Derek and I are exploring collaboration, as a response to the 'Public Realm' module this year. It has happened naturally, was somewhat unplanned, but through a mutual interest to explore SOUL and the written word and having similar ideas in which to approach the 'Public Realm', here we both are. This collaboration with Derek is also a response to lockdown, and not having as much creative contact as we'd both like...
How do we generate contact and feel our agency to connect? How do we embrace collaboration in a world that is socially distanced, evoke intimacy, safety and support in an atmosphere of threat and enforced separation? To celebrate creativity that moves through the cracks, that finds a way through shut down... to share and express.
Through the Seminars with Laura last semester, which focused on writing as practice, I feel that my a writing practice is developing, and is steadily becoming a living element in my art practice. There is a mutuality between making art and writing, both have a performative quality - my art speaks through my writing and my writing speaks through my art - they are in direct conversation / relationship - and they feed one another.
Derek and I have met 3 times so far, and have arranged a weekly rhythm to our meetings on zoom. At first there's the question: well, what are we going to do? We agreed to have no agenda but to play, to give space to explorations, using poetry as a starting point. The conversations with Derek become very alive and dynamic, our ideas seems to catch alight and accelerate - it is great to have this opportunity to share my creative practice with another and to know we are creating a body of work together. It feels very supportive and exciting - something magic in the responsive-ness happening between us. More unknown - as the relationship strengthens more trust and more sharing ....
Our last session we shared a poem - firstly interweaving them, so Derek spoke one line of his and then I spoke one line of mine. Then I wanted to hear Derek's poem in its entirety - and he mine. .... From this images and ideas of performance / theatre / costume/ space/ filming started to emerge - so that the poems could flesh out and have body. We are going to take this week to explore our own poems and performative/ filmic responses. Then next week we are going to read each other's poems and take them into the same process.
Both poems are about SOUL, what it is to be human, to be here - at the edges of life.
An incantation, a prayer, a cry - from deep within.
I will include the sound piece from the recent zoom - of our poem sharing.
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