4 + ever= group of 5
On the first day the workshop participants of „Agora 2010/Feldstärke International“ were confronted with the task of forming groups in which they would like to work. Apparently all of us did not involve in the group finding process, because of a reject to the situation of having to chose people that you want to work with and others that you do not want to work with after getting to know everybody on the same day. In the end the five of us turned out to be the only ones not being already organised. Therefore we were put into one group and started to think about how to deal with the situation of being a group that arbitrarily chose itself/was chosen. We decided to act as if we were friends that know each other for a long time and are spending their holidays together in 2010's cultural capital of Europe: Essen. We wanted to focus on things that are normally considered unimportant in the process of art making because they lack the seriousness of the prospect of producing art.
We proceeded by faking a day of vacation in the area of Zollverein on the next day. We collected a number of activities that friends could do on vacation and enacted them in a strict schedule. In our presentation on the same day we showed this material in photo slide shows, video streams and exhibited how we planned the day. In the end we invited the other workshop participants to come outside with us to spend some time at a fire that we had been constructing in the day. Faking enthusiasm turned out to be great fun.
We decided to explore our topic more, because we observed that our experiences of the day before were nice but stayed on a very pictorial level that did not so much transport different aspects of friendship and the relation between what is considered working and what is not considered working. We decided to go on a shopping tour to the city center of Essen. After the very productive first day the second one – that we wanted to spent in a passive fashion – turned out to be rather boring. We keep on exploring our topic by doing further activities on the next days: we inscene a party in a hotel room in the next morning, play silly games, become depressed and discuss topics like group dynamics, functionality. work, procuct and fun. On purpose we act not goal-oriented but rather go for small aims/ideas that show up. From the outside this might seem as if we do not spent the research time that is offered to us in Essen productively, but just act as irresponsible young people.
On the day before the final presentation the context is responding to our activities by naming them not being „art“. We are asked what we did in the week and if it really was not more than just having fun. We are asked if we digged deeper into our topic or if we just stayed on the surface of things. We are a bit confused about this critic coming from a representative of the context that we are working in. We ask ourselves if we had communicated a too negative attitude towards the whole project wondering about why the pressure to production is not regarded as an effect of the art founding structures that both sides, the context and the participants, have to deal with, but enacted as professional opinion. Why are we asked to present something which could easily be considered as art by following a number of set rules. It became apparent to us that by having to enact our faked friendship in activities in which you try to have fun, our topic changed because this approach directly opened up the question of what is considered only „fun“ and spending your time in an unjustified relaxed fashion and what is a serious approach towards „art making“. At the same time this question about the economical structures that we are working in already refers back to our starting point of how to structure coming together, how to come to a common point that works. We decide to try to justify our activities by explaining them, quickly write a manifesto and try to make our process transparent. At the same time we plan what to show on the next day.
English mistakes are accidentally!
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