Event Details
For our third and final official Summerhall workshop, Collective 11:11 chose to have a more informal session, focusing instead on the idea of doing something collaborative as opposed to working towards our individual speculative projects. We therefore chose to do an activity that no-one overly had experience in, and no-ones project included – flower arranging. To do this we decided in our planning meeting the week before that we each should bring to the session a bunch of flowers that we liked in particular, with the intention of sharing them out between the group so by the end of the activity everyone has their own mini bunch filled with the different flowers of the group. The bouquet will represent our collective. To support this, I also volunteered to bring ribbon to tie the bunches together as well as scissors to prepare the flowers.
Context
This activity reminded me heavily of one of my initial references of my project where I talked to curator and founder of Gossip Gossip Gossip magazine Sandra Teitge about how important it is to have joy in whatever you make and do. By having fun as a collective we were able to think about group dynamics, comparing our collective to an SVAO as presented in Week 2, and how a workshop functions, again returning to thinking about how artist collectives work but within the context of public programming (Gabi Barkess-Kerr, Week 10). By all having the same purpose for the session, we came with the same intentions of group engagement and having a good time away from the pressure of being productive.
Reflection
To think that our group in the first week struggled with communication and to function as a collective is beyond me considering just how well this session ran. We all took part, sharing stories and as a group we even created a set up where simultaneously we had an English to Chinese and Chinese to English translation devices running to allow for smoother communication within the group. People shared what flowers they brought and why, with some individuals such as Yiran Gu sharing that they brought the same flowers from their graduation. Yuman Ma and I both brought white roses, which created a discussion in which I explained the War of the Roses and my pride over the white Yorkshire rose as a result. As a collective activity this was extremely positive and considering it is our last, a great send off to our Collective. It is clear how much of an impact a good time and an engaging workshop can have.
