Collaboration: on learning new languages and saying “I can ….”
I recently read an article about how in Mozambique, wild birds collaborate with humans to help guide them to bees nests and in doing so find key resources of wax and honey. The birds, known as honeyguides recruit an appropriate human collaborator then fly from tree to tree to indicate the direction in which the nest lies. They know humans are valuable assets for breaking open tree trunks, subduing bees with smoke and helping them access the wax which they eat. The honey is the bounty for their human ally. As if this isn't amazing enough, the birds can choose who they approach with the ‘information’, regionally different calls have been developed and passed through generations of ‘honey hunters’ in Africa. They are three times more likely to be successfully lead to a nest if they use the correct call for the region.
You may be reading this and thinking, alright yes that’s mildly interesting… but this isn't National Geographic, why on earth am I reading this on a website for an exhibition? Well this story seems to me to be almost a parable about relationships, collaboration and communication.
Exhibitions are all about relationships. Relationships between works, artists, spaces, viewers; the list is almost inexhaustible. It is very fitting therefore that our first exhibition as a collective should be collaborative on a large scale. There are 22 potential curators, designers, interpretation specialists, marketers, learning officers. We span a couple of generations, almost a dozen nations and have a range of backgrounds from bank tellers, fine art practitioners to ex armed forces. As expected with a group this size and variation this diversity presents both strengths and weaknesses, pitfalls and potential.
The first meeting for (S)he that we had as a group was terrifying. Initially all you see is the potential difficulties. How to reconcile so many differences? So many ideas, agendas and personalities? Crucially we are directing the project collaboratively. How to make all voices heard? How will we make democratic decisions? How to create something cohesive from so much possible discordance? On a basic level, how on earth do we communicate and organise ourselves?
At this moment the tale of how wild birds and humans communicate and collaborate gave me courage. And as the ideas started spilling out our collective courage grew.
It strikes me as very poignant that in this time of great social, political and economic discordance, we need to think about new ways of communicating and working together. This means our future success depends on finding new languages to speak and new ways of coordinating. An exercise like the exhibition (S)he can help us find some of these new mechanisms for bridging and building.
None of us are strangers to working collaboratively on some levels I’m sure, the benefits of increasing resources for a project by pooling skills and strengths are easily apparent. True to this the range of skills that came out of the woodworks when we started discussing what we could each contribute were astounding: coding, lighting design, sound tech, writers, photographers, digital marketers…. the resources our team represents grew and grew and continue to grow as our project progresses. With (S)he, through true collaboration we will create something truly polyvocal, polycentric and sympathetic to many cultures and thought processes. We have discovered our collaborative ‘call’ a la Mozambique’s honey hunters. It is a simple ‘I can…’.
And we can… and we will.
Thanks for watching this space.
X