Pauline AutetToday’s talk tackles the theme of civicness, and what that means for three individual art practices, working on projects involving community participation and in multidisciplinary collaborations, especially when working in the public sphere. 

Civicness is a complex term that can mean a lot of different things. And the more we delved into this subject, the more it became apparent that it could be tackled in different ways. For one, it evokes our relationship to the city, and today we are interested in it as a broad term as understood from the Latin roots of the word civic which link it to the notion of citizen and civilian. One common definition defines the word citizenship as one’s awareness of belonging to a community. 

In this sense, citizenship is predominantly associated with the public realm: it seeks to define individuals’ identities and roles as citizens, as well as the respective public institutions where these can be put into practice. Although we are all New Zealand citizens sitting up here for this talk, it’s not so much the notion of citizens in relation to a nation state or geographical borders that we’re going to be interested in discussing today. 

Rather, it's the idea of being part of a global society, which is constantly shifting, which seems a more fertile terrain to discuss how we navigate the world as an artist or cultural professional, while bringing our moral and social sense of responsibility, our values and our needs with us. This reflects Contemporary HUM’s mission of demonstrating and championing the diversity of voices that come from Aotearoa New Zealand as opposed to condensing that or demonstrating that there is a typical way of working or typical identity. Our goal is really to foster international dialogue and a broader exchange of ideas. 

The first subject I’d like to discuss with you is collaboration because there’s a form of it involved in the heart of the projects you presented today, whether it’s a collaboration with an architect, for you, Cat, or working from the heart of cultural institutions for you, Ruth, in order to bring changes that better reflect the contemporary society that we’re in. And, for Daniel, working collectively with other disciplines and professionals in theatre. 

To kick us off, can you tell us how collaboration works for you, what collective work or cooperation with others allows you to do, perhaps in contrast to your individual practices? And whether this brings up questions in relation to authorship—do you see authorship as important when you’re working collaboratively? Daniel, you said in your presentation that you were fed up with certain aspects of working solo, what does collective work bring you in contrast?

Daniel MaloneIn the theatre work that I shared today, everybody in the ensemble has their own task. Everybody’s sitting at the same table right from the very beginning of the process and bringing their own expertise. This discursive and very horizontal aspect is very important to the politics of our group working together. 

It does have to insert itself into the hierarchy that’s present in theatre but there’s a safety in numbers or in forming a team that relies heavily on a certain interpersonal dynamic—friendship, is probably the best word to describe it. To be honest, some of the most difficult times have been when those friendships have become a little bit strained and the organic shifts in the ensemble have usually been tied to that.

One of my favourite things about this process is that everybody’s putting ideas on the table and discussing everything but in the end, you each have a very specific task to perform. I make the call on the costumes or scenography. 

I like this blurry line between roles, but the fact that you still ultimately have a strong sense of standing in one place and working from there, that no one’s going to come and undercut that. And when the ensemble’s worked at its absolute best, it’s been when people have supported each other’s decisions even when they haven’t fully understood them. Or when we’ve stood up together to do something that the theatre didn’t want to let us do.

Cat AuburnI’ve just been thinking about what Daniel mentioned in relation to friendship and collaboration. My collaboration with Kyle Lewis is based on a long friendship. I haven’t always worked collaboratively in my art career. Collaboration requires a certain capacity for mistakes, friction and letting go of control. Over the last five years, I’ve become more confident and comfortable with working in that way. It’s definitely been a learning curve for me. 

Kyle and I have developed a way of working that’s thinking with, rather than thinking separately. We try to always do this process together, almost like a hive mind or using each other's brains as external hard drives. With this way of working comes a certain amount of confidence to tackle things that are really difficult. I think that some of the questions involved in the NFT project I spoke about could have been overwhelming for me to tackle alone. It’s been incredible to have a collaborator to move through complicated conceptual spaces with. 

In relation to your question regarding authorship: our project is absolutely about interrogating ideas of ownership, and who gets to own things via new technologies that were previously unable to be owned. Asking questions about authorship and ownership is integral to the larger project itself. We don’t necessarily have solid answers to these questions yet, because we’re still in the process of developing the project. 

PAAnd Ruth, how do you work with the institution and is it collaboration or cooperation? You said earlier that sometimes your intervention is only half welcome. Do you dissociate where your work ends and where the structural processes of the institution start? Does the wobbly jelly start to mix everything up and does it matter? Is it important where the authorship of the artist stops? 

PAThinking of your projects broadly as occupying public space - whether it’s a public theatre or an art institution or even dematerialised a step further to the NFT market - I also read your work in terms of site-specificity. 

Do you see yourself as having a site-specific response when you work in situ within these very different contexts? Are there parameters that you look for, or respond to, from one context to another, from one project to another? 

Daniel, when you switch from one public theatre to another, the play moves and is performed in different buildings and cities but is there a site-specific aspect in the way you imagine the spatial installation or the subject of the play?

RBFor me, “situatedness”, is more useful than site-specificity because it draws in what you’re talking about, Daniel: the process of creating an audience through a production, and how you’re able to call in the situation in which you find yourself. And while that does mean spatial- site-specificness too, I think it’s more useful to think about it holistically—bringing as many different elements into how you understand the situation, how you wish to turn it into this dream engine, to dream a play for an audience that will never come. Or doesn’t exist, yet.

PACat, it’s the first time you’re working within the NFT market—what was it in this new field that you wanted to respond to and why choose to occupy this specific site?

PASomething else that is striking within your three presentations is the questioning of overarching systems, often to do with power structures. I’m wondering if a relation can be traced between civicness and social change, and what tools you use to rethink these power relations.

Civicness is inherently linked to positive qualities of learned civility, such as tolerance, mutual respect, awareness towards others, social concern and responsibility. But in contrast to this, the role of the contemporary artist today is not to be a public servant, bound by moral action, ethics or notions of political correctness. 

The realm of art is by definition meant to be free, yet in recent times we increasingly talk about responsibility towards specific communities, avoiding speaking on someone else’s behalf or appropriating from others’ experiences... So there’s a potential friction here when we put these two concepts next to each other. Can artistic practice incite, and do you aim to incite, social awareness within the audience?

RBLike you, Cat, I think about how spaces can be texturized by a variant of thinking. And sure, I would definitely like the world to be radically different than it is. My main focus, particularly more recently, has been on working into preexisting structures, in this case, the museum. 

Bonaventure Ndikung has talked about the body as the primary museum, and the museum as the secondary museum—he describes the museum as a space where cognition and experience come together. My focus has been to try and understand how we can play that out in space. I think there has been a lot of fascinating discourse in the sphere of the museum, but there’s been less opportunity to apply the physical, this grabbing situation, where you could feel difference in something like a civic framework, where we see a melding of the spatio-political.

This is where I’m interested in digging into. And I imagine that it could be really effective, particularly if you start to engage in conversations across best practice in other fields of governance.

PAThis subject of dissonance links back to Cat’s mention of Donna Harraway’s phrase, ‘staying with the trouble’. Perhaps it’s important to talk about what those troubles might be. What are the challenges of the projects that you showed us that you are choosing not to walk away from? The challenges that are potentially uncomfortable but that you’re choosing to stay with to try and work through them, or transform them, or find new ways of using them.

RBLike Daniel, the mechanisms of the wider international art world were certainly troubling to me. I come from a framework of feminist institutional critique and at some point I felt there was a lag between how I was thinking and what I was doing. This thing of grabbing and pointing, which is a concept discussed by writer Marina Vishmidt, has been very helpful for me. Here, critique would be the moment of pointing, and transformation would be the moment that you grab.

Once I understood that the question was: what was I pointing at?, it was important to develop strategies that allowed this grabbing. And that has meant changing the way I work and changing the parameters that I set for a working relationship. Generally, I’m only doing things where I have a long time to engage with the situation. If there’s the possibility to be within an automated system and grab, and grab, and grab, then for me, it allows a shift to move from pointing into developing strategies of transformation, turning on that dream engine.

DMI probably have the easiest job of answering that question from the perspective of producing theatre because the outcome is very concrete. And there’s a place for it in the programme. And there’s money spent on it in the expectation that it will be presented and seen. But in the rest of my practice, the process is more important to me than the outcome, especially right now. 

CAYes, I would agree. I see the moment that an exhibition occurs, or an art object is solidified, as a fleeting moment where I can offer it to the public, or to an audience, or to just one other person, before it is folded back into my art practice. That moment of solidness happens briefly within a big mixing process. 

I don’t see my art practice as a process of popping research in one end and then popping an art object out of the other. Rather, I see it as a big series of mixers that continuously fold the end results back into the middle of the process to be explored further.

Question from the audience from Bob van der Wal 

Can you speak to the protests depicted towards the end of your presentation?

Question from the audience from Clémentine Delisse 

It’s a question for Ruth—when you work on your embroideries, they also look like floor plans, particularly the one that has a spiral and the smaller grid. Could you explain what the spiral is in terms of your idea of the dialogue that you want to bring to bear between the body and the collection? And is the spiral part of your thinking of the body, and the movement of the body within the space? 

And if so, how do you suspend the centrifugal feeling, that if you go through the spiral you will end up finding the collection. Where is the collection in all of this?

CDSo, the spiral embroidery is not part of your plan at all? Conceptually it is, or cosmologically it is. But it’s not a floorplan?

Question from the audience from Estella Castle 

We have a question from the livestream audience for all artists: Is there a danger that by expecting artists to connect with a local community, rather than the venue doing the connection, that we inadvertently create monocultures around the work? 

And the second part is that by moving the responsibility for connecting to community from theatres to artists, that those communities only see work that connects to them, rather than work that comes from a different idea, ethos, perspective or culture?

CAI think this is a funding issue. There used to be funding for community projects - and the arts. Those separate pots of money have started to become commensurable. Artists are expected to do a lot of community facilitation in order to meet funding criteria for their projects. 

I see an issue with exclusively connecting arts funding with local communities, and expectations of facilitation being put solely on artists’ shoulders. Artists may not have the right kind of background, skillset or training in facilitation to carry out those commitments to local communities.

DMI mentioned the Kristin Ross book, Communal Luxury. That’s a really super book, specifically around the Paris Commune, and using it as a model of a way of thinking about public space and dissonance and disruption. She’s great.

CAI’ve enjoyed Ursula K. Le Guin’s short essay called The Carrier Bag Theory.