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'Collaboration, Conversation and the Intertwining of Material and Immaterial Worlds: a reflection on the Mothership residency'
by Bevis Fenner
Tessa Atton I Jane Bennett I Yvonne Jones I Belinda Mitchell I Yonat Nitzan-Green I Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
***
The June session of the Phenomenology and Imagination Research Group took our previously explored idea of conversation as methodology on a slight detour. To be precise, that detour took the group to West Dorset via my narrative retelling of a recent four week residency as part of Anna Best’s Mothership Residencies project. I used the session to open up the notion of conversation to the possibilities of collaboration both with humans and non-humans. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of affects and becoming, and Karen Barad’s explorations of human and non-human agents, I set out to start a conversation about the nature of conversation and collaboration in the art-site relations of the artist’s residency. The reading I sent the group prior to the session was a chapter on residency and collaboration from For Creative Geographies (2014) by Harriet Hawkins – an exploration of the human interactions and encounters that residencies can produce, as well as the ways in which material making and skill-sharing can build community and transform individual and collective subjectivities. Here, person-site relations become part of an affective praxis in opposition to alienating and dehumanising effects of neoliberalism – individualism, competitiveness, exchangism, deskilling, social atomisation and so on. Hawkins stresses the importance of shared labour – literally collaboration – in transforming individual and collective consciousness. She uses gardening – a key aspect of my residency – as an example of a ‘grounded’ practice that has the power to disrupt and reconfigure the habitual relations of everyday life:
'We could suggest that the physical, discursive, and haptic experiences of shared labour… was part of the creation of a rupture in everyday practices from within which new identities and shared consciousness could emerge (Hawkins, 2014: 170)'.
The starting point for the group’s conversation was a discussion of the unique labour relations of the residency, which as I admitted to the group, were an initial source of suspicion as I adopted the cynical post-human perspective of trying to analyse the power relations between host and guest and the exact terms of labour exchange. However, in attempting to calculate and quantify these relations, I found that rather than reflecting the neoliberal idea that altruistic acts are often thinly veiled opportunism and that everyone is ultimately self-serving, the residency provoked a sense that the reciprocal nature of the collaboration had far more humane dimensions. It seemed that the more I tried to quantify the exchange, particularly in relation to labour value because I was not paying money to be there, the more the things shattered to reveal human truths and a qualitative value way beyond any kind of contractual arrangement. Thus my attempts to provoke a breakdown of assumed neoliberal labour relations were unjustified as the layers fell away to reveal a very human conversation about not only the need for people to live together but also the importance of bringing things together that are usually held apart. Instead of finding an illusionary micro-utopia sustained by wealth and privilege, which masked true power and property relations, I found a situation of honesty – a genuine attempt to make new worlds and recuperate old ones. Small-scale organic farming is an uphill struggle where the old binaries of humans pitted against nature are initially reinforced. However, in responsible and ethical engagement with complex ecosystems, culture / nature binaries are eroded. Pestilence ceases to become a non-human enemy to be wiped out with petrochemicals when ecosystems are in balance. The context for the residency was not only thought-provoking but also provided a space for dialogue between humans and non-humans alike – “a potential space for collaborative thinking”, as Noriko put it. One of the key things that came out of the session was the notion of ‘maternal space’ – of how, out of necessity, things of difference are brought together. Instead of seeing disruptions as inconveniences that break our ‘trains of thought’, by being open to ‘external’ factors and intrusions we are able to open out to new and emergent ways of being and seeing that foster generative creative processes. My challenge was to move beyond provocation as a means of ‘exploding’ power and property relations, and to embrace collaborative conversation as a means of gently unpicking the complexities of context without ignoring tensions and differences. In the words of Harriet Hawkins (2014), to develop truly collaborative art-site relations we must ‘remain open to the generative complexities of a given site… to be able to recognise the problematics of context, without sacrificing the ability to work productively within the community…’ (Hawkins, 2014: 166).
Hawkins, H. (2014). For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds. London: Routledge.
Reflections and Feedback
Tessa Atton
Bev recounted with great candour his experience of a month’s residency at Anna Best’s smallholding near Powerstock, Dorset as part of her Mothership Residencies project. Two aspects in particular caught my imagination. The first was something that Bev himself took time to come to terms with: the lack of contract and, the corollary of this, seeming lack of expected outcomes. How was he meant to proceed? How would he “pay” his way? Most residencies are set up with an expectation/ hope that the artist will carry out a specific project, whether it be to engage with a community or a site, whose result will be symbiotically beneficial. None of this was made clear and it eventually became evident that it couldn’t become clear as the expectation did not exist. There was no “catch”, Bev truly was free to explore his own response to being in this particular environment, especially the rare opportunity to realign with natural rhythms – dawn chorus, cock crowing – and have unmeasured unattributed time – almost overwhelming at first.
So, whilst helping with the manual work of the small holding, Bev reflected on the post-human perspectives he had brought with him, the view that labour is a commodity quantified by market values and the worth of the worker is disconnected from this, comparing and contrasting this with Richard Jefferies’ late 19th Century reflections on the changing nature of the master/ worker relationship (The toilers of the field 1892).
The second aspect that particularly interested me, presenting itself powerfully as a split screen video, was triggered by Bev’s understanding that he was both a tourist and at home during the residency. For him it was a unique experience, deeply felt and shared with Anna and others in the local community, but what was it for them? I briefly imagined a Kafkaesque scenario in which all the activity shared by Bev was repeated identically and infinitely with each resident artist. Was it an experiment, understood by all the protagonists except the artist whose role was that of the observed subject? Was it akin to The Truman Show? No. Of course it wasn’t. The Mothership project was only set up in March 2016 and did have at least one expectation: that artists should contribute to the blog after their stay. It is well worth while reading this blog (tumblr: mothershipresidencies) to understand the range of artists’ intentions in talking up these residencies and the ensuing range of outcomes.
Jane Bennett
Amongst the issues introduced by Bevis’ interesting review of his time spent in a residency at the Mothership, I was most struck by his description of his initial sense of the place – or displacement – and how this, in time, affected his thinking and making. The general nature of an artist’s residency is to provide a time and space for reflection and renewal away from the artist’s usual environment.
Bevis described how the location of the cabin in the heart of a natural environment gradually heightened his own sense of connection with the rhythms of nature. In a short while, he became comfortable and ‘at home’ in his new surroundings, to the extent that he felt the ‘need to shake things up’ when it became too homely. There is a definition of art as seeing the familiar in an unfamiliar way, and one of the opportunities given by a residency is to put the artist in totally unfamiliar surroundings, giving them a new perspective on things. As Bevis said, sometimes we have to create these new perspectives for ourselves.
In a discussion on the nature of genius and creativity, Juliet Mitchell talks about the heightened state of anxiety that frequently precedes the creative act (BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, June 2000: https://issuu.com/smallbizinsights/docs/iotm74). It would be interesting the learn of other techniques (perhaps less dramatic) that other artists use to ‘shake things up’.
Yvonne Jones
We were privileged to hear about the internal experience of the residency as well as its external facts of it, this was enriching. It emerged that this residency was akin to time travel, returning to the older ways of relationship between employer and employee. Of being in touch with the material living natural world, with interdependency, and with a human aware, situation that included respect for humanity. Surprisingly the mind-set of our artist was disclosed in part as posthuman with an expectancy to be considered an ‘item’ rather than as a person, this expectancy was not encountered rather the experience was one of being, and of being involved as a fellow human not a number.
The discussion brought the concerns of social politics clearly into view with discussions on neo liberalism. The power and struggle (however friendly it is presented) for control that is of the now. If not a party to subverting other, one tends to be expectant of other working to subvert ones self. Bevis introduced Foucault as one who highlighted this disempowerment of society by the powerful. Through separation of groups into small units under one roof it is easier to control all individuals who then lose any voice. There is then no ‘will of the people’. With the current debate on IN or OUT of EU it brought to mind that if UK becomes a small unit under EU rule (roof), it will indeed be easier to control.
Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
Mothership Residency offered Bevis a platform to explore different forms of encounter (both human and non-human) and to experiment with various interstices of art making and labour. One of Bevis’ aims during the residency was to ‘gift’ his labour as a way of ‘developing a non-productivist or non-economically-rationalized relations’.
Many forms of relational practice, according to Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘aim at the formal construction of space-time entities that may be able to elude alienation, the division of labour, the commodification of space and reification of life.’ (Bourriaud 2004, p.48) At the start of the residency, I sense that Bevis too thought his residency would offer him the chance to make relational work that commented on the devaluation of work, commodification of human relation and social alienation.
However, the durational aspect of the residency allowed Bevis to take note of the changes and developments that took place around him, through him and with him, as he engaged with the people and nature that became very much part of his daily routine and art making. The most intriguing, however, was his shift in perception of the ‘gift’ of labour from a critique of classical Marxist political economy to a genuine willingness to reciprocate the generosity offered to him through the residency.
Mothership provided Bevis with no set framework to manage his practice apart from time, space and freedom to explore and to ‘become’. I hope what he took away from the residency will add a valuable humane dimension to relational art works he may embark on in the future.
Nicolas Bourriaud, “Berlin Letter About Relational Aesthetics” in Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation, Claire Doherty (ed.), (2004) London: Black Dog Publishing,
by Bevis Fenner
Tessa Atton I Jane Bennett I Yvonne Jones I Belinda Mitchell I Yonat Nitzan-Green I Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
***
The June session of the Phenomenology and Imagination Research Group took our previously explored idea of conversation as methodology on a slight detour. To be precise, that detour took the group to West Dorset via my narrative retelling of a recent four week residency as part of Anna Best’s Mothership Residencies project. I used the session to open up the notion of conversation to the possibilities of collaboration both with humans and non-humans. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of affects and becoming, and Karen Barad’s explorations of human and non-human agents, I set out to start a conversation about the nature of conversation and collaboration in the art-site relations of the artist’s residency. The reading I sent the group prior to the session was a chapter on residency and collaboration from For Creative Geographies (2014) by Harriet Hawkins – an exploration of the human interactions and encounters that residencies can produce, as well as the ways in which material making and skill-sharing can build community and transform individual and collective subjectivities. Here, person-site relations become part of an affective praxis in opposition to alienating and dehumanising effects of neoliberalism – individualism, competitiveness, exchangism, deskilling, social atomisation and so on. Hawkins stresses the importance of shared labour – literally collaboration – in transforming individual and collective consciousness. She uses gardening – a key aspect of my residency – as an example of a ‘grounded’ practice that has the power to disrupt and reconfigure the habitual relations of everyday life:
'We could suggest that the physical, discursive, and haptic experiences of shared labour… was part of the creation of a rupture in everyday practices from within which new identities and shared consciousness could emerge (Hawkins, 2014: 170)'.
The starting point for the group’s conversation was a discussion of the unique labour relations of the residency, which as I admitted to the group, were an initial source of suspicion as I adopted the cynical post-human perspective of trying to analyse the power relations between host and guest and the exact terms of labour exchange. However, in attempting to calculate and quantify these relations, I found that rather than reflecting the neoliberal idea that altruistic acts are often thinly veiled opportunism and that everyone is ultimately self-serving, the residency provoked a sense that the reciprocal nature of the collaboration had far more humane dimensions. It seemed that the more I tried to quantify the exchange, particularly in relation to labour value because I was not paying money to be there, the more the things shattered to reveal human truths and a qualitative value way beyond any kind of contractual arrangement. Thus my attempts to provoke a breakdown of assumed neoliberal labour relations were unjustified as the layers fell away to reveal a very human conversation about not only the need for people to live together but also the importance of bringing things together that are usually held apart. Instead of finding an illusionary micro-utopia sustained by wealth and privilege, which masked true power and property relations, I found a situation of honesty – a genuine attempt to make new worlds and recuperate old ones. Small-scale organic farming is an uphill struggle where the old binaries of humans pitted against nature are initially reinforced. However, in responsible and ethical engagement with complex ecosystems, culture / nature binaries are eroded. Pestilence ceases to become a non-human enemy to be wiped out with petrochemicals when ecosystems are in balance. The context for the residency was not only thought-provoking but also provided a space for dialogue between humans and non-humans alike – “a potential space for collaborative thinking”, as Noriko put it. One of the key things that came out of the session was the notion of ‘maternal space’ – of how, out of necessity, things of difference are brought together. Instead of seeing disruptions as inconveniences that break our ‘trains of thought’, by being open to ‘external’ factors and intrusions we are able to open out to new and emergent ways of being and seeing that foster generative creative processes. My challenge was to move beyond provocation as a means of ‘exploding’ power and property relations, and to embrace collaborative conversation as a means of gently unpicking the complexities of context without ignoring tensions and differences. In the words of Harriet Hawkins (2014), to develop truly collaborative art-site relations we must ‘remain open to the generative complexities of a given site… to be able to recognise the problematics of context, without sacrificing the ability to work productively within the community…’ (Hawkins, 2014: 166).
Hawkins, H. (2014). For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds. London: Routledge.
Reflections and Feedback
Tessa Atton
Bev recounted with great candour his experience of a month’s residency at Anna Best’s smallholding near Powerstock, Dorset as part of her Mothership Residencies project. Two aspects in particular caught my imagination. The first was something that Bev himself took time to come to terms with: the lack of contract and, the corollary of this, seeming lack of expected outcomes. How was he meant to proceed? How would he “pay” his way? Most residencies are set up with an expectation/ hope that the artist will carry out a specific project, whether it be to engage with a community or a site, whose result will be symbiotically beneficial. None of this was made clear and it eventually became evident that it couldn’t become clear as the expectation did not exist. There was no “catch”, Bev truly was free to explore his own response to being in this particular environment, especially the rare opportunity to realign with natural rhythms – dawn chorus, cock crowing – and have unmeasured unattributed time – almost overwhelming at first.
So, whilst helping with the manual work of the small holding, Bev reflected on the post-human perspectives he had brought with him, the view that labour is a commodity quantified by market values and the worth of the worker is disconnected from this, comparing and contrasting this with Richard Jefferies’ late 19th Century reflections on the changing nature of the master/ worker relationship (The toilers of the field 1892).
The second aspect that particularly interested me, presenting itself powerfully as a split screen video, was triggered by Bev’s understanding that he was both a tourist and at home during the residency. For him it was a unique experience, deeply felt and shared with Anna and others in the local community, but what was it for them? I briefly imagined a Kafkaesque scenario in which all the activity shared by Bev was repeated identically and infinitely with each resident artist. Was it an experiment, understood by all the protagonists except the artist whose role was that of the observed subject? Was it akin to The Truman Show? No. Of course it wasn’t. The Mothership project was only set up in March 2016 and did have at least one expectation: that artists should contribute to the blog after their stay. It is well worth while reading this blog (tumblr: mothershipresidencies) to understand the range of artists’ intentions in talking up these residencies and the ensuing range of outcomes.
Jane Bennett
Amongst the issues introduced by Bevis’ interesting review of his time spent in a residency at the Mothership, I was most struck by his description of his initial sense of the place – or displacement – and how this, in time, affected his thinking and making. The general nature of an artist’s residency is to provide a time and space for reflection and renewal away from the artist’s usual environment.
Bevis described how the location of the cabin in the heart of a natural environment gradually heightened his own sense of connection with the rhythms of nature. In a short while, he became comfortable and ‘at home’ in his new surroundings, to the extent that he felt the ‘need to shake things up’ when it became too homely. There is a definition of art as seeing the familiar in an unfamiliar way, and one of the opportunities given by a residency is to put the artist in totally unfamiliar surroundings, giving them a new perspective on things. As Bevis said, sometimes we have to create these new perspectives for ourselves.
In a discussion on the nature of genius and creativity, Juliet Mitchell talks about the heightened state of anxiety that frequently precedes the creative act (BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, June 2000: https://issuu.com/smallbizinsights/docs/iotm74). It would be interesting the learn of other techniques (perhaps less dramatic) that other artists use to ‘shake things up’.
Yvonne Jones
We were privileged to hear about the internal experience of the residency as well as its external facts of it, this was enriching. It emerged that this residency was akin to time travel, returning to the older ways of relationship between employer and employee. Of being in touch with the material living natural world, with interdependency, and with a human aware, situation that included respect for humanity. Surprisingly the mind-set of our artist was disclosed in part as posthuman with an expectancy to be considered an ‘item’ rather than as a person, this expectancy was not encountered rather the experience was one of being, and of being involved as a fellow human not a number.
The discussion brought the concerns of social politics clearly into view with discussions on neo liberalism. The power and struggle (however friendly it is presented) for control that is of the now. If not a party to subverting other, one tends to be expectant of other working to subvert ones self. Bevis introduced Foucault as one who highlighted this disempowerment of society by the powerful. Through separation of groups into small units under one roof it is easier to control all individuals who then lose any voice. There is then no ‘will of the people’. With the current debate on IN or OUT of EU it brought to mind that if UK becomes a small unit under EU rule (roof), it will indeed be easier to control.
Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
Mothership Residency offered Bevis a platform to explore different forms of encounter (both human and non-human) and to experiment with various interstices of art making and labour. One of Bevis’ aims during the residency was to ‘gift’ his labour as a way of ‘developing a non-productivist or non-economically-rationalized relations’.
Many forms of relational practice, according to Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘aim at the formal construction of space-time entities that may be able to elude alienation, the division of labour, the commodification of space and reification of life.’ (Bourriaud 2004, p.48) At the start of the residency, I sense that Bevis too thought his residency would offer him the chance to make relational work that commented on the devaluation of work, commodification of human relation and social alienation.
However, the durational aspect of the residency allowed Bevis to take note of the changes and developments that took place around him, through him and with him, as he engaged with the people and nature that became very much part of his daily routine and art making. The most intriguing, however, was his shift in perception of the ‘gift’ of labour from a critique of classical Marxist political economy to a genuine willingness to reciprocate the generosity offered to him through the residency.
Mothership provided Bevis with no set framework to manage his practice apart from time, space and freedom to explore and to ‘become’. I hope what he took away from the residency will add a valuable humane dimension to relational art works he may embark on in the future.
Nicolas Bourriaud, “Berlin Letter About Relational Aesthetics” in Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation, Claire Doherty (ed.), (2004) London: Black Dog Publishing,