Collaboration

"...keeping it an ongoing open process. Not finishing, just starting over and over." -Gordon Matta-Clark

humans and the world . . . moving through one another (Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon)

Collaboration is a force.
It has surprised us and transformed 28 days.
Together with:
Don Chalmers Ford, Santa Fe
Ten Thousand Waves, Santa Fe
Chaco Canyon National Monument
Sundance Preserve
The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)
SIMPARCH
Laybourne, Telluride,
we have collaboratively shaped:
-which sites we will inhabit
-the duration of each inhabitation
-the forms of aesthetic response we will make
-contexts for sharing our project with the public along the way
-the embodied experiences we will have access to from site to site
-the amount of resources available to us for creative experimentation
-an envelope of support and excitement that will follow us for 28 days
-a sense of making "for" an audience that we do not presume to know, but exists

image from http://www.clui.org


Through these exchanges we have experienced collaboration not just as a force, but as a force in play.
-collaboration has become open-ended, exploratory, without predetermined goals
-we have sensed collaborators sharing resources and ideas by opening new channels and forms of support for us as artists, for the environment, and the arts in general by going beyond "the usual way of doing things".
-collaboration as a force in play finds slippage within institutional guidelines and habits, making it a site of experimentation
-28 days puts collaborators in play with one another releasing new modes of relationality among strangers
-as artists we will move in accord with and make something of these forces of collaboration

"[Collaboration as a force in play] is a game we invent to endear ourselves to each other and to our ideas." -Gordon Matta-Clark