You begin a short project, collaborating with people you have only known for a short while.
How do you work in these circumstances? What ways do you discover to work together? What strategies do you employ to make your voice heard? How do you listen to the rest of the group? How do you listen to the work? How do you make a collaboration?
“We pay as much attention to the process of making our work as the work itself.” Goat Island Performance Group – Small Acts of Repair (Routledge, 2007)
Below are a series of images which were taken as a spontaneous response to the processes of collaboration during a workshop with sound designer Ross Brown. These images began with the Documenter taking a photograph (from the edges, from a distance) of one member of the group who was (probably unwittingly) performing a gesture that the Documenter felt reflected or showed a particular point in the collaboration process. The Documenter has become interested in how these gestures (both in proximity of the face) performed something of the difficulty of collaboration.
From these initial photographs she approached the group and asked the other members of it to perform the same gesture but this time for a portrait. Through this process the Documenter wonders how the dissemination of the gesture might affect the group? How, by giving other members of a group the opportunity to ‘step into the shoes’ of one of their collaborators, the collaboration might shift, and the potential ‘fraughtness’, which the Documenter witnessed, might be made more fluid? Here are the two initial photographs of the gestures:
1. Hand on chin
2. Hands clasped on head
Below is the gallery of portraits, where other members of the group (including the original person) re-present themselves and the gesture:
