+++
title = "Spring meeting 2022"
has_reflections = ["distinctiveandshort.md", "manythoughts.md", "untitled.md", "vanishingmediators.md"]
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# On Art’s Divestment of the Self

Spring Meeting 2022 at PAF was convened to approach that which is singular as already multiple, to reimagine the individual through mediation. To question origin, identity and ownership in the act of directing attention instead to intercesseurs, mediators and intermediaries, to true and falsifying personae and to collective or common agencies.

There are many more terms that could apply apart from intercession: intervention, interlocution, translation, appropriation, forgery, ventriloquy, bastardization, theft. There is an abundance of modes in which artists produce, collaborate, distribute subjectivities, and present work. Collectivity or group work might also be an opaque façade that conceals and protects political strategies and undercover operations.

If our point of departure is not the individual but the common, then we must look into what we share at a level prior to or beyond the personal – language, modes of production and cooperation, sensory apparatuses and habits, and history. While we do not want to affirm dehistoricization, we recognize good reasons for its contestation that point to canons and canonization. In a canonical culture relations between artists serve to cement significance. Canonical artists are often those who are centers of influence or those whose networks include other canonical figures. What ways are there to be in dialogue with and through others, which do not further secure the position of the self in the canon?

Art occurs, regardless of whether it resembles the canon of autonomous, functionless, exceptional, single-authored, manifestations of the artist’s will. Some occurrences might be found in invisibility, refusal, collectivity, name changes, shifting the locus of art making and thus its legibility as such. In a time of over-investment in the self as commodity and an aggressive disinvestment in collective resources and services – so that we can all have the privilege of loneliness – how to choose the group every time, above and beyond the impoverished and impoverishing path of atomization?

The problems posed here seem ill-suited to individual inquiry. The world is neither neat nor kind. One’s interiority cannot present an innocent starting point or refuge of the beautiful soul. For the Spring Meeting 2022 we did not want to think only about single author-artists, but also to dedicate time to those who make the work possible but remain in the shadow: performers, assistants, translators, and so on. The author has long been declared dead, but shared authorship remains rare. Theaters, museums and other institutions demand unequivocally delineated individuals who guarantee for their products.

Spring Meeting 2022 was thus devoted to the dependent, non-sovereign, subjected forms of making art and thought. Interested in working methods that say no to “working alone”. And also interested in artists speaking about the work of others in which they recognize something they themselves could not do. This is not about denying individual responsibility: one’s individual actions matter as they materialize the world. So, we ask: what can we learn from art’s investment in the divestment of the self?


# Documenting the collective thinking

Pirate Care's contribution to the Spring Meeting's theme of research - "Art’s Divestment of the Self" - follows the contours of a handful of figures who we used to narrate our practices, in various constellations of "we". In our presentations we introduced the figures of librarian, custodian and pirate carer, while what follows was created through an experimentation with the roles (and modes of action, of attentivness) of voices, scribes and editors.

Our starting point is the consideration that often the most interesting ideas come up in conversations taking place in the coffe break, in the bathroom, at the pub after the lecture...Such ephemera, such marginalia fully belong to the event, yet they are often not recorder as part of it. They exist only in the memory of those smaller groups of people who sometimes rather by chance, brought their reflections together. Our experiment wants to diverge from this normal state of affairs by attempting to create a common record, however partial, of the thinking that goes on in a dispersed way in a gathering such as the Spring Meeting.

Since in our practice we often highlight that ideas do not belong to the individual (and should not be privately owned), our experiment wants to create a different awareness around the fact that certain thinking can only happen in co-presence, in the company of specific others and in specific embodied circumstances. We also want to reclaim writing as a capacity and technique away from its academic and didactic connotations, but without an investment in techniques of "creative writing" that re-centre the self as the source of authorship. Collective writing might not be possible after all, but thinking together definately is.

Our experiment gives people a permission and some enabling constraints to take on the responsibilities and the attentivness for that shared process of collective thinking in the figures of the scribe and of the editor. In this respect, we shared two litarary figures who were sources of inspiration for us. 

First, there's Borges' 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,' in which Menard sets out to compose Don Quixote intentionally. By just sitting down and typing out the book, he is not attempting to 'duplicate' Cervantes' feat, to copy it or to write a modern 'version' of the saga. Rather, he's attempting to write it as if it were the first time, much like Cervantes did when he first wrote it.

A second figure we want to convoke is the character of Bobi Bazlen from Daniele del Giudice's Wimbledon Stadium, who is a writer who never wrote. Instead, he became a key figure in the lives of many important writers of his generation, whose art benefitted of Bazlen's interventions in their lives in different ways.

Concretely, the experimental process we proposed was a two-fold process to create collectively a logbook for SM2022, complete with its own library of references (we call it experimental because we are still figuring this out and this endeavour in collectivizing social reproduction might fail).

# Scribing and editing

On day one, volunteer scribes have been invited to record in writing thoughts that appeared in conversations as they took place between the sessions and performances, in the queue for luch, at the dinner table, etc. The scribes' responsibility was to stay as true as possible to what they heard, yet their selection of materials inevitably turned idiosyncratic, simultaneously the product of personal choice and of serendipity. It was up to the scribes how much and in which way they would scribe others' conversations. The one accountability constraint we have asked to commit to is to acknowledge the name of those who are mentioned, and to ask them permission to acknowledgem them by name, a function we have proposed to name the voice. 

On day 3 we facilitated a three-hour workshop during which small groups of participants were first invited to reflect on meaningful conversations held in the previous days. Each of these conversations was scribed and added to the existing collection of notes. After that we held a collective silent reading of all the notes recorded over the course of the meeting. Continuing to work together without particular rules or guidelines on how to do so, each group was then invited to write a reflection that, just like an editorial piece, would highlight pattens, differences and resonances between different notes. After all, a collection of text carries more meaning than the mere sum of its parts.

Each editorial group decided which notes to reference in their reflection and how to go about with the writing process. The requirment was simply to keep track of which notes the editors chose to reference.

In parallel, a library of referenced resources and texts has been assambled, a task taken on by Nikhil Vettukattil, with the support of Tomislav Medak.

# Sandpoints

The results of this process is what you are reading here. This website is written on a free software platform called Sandpoints, built and mantained by Marcell Mars, that has the specificity of allowing for immediate priting on demand of the whole website to happen, like in an instantaneous zine, without the need of a separate designing and paginating process.
