Collaborative Aesthetic

Kestler (2005a) writes of the way the culture of art is implicated in the culture of nature: “We often associate the figure of the artist with a heightened sensitivity to the natural world, but intimacy does not always imply care…. The act of speech, of expression, is driven by the imperative to assert the prerogatives of self over a resistant substance. It exists within an extractive economy which all too often views the natural world as resource rather than interlocutor.”

For Kestler (2005a), collaborative art practice is one important trajectory through which artists are unlinking their work from the “possessive individualism” of modernist subjectivity and post-modern cynicism. A collaborative aesthetic allows a place-specific ecological art to unfold. Developing this aesthetic through dialogue and community engagement invites an altered sense of both agency and object. “It is the promise of the collaborative aesthetic experience to prefigure another set of possibilities, to enact change and not simply represent a apriori positions” (p. 32).

The potentialities of such work are visible in the twenty projects conducted by the artists’ group WochenKlausur since its inception in 1993. WochenKlausur is a small collective composed and recomposed through a rotating series of residencies. The group works throughout Europe to develop concrete means to address specific local problems. Kester (2005b) describes one of these projects:

“On a warm spring day in 1994 a small pleasure boat set off for a three hour cruise on Lake Zurich. Seated around the table in the main cabin was an unusual gathering of politicians, journalists, sex workers and activists from the city of Zurich…. Their task was simple: to have a conversation. The topic of this conversation was the difficult situation faced by drug-addicted prostitutes in Zurich…. Stigmatized by Swiss society, they were unable to find any place to sleep and were subject to violent attacks by clients and harassment by police. Over the course of several weeks [the artists’ group] WochenKlausur organized dozens of these floating dialogues…. [Participants] were able to forge a consensus of support for a modest, but concrete response to this problem: the creation of a pension or boarding house in which drug-addicted sex workers could have a safe haven, access to services and a place to sleep (eight years later it continues to house twenty women a day).”

See project description at http://www.wochenklausur.at/projekte/02p_kurz_en.htm

Differences between collaborative and conventional art explored by Kestler (2005) and others are summarized in the table below:

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With a collaborative aesthetic, “artistic creativity is no longer seen as a formal act but as an intervention into society” (WochenKlausur, cited in Smith, 2007).

Ala Plastica is an Argentinean artists’ organization employing a collaborative aesthetic in work addressing Environmental Racism. Their ‘’AA Project ‘’(2004-ongoing) aims “to create, by means of political and artistic intervention, a permanent installation or Social Sculpture; a space for survival of those people affected by floods or other disasters caused by aggressive mega-engineering in the Rio de la Plata basin” (Ala Plastica, artists’ statement in Kestler, 2005a). The project has specific goals, such as the real improvement in living conditions for those made homeless by corporate development and its effect on the river ecosystems, and more general cultural goals including “developing new terminology and models for the concepts of community, sustainability, development, territory, and participation” (p. 90).

Ala Plastica, "Proyecto AA", 2000

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