges of collaboration and collective practices. The course will be led by one of its co-founders, Priscila Clementti, and will address key topics such as:

• How do we organize?
• How can we create horizontal and decentralized structures?
• How to map the tasks and responsibilities in a collaborative project?
• How to work with digital tools to co-create and to communicate?
• How to approach authorship, ownership and collective acknowledgement?
• How to evaluate and improve collaborative practice?
• How to resolve the tensions and conflicts that may (and probably will) arise from collaboration itself?

This course is for artists, curators, cultural workers, collectors, cultural agents, and any professional (or students) that might be interested in multidisciplinary or collaborative practices.

By the end of the course you will have developed not only skills, but also sensibilities to detect needs, solve tensions or challenges, and productively reimagine ways of working in collaborative and collective practices.

Program

Session 1. Intro

This session will be an introduction and overview of the course. All participants are invited to introduce themselves and the key aspects that led them to the course, taking as a starting point their last collaboration with another cultural agent. Together we will reflect on “what does it mean to work collectively”? “What’s the difference between collective and collaborative work?”

Session 2. The Romanticization of collaborative work, processes, projects

We will discuss collaborative situations in which people from different contexts and background are involved:

• Case study & discussion: “How do we organize, and how can we create a horizontal and decentralized structure”.
• The iceberg principle or theory: a principle or a theory that suggests that we cannot see or detect most of a situation’s data. How to address that and start from there?
• Useful tool: how to map the tasks and responsibilities within a collaborative project, as well as analyze their impact and visibility

Session 3. Digital tools for collective and collaborative work

We will share and explore tools that can help us in co-creation processes in hybrid contexts (away from keyboard and in virtual/digital) and also in synchronized or asynchronous formats:

• Tools to discuss: invision/miro/telegram
• Dos and don’ts through a case study
• Exercise using “invision” digital tool for collaborating

Session 4. Care as methodology

This session focuses on the notion of “care” as a key aspect and principle for collaborative work and organization. To do so, we will present a series of care-driven tools and actions:

• Check in, Check out: This tool helps us to detect the group’s or the collective’s atmosphere in order to create a “safe and comfortable” environment.
• Common vocabulary: Tools to create collective glossaries ​​and common linguistic frameworks from which to dialogue under the same parameters
• Being Sky; Landing and Lifting: dynamics to create virtual intimacy and from which to approach hybrid formats from the point of view of care.
• Bridge dynamic: a tool for problem solving

We will also discuss Authorship, ownership and collective acknowledgement; how to collaborate in a thoughtful way; rights and free-sharing.

Session 5. Assessment and evaluation

Last but not least, we will discuss different tools, approaches and dynamics that can be used to evaluate, detect and improve collaborative practices. We will explore one of the proposed evaluation tools that has arisen from social movements but is now being used in the cultural and artistic context to evaluate collaborative processes and practices. In this case, it will be used to evaluate the course from personal experience as well as to think about forms of evaluation for current projects of each participant.