In this weekly meeting our collective (11:11) chose to meet at Summerhall to acclimatise to the space and begin tot think about the practicalities of our first session formally in the space which was a film screening. This meeting was by far our most successful, with everyone who attended getting involved in the discussion and actively making choices for the group. After a recommendation from Marcus Jack following him leading one of our group in-class meetings, we decided that if we all chose videos from Ubu-web, a website that houses videos from hundreds of artists, the screening would have slightly more focus than anyone showing anything. As it was just for our collective and nothing external, this meant that we didn’t have to think about copyright infringements. To group together people’s chosen films I made a post on Teams for people to put a link, as well as making a page on Miro if that was easier. This led towards an interesting conversation about how we communicate within the collective, especially with a language barrier, and so we decided that to discuss the films afterward we would try non-linguistic communication such as playing Charades. In this way body language can become universal and might be more helpful especially when conveying emotions.
After working in the space we additionally decided that projection would be the best way to see the videos instead of someone’s personal device, and so I volunteered to bring in my projector for the event. Beichen Huang volunteered to provide snacks since three hours of screenings is a long time, and other members of the group volunteered to arrive slightly early to set up bringing paper to cover the window and tape. These practical conversations about the running of an event, even though it was just for ourselves, was very useful and practiced as a collective how we can make decisions together instead of one person taking charge.
We also began to think about what else we would like to do in the space. It was universally decided that everyone doing a reading would be difficult, especially with translation, and so instead Beichen proposed to do an induction on an online curatorial mapping website called Art Steps. This will allow us all as a collective to work on the feedback to start making documents that visualise what our various projects will look like. This will support us all as we work towards making our proposal documents. Additionally Emily suggested that we do something very relaxed in the last week such as flower arranging. This is a creative activity with little mess so perfect to the space, and allows everyone to take part by bringing in their own flowers to share as a group. Events like these require minimal effort and should help us grow stronger as a collective.
Overall this was a very productive meeting and really encouraged the collective to experiment more within the space and to openly share ideas with a group. Without the sharing of ideas we wouldn’t have as exciting events happening in the last two sessions and the screenings would be a lot simpler. This is a great demonstration as to how we have put our collective manifesto into practice.
