Conference paper at GETTING TOGETHER: STAYING TOGETHER. DEVELOPING COLLABORATIVE PRACTICES AND SPACES held on 25 October 2006 at Broadway Cinema in Nottingham.
'The word collaboration has slipped with ease into the vocabulary of artistic practice, and into the criteria of funding schemes. Collaboration has come to describe forms of social or relational artistic activity or engagement which might include ‘working with others’, collective action, and participatory practice. It accounts for the practice of artists working together with other artists, as part of a collective or with individuals from other fields. Collaboration marks the mutuality of the relationship between an artist and an organisation or the process of organisations coming together with other organisations or with other groups. It can be viewed as a joint venture that brings together those with shared interests and a common agenda, or instead might be an initiative that bridges any notion of disciplinary lines. In short, collaboration remains a rather vague and abstract term, an ambiguous and slightly slippery concept that perhaps needs to be interrogated with more rigour or criticality. In this paper I hope to try and raise a few questions about the term collaboration, especially in relation to the way it has become part of the rhetoric of the arts sector. I am proposing to indicate a number of projects which I have been involved in and which might be described as collaborations, in order to reflect on both the possibility and also the problematic of this form of practice. I want to try and contextualise some of these case examples by highlighting some the wider debates or ideas through which collaborative practice might be considered, especially in connection to how artists and arts organisations are strategically employing this way of working and in particular how it might connect to the notion of an interdisciplinary practice.'
