Collaboratively run workshops, residencies and exhibitions
Producing work together in particular places and spaces can draw attention to the strengths of those places and set in flow an exchange of skills. Running events and making work together can enable team members to learn from each other as the project evolves.
In our project, the team designed immersive experiences where they stayed and worked together and took part in particular arts-based activities.
Team ethnography
The workshops were accompanied by a form of team ethnography (ethnography is the practice of studying people in their own environment, usually through direct observation and participation). The team researched the perspectives and political imaginations of those who produced, sustained and consumed art in their working context, both in the wider world and through interviews and discussions.
Film Prompt: "This is the beauty of research", Duniya Khandokhar reflects on the ethnographic method used in the project. “This is the beauty of research…you just be there….you try to understand people’s life, what that place is saying to you…that thing is automatically communicating with you. If you want to understand what that society really is”.
Film Prompt: Shohrab Jahan reflects on the unexpected results of collaboration, exchange and the value of failure. “When real time collaboration happens we fail to explain, before we have logic.”
Film prompt: A Temporary Exhibition, Uganda National Museum, March 2020.
On Collaboration, Interview with Shohrab Jahan
When I’m trying to develop an idea, I don’t spend too much time with people because I need to be very quiet and calm. When I do this, I can't work with a lot of people. Maybe inside myself, I am not very collaborative; inside myself, very far inside, very hidden, like a folded thing. Even when I work with people, inside I'm thinking, how will I do it and how I will execute that idea and that’s a very lonely journey and I feel very alone inside, sometimes deep inside. Lots of friends, lots of people, lots of everyday engagements, but maybe inside I feel very alone—maybe I need to feel very alone to think about anything or make anything.
I think collaboration depends on the people. If you are collaborating with somebody, somehow you both need to understand, get the taste... If you can get a little bit the same feeling, then collaboration can happen. First, you need to do a small, small collaboration, then you will understand each other, then maybe some collaboration will start, then maybe you can think OK, now maybe it's a good time to think about some work.
It’s like we’re doing a kind of sketching, we are trying to understand each other. Maybe some things we understand. And for some things we think, ok, I can ask him for this and he will not ask a lot of questions because somehow he understands. This is comfortable.
If I feel, oh, she’s like that, I need to be very careful—then it's very hard to collaborate. Before that, when either of you are shy about asking for something, perhaps there is exchange, but this is not collaboration. But after this journey, somehow you will get knowledge from each other, then you can say, yes now we are collaborating because we understand the inner language.
I think when collaboration happens, you fall into it naturally. Maybe you have a clear logic, you have a clear point… but by the end, maybe you are just doing it because you are ready, or because you fell into it. I think somehow when we fall in with each other, then it's a kind of tune from a musical instrument, from one instrument to another instrument. When it's a tune, the sound comes out very beautifully. You might have two different instruments, both with a very good sound, but different, so it doesn’t sing. Maybe each sound is beautiful, but the sounds can't collaborate. But when the two sounds blend into each other and it doesn’t feel like there are two instruments—it is a tune of two instruments, but you hear one, one single knowledge or one single sound blending all of the sounds. It’s a kind of machine; one man’s hand and another man’s hand collaborating, their eyes collaborating, and their brain is moving towards each other. They are very different, but somehow they collaborate and somehow they get each other. Somehow they understand that they have different practices, different understandings, but somehow this understanding can blend with that one. Mixed, blended, and the blend tastes good.
Collaboration is like the sound at the riverside: the sound of birds and the sound of insects are somehow blended; somehow they collaborate to make a single frame. We know that this one is the sound of insects, that this other is the sound of birds, but we also hear both, there is a single frame. The two sounds are collaborating.
We can explain collaboration in the socialist sense—there are lots of explanations. But the structure of explanation is not enough to make art. There's a lot of explanation about art, but who can say what art is? It’s impossible. Why? Why? That thing was created very organically. Maybe people can put it into a structure, but the structure always fails because your work is going on and the explanation is changing and always the form of work is kicking the explanation and running his own way or walking its own way.
Maybe collaboration makes us hungry to make more work. Each time we feel, this is not real collaboration, the next one will be the real thing, and so it goes on. And somehow it doesn't matter. In the end this doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter actually. Nothing matters for nothing. Nothing matters. In the end, you see the sun is rising, the water is flowing, the insect is talking, the birds are flying. Nothing matters.
I think we don’t, really don't need to know anything. Why Do We Need to Know?
It’s very difficult.
Beautiful, no?
Interview with Emilie Flower, transcribed Edited by Ruth Kelly
Chittagong, December 2019