Collective Hospitality
A series of reflections and projects (developed in and out Constant) that explore the concept of ‘hospitality’ in the framework of collaborative creative processes.
The concept of ‘hospitality’ seems to be quite relevant in the framework of artistic residencies. It evokes the specific characteristics and expectations related to the role of ‘host’ attributed to organisators, curators and cultural institutions, and the role of ‘guest’ played by the invited artists. Since 2014, Constant organises twice a year transdisciplinary residencies called ‘worksessions’. We create a temporary working environment where participants from different backgrounds, origins, genres and languages come together to develop ideas around a specific question. The importance of ‘hospitality’ is especially felt during these working moments, in order to offer a safe environment where participants can express themselves and work together in the most comfortable and laid-back way.
Iterations
During a conference who took place on November the 7th, 2019 at Bozar in Brussels, Donatella Portoghese and Peter Westenberg outlined the main threads that emerged from the project Iterations. This project aimed to experiment with collaborative creative processes in a digital environment. During a series of collective residencies across Europe, concepts such as reciprocity, togetherness, common grounds, conflicts, misunderstandings, collective identity, were discussed, explored and then translated by the participating artists in performances and exhibitions. Why is collaboration important? As Reni Hofmüller, director of esc medien kunst labor in Graz, once said: “The internet is the main working infrastructure of our time, but the internet is too big to make sense of alone, we need each other to learn and exchange”. It is through working together and mutually influencing each other that we imagine and give shape to the worlds of tomorrow. But what are the conditions of ‘working together’?
On reciprocity
To organise and host residencies means to bring together people from different backgrounds, who speak various languages, who have other needs or expectations; people that apply or are invited to a residency don’t come alone, but with a set of conditions, desires, doubts even; sometimes with family members or young children. This is not without complexity. The term ‘reciprocity’ is as important as ‘hospitality’. It implies a sense of solidarity, empathy, exchange of knowledge and mutual learning between institutions and artists involved in the process.
During a conversation in Hangar in Barcelona, Sergi Botella, Marta Garcia, Marzia Matarese and Donatella Portoghese discussed these two notions (‘hospitality’ and ‘reciprocity’) and how they apply to the residencies and worksessions they organise. The mind-map above was lying on the table as a starting point. Part of this exchange found its way into the article reciprocity — recIprocIdad, written by Sergi Botella as a contribution to the publication Residencies Exchange. It is a compendium of texts and dialogues written by international residency’s managers that delve into issues around 4 key concepts in the frame of artist residencies: mobility, reciprocity, academia and hospitality. It was published by the platform hablarenarte in Madrid in 2019.
http://www.hablarenarte.com/uploads/proyectos/326_2144.pdf
Some time ago performance artist Andrea Fraser wrote a text with the provocative name of ‘As If’ We Came Together to Care. It reflects on the psychological dimensions of hospitality in art institutions. Art residencies always produce complex host-guest relations. The position of institution as host and the artist as guest are assumed roles that can also shift in relation to social, political, economic and ethical conditions. Space, time, exchange and resources define situations of hospitality, which are intrinsically linked to every level of cultural production. This small essay first appeared in 2016 in ‘Cultures of the Curatorial’, published by Sternberg Press.
Technologies of collaboration
‘Introduction: Radical Feminist Storytelling and Speculative Fiction: Creating new worlds by re-imagining hacking’ was published in the issue #13 of ADA, a journal of gender, new media and technology. In this article, Sophie Toupin and Spideralex dream about specific geographies of the imaginary which they consider an active practice of doing. “A practice that is situated, plural and collective, and which involves non-stop loops in which feminists are reading, quoting, conspiring, studying, supporting and summoning each other.” Further on they suggest that “doing speculatively in a context of technology helps to prefigure the types of feminist technologies, technoscience and infrastructures needs to (re)imagine and strive for systemic transformations…Doing speculatively is infrastructural as it allows for the circulation of ideas, fabulations and dreams among others.”
https://adanewmedia.org/2018/05/issue13-toupin-spideralex/
Manifesto For Maintenance Art 1969!
Initially written as a proposal for an exhibition entitled ‘Care’, the Manifesto For Maintenance Art by Mierle Laderman Ukeles emphasizes maintenance as a creative strategy. The manifesto is divided in two parts. In part I, under the rubric ‘Ideas’, she makes a distinction between the two basic systems of ‘Development’ and ‘Maintenance’. ‘Development’ is associated with ‘pure individual creation’, ‘the new’, ‘the change’.’Maintenance’ is tasked with ‘keep the dust off the pure individual creation, preserve the new, sustain the change’. The second part describes her proposal for the exhibition. She begins with the statement “I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order) I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I ‘do’ Art. Now I will simply do these everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art […]. My working will be the work.”
Operating / Exploitation
A computer operating system functions through interacting scripts which negotiate collaboration, instrumentalisation and hierarchy between connected elements. The exhibition Iterations #5: Operating / Exploitation was the results of two collective residencies that took place in BozarLab in Brussels in June and October 2019. The participating artists chose the operating system as a metaphor to investigate the conditions for working together. The very title occupies the semantic space between the English and French terms for it: ‘operating system’ and ‘système d’exploitation’. Operating / Exploitation was about the technology of collaboration. Technology in this context is not to be interpreted as ’high tech’, but refers to everything that can be said about the know-how, tools, skills and techniques that are connected to the act of working together.
http://constantvzw.org/site/Iterations-5-Operating-Exploitation,3232.html
Sharing infrastructures
Etherpad
Etherpad is an open source online editor that allows to edit documents collaboratively in real-time. Pads and similar collective writing tools are largely used in long-distance as well as in close collaborative projects.
Etherbox
Etherbox is the name of a configuration of software and hardware that was created during a workshop on Machine Learning, organised by Aarhus University, Transmediale and Constant in Brussels in 2016. It developed into a local independent server as a writing and publishing temporary platform used during the worksessions by participants to share files, resources, codes, images and other documents.
GitLab repositories
GitLab is an open source platform used by designers and makers to share their projects mostly in terms of code sources, ressources and other digital materials.
Domaine Public / Nubo
A non-profit Internet hosting structure, independent and managed collectively by all its members, Domaine Public wants to promote autonomy in the management of computer tools for dissemination and communication, among a large public and especially non-specialists. Nubo is a Belgian cooperative that offers online services that respect privacy. It is an online storage space (cloud) and an e-mail address (mail) that you can control. Nubo is accessible to everyone, regardless of usage or skills.
NextCloud
Since 2014 Constant shares a working space with about 60 other Brussels based individual artists, artistic organisations and collectives. To facilitate space management, 3 common calendars are hosted on Constant NextCloud (NextCloud being an open source file hosting site). They are essential and easy to share tools to be able to collectively access and manage the common spaces between so many users.
The Techno-galactic Walk-In Clinic
The Walk-In Clinic provided free hands-on observations from a wide range of professional and amateur practitioners on the spot. Available services ranged from immediate interface critique, collaborative code inspection, data dowsing, various forms of network analyses, unusability testing, identification of unknown viruses, risk assessment, opening of black-boxes and more. The walk-in clinic was a service provided by the Techno-Galactic Software Observatory, a worksession organised by Constant from 7 to 12 June 2017 at the World Trade Center in Brussels.
List of services provided at the Walk-In Clinic
Hosting service
Are you being served?
The last edition of the festival Verbindingen/Jonctions took place in Variable (Constant temporary artists studios at that time) in December 2013 and was dedicated to a feminist review of mesh- cloud- autonomous- and D.I.Y. servers. For this occasion, Constant asked the help of a group of friends as ‘hosts’ to welcome and accommodate participants, integrating this ‘service’ into the spirit and intention of the work session.
Cooking as caring
For each worksession, Constant invites professional and amateurs cooks to contribute with their vegeterian meals full of passion and creativity to the ‘hospitable’ atmosphere of these working moments: between others, Guillaume Bernier, Sunyoung Choi, Joris Vermeir, Louise Mestrallet and Christian Valens, Charlotte Lambertini and Les cocottes volantes, l’équipe de La Poissonnerie, Delices Afghans à domicile.
This book is yours. Recipes for artistic collaboration
In a place where several people are working together, the kitchen becomes very quickly the meeting place where informal exchanges happen. The short essay ‘A Guest + A Host = A Ghost’ published in ‘This book is yours. Recipes for artistic collaboration’ talks about this. Sally De Kunst, director of Arc artist residency in Romainmôtier, believes that ‘rewarding artistic exchanges can only take place in a friendly atmosphere that fosters trust, mutual respect and generosity…The kitchen should be the heart of an insitution, a project or a community…In a place where ’hosts’ and ‘guests’ connecte and bonds are created, there is a spirit of mutual trust and understanding, roles change and guests become hosts in turn.’
Collective dishwashing
And yes, washing dishes is also part of the informal exchange of experiences and thoughts.
The conditions for collaboration
Cuisine Interne Keuken
The Cuisine Interne Keuken project was initiated in 2004 at Jonctions/Verbindingen 7, a yearly festival around art, technology and ethics organised by Constant. We selected 15 questions around the ingredients and recipes of cultural work. Some of these questions were quite straightforward, and some left more space for interpretation or even evasion. The idea was to put practice, tools and conditions at the same level, so to question their interrelation. Cuisine Interne Keuken started out of the desire to render visible the internal organisation of the cultural world we work in, with its written and unwritten laws, decision making processes and value systems.
Caveat
Caveat is a collective research into the ecology of artistic practice. It is initiated by Jubilee, in partnership with Open Source Publishing, No New Enemies and Été 78. Caveat tries to find more sustainable, balanced ways of operating within the existing legal frameworks. And when the limits of the existing system are reached, it tries to come up with possible new narratives that open up space for reflection.
Collaboration Contamination
In the framework of the project Iterations, and after a series of online meetings beforehand, 6 artists came together in the physical space of esc medien kunst labor à Graz (Austria). In ten intensive days of exchange, they transformed the gallery into a spatial laboratory where ideas around ‘Collaboration’ and ‘Contamination’ filled the room. As a result, real dirt (soil) filled half of the room giving substrate to seeds and plants to grow — a metaphor to constant transformation and the research of a common ground where the seeds of collaboration need to slowly grow. Subverting the power relations and constructing a new conglomerate within an action, the individual names of the artists disappeared, leaving behind just some vowels that formulate a new compound: Common Ground.
https://iterations.space/iterations-4-04-05-2019-to-26-05-2019/
Collaboration guidelines
The Collaboration guidelines assembled by and for Constant set bouncy delimitations that curve, bend and resituate yet they need to offer protection when needed. For two months in the autumn of 2019, the window of Constant was turned into a public drafting sheet for these guidelines. Michael Murtaugh developed a colourful LED display which run through changes in the guidelines while they were being written and rewritten. Passers-by and visitors were welcomed to add or remove lines, rules, scores, considerations, instructions, expectations, ideas and codes.
Constant Collaboration guidelines
More pictures of the public reactions to the Collaboration Guidelines
Collective Conditions
During the worksession Collective Conditions that took place at Ateliers Mommen in Brussel in November 2019, the environmental conditions for thinking together were set by artist Loren Britton, who made tables and pillows for the room where participants were working in. Loren created these objects as opportunities to play, to shape new directional flows and to consider metaphors around orientation as ways to imagine what collaboration can be.
During the same worksession, a group of intersectional trans * feminists gathered to collectively write a manifesto of cares. They noticed that many in positions of power are doing little to enact cares. They felt the urgency to talk about cares, not because they don’t exist, but because cares are not distributed equally, and because to ‘take care’ can have multiple meanings depending on positions of privilege, context and who and what we’re dealing with. This manifesto is a demand towards those subjects within institutional frameworks to reflect on their relationship towards the giving, taking, receiving cares, to question well worn patterns of cares, and how they can be reinscribed.
Intersections of care
The ‘Manifesto of cares’ will appear as a contribution to the artistic research project Intersections of care by Florence Cheval and Loraine Furter in the framework of a call for contributions to build a compilation of collective guidelines of care in different fields and configurations — from informal affinity groups and activist collectives to arts organizations. This collection aims at sharing tools for safer and more ethical collaborations within groups, organizations and institutions.