This session sought to identify key themes.
Our first session where we met our fellow ArTELIER colleagues was held at two locations, All That We Are at Pipe Clay Lagoon followed by an afternoon session at the Underwood Centre, as an introduction to our partnership with them.
This session was framed by the question What do we mean by participation & engagement?
Ruth Langford delivered a welcome to country and spoke on Deep Listening as the listening to all living things without overlaying judgement or reaction. She invited us to pair with another to introduce ourselves and practice deep listening - the perfect way to begin an artist led community of inquiry.
Provocateurs: Madeleine And Tim Humphrey
“Madeleine and Tim are artists who create unexpected situations for listening. They have a long-term collaborative practice. Their work is driven by a curiosity for questioning and listening in human culture and seeks to evolve and engage with new processes and audiences through public and private interventions. Their practice intertwines local, national and international relationships”.
http://madeleineandtim.net/practice/
Madelein and Tim’s talk focused on creating works within festival contexts showing us a number of their poetic and beautifully resolved pieces, such as the Megaphone Project, that draw viewers into a exploratory process of discovery with sound. They spoke of creating platforms for engagement, encouraging risk taking and the ‘disappearing ego’. In responding to festival requests for their works they spoke about doing a combination works that allow them to cater for mass audience interaction as well also creating as intimate small-scale works. They reflected that the smaller scale works are often well suited to kids and suggested ways to pitch these kinds of works to festivals. Time was given after this presentation for questions and reflection.
Following this a key aim for the day was to co-create the themes for the monthly discussions for the year. In the week before the session we all emailed in a question that is pivotal to our practice, during this session we brainstormed and grouped these to form a yearly agenda for ArTELIER.
At the Underwood centre in the afternoon we were introduced to the staff and facility. Simon Spain ran a hands-on workshop, Self Assembly, in which we paired up to created a figure out of plaster bandage and branches. Working collaboratively is essential to making these figures and to forming them into a group that are inter-dependent, relying on each other to stand. The activity becomes an embodied metaphor for collaboration.