Fields of collaboration in contemporary art practices | International conference
Culturgest, Lisbon
November 19-20, 2019
This conference brings together a group of artists and researchers from different backgrounds and generations, who are invited to reflect upon collaboration in art practices and how it shapes processes of creation, problematizing aesthetic issues and generating new models of production, circulation and organization. Fields of Collaboration aims thus to survey the questions posed by work performed collectively and in platforms for artistic cooperation, highlighting the simultaneously hybrid and singular nature of some of these projects.
The phenomenon of collaboration in the arts spans several periods and contexts, surfacing with particular impact in moments of social, economic, and political uncertainty (KESTER, 2011). These practices often challenge the status quo and promote the emergence of new subjectivities, reconfiguring notions of authorship and challenging the dominant structures of institutional power. It is likewise timely to reflect upon the role played by these networks in the current socioeconomic context, in light of the increasing flexibilization and precarization of work.
In order to respond to the theme’s complexity and its multiple approaches, diverse experiences and thoughts on collaborative work will be shared by artists and researchers during the two-days conference. The event thus comprises three keynote presentations, a roundtable, and six thematic panels, composed as a result of a call for papers open to articles and performative communications.
Catherine Quéloz and Liliane Schneiter, founders of the pioneering art-based program CCC - Research Based Master Program (HEAD, Geneva) will open the conference with a communication titled Fire up your imaginary!. The duo will debate how the notion of the common “emerges in the collaboration process, offering a perspective on how to lead a ‘good life’, in sharp awareness of the cooperation between ecofeminism, degrowth, conviviality, voluntary simplicity, multi-species collaboration, etc”. Next, the panel Building the common will address pressing issues such as the disappearance of public space, gentrification and austerity in the funding of the arts, with three case studies of activist collectives and community centers. The panel Feminist approaches in collaboration processes, which will close the morning session, will examine the activity of artistic projects and political collectives formed largely or exclusively by women, in order to tackle gender issues in this context. The third panel will address how the exercise of collective creation can deconstruct, invalidate and remake the notions of author, authorship and authorial. The first day will end with the participation of the art collective SOOPA, an international platform for creation founded in 1999, and organized around a group of artists and thinkers. On behalf of the collective, Filipe Silva and Jonathan Saldanha will reflect upon the group’s twenty years of collaboration, departing from an archive of video, photographs, sounds and texts, which will reveal the “cosmological relationships” contained in the concerts and performances they have developed, based in Porto but in flux through many different spaces.
The second day will begin with a roundtable on collaboration in the Portuguese context, with the participation of António Olaio, José Maia, Rita Fabiana and Sandra Vieira Jürgens, chaired by Samuel Silva. Considering the relevance of collectivization processes in artistic practices in Portugal, this panel will firstly address the contributions made by collaborative groups/projects that emerged from the 1960s on to the development of “unique collective models of production, self-management and dissemination of art” (JÜRGENS, 2016, p. 235), a then notoriously political gesture of resistance. In addition, the panel will discuss the different collaboration formats that appeared subsequently in the context of democracy and up to the present day, and which combine and develop aspects such as informality, cross-disciplinarity, the construction of an artistic community and the strengthening of an idea of independence. This topic will be further debated in the fourth panel, which looks at the potentialities offered by projects of the 1960s and 70s to think about collaboration in areas such as artistic education, the visual arts and dance, both in their historical contexts and today. The next panel, Intervening in the public space, will focus on the ways through which collaborative artistic practices transform social dynamics, support or question political models and alter the aesthetic experience of the city. The conference’s last thematic panel will discuss the challenges and conflict resolution strategies that emerge in the midst of collectives and cultural production organisms, in the sphere of performative and community arts. The conference will end with the participation of Francisca Caporali, founder and artistic coordinator of JA.CA, a collective space for creation in Belo Horizonte (Brazil). She will do a retrospective reading of the project’s ten years of existence, “departing from the construction of its headquarters in a terrain that was not its own.” Caporali will reflect on the relationship between the project and the local communities, public policy and the construction of networks with other autonomous spaces, as well as on its program of art residencies.
Above all, Fields of Collaboration in Contemporary Art Practices is a possibility of encounter, drafted by many hands, and the result of the cooperation between different organizations and research centers.