About Us

Abstract

How can we use imagination to organize ourselves?

The research project 'Dialogical Landscapes, A speculative research on common ground(ing)' investigates and problematizes the boundary between the artistic and the organizational domain within the arts, and the role of artistic imagination and collaboration within this.

From this research framework a form of conversation was developed as an artistic and performative gesture, for groups between 4 to 12 participants, who are currently part of a collaboration (ie they are connected to each other as an organization or collective). It functions as an imaginary organizational structure (or a collective) that is established and disbanded in the course of the performance. The roles of different players can shift, and the group is challenged to think about their own cooperation. What brings us together?

The basis of this conversation performance consists of a script that was developed and that is still changing, based on many interviews with existing self-organization collectives in Belgium and abroad. I mainly focused on specific themes that play a prominent role in these organizations (e.g. authorship, care or the use of space), which I then transformed in different ‘roles’. How do certain terminologies change meaning when an organization uses them? By selecting and mixing quotes from these interviews, a generic script is created that reads like a manifesto (‘About Us’) from an organization that never existed.

This script forms the starting point of the dialogical performance, and is read throughout the performance, critiqued and finally adapted by the group, in various 'rounds'. To guide this process I currently have dramaturgical support from Peter Aers (Building Conversation). The ultimate goal of the performance would be that the participants learn to look differently at (aspects of) their own organization by means of this script, and a shift occurs in the way in which people speak in the group. The quotations provide a catalytic effect that enables a group of participants to question their own collective through the words of other collectives.

'About Us' balances between a dialogue and a performance, an imaginary and a daily reality.