During our residency at the Nieuwe Vide in Haarlem (2024), we began preparations towards the exhibition Re-Viewing Sites of Preservation. As part of the exhibition’s public programme, we developed a workshop about the ethics of collective working, titled More than a seat at the table: on accessibility, accountability and affability. Contemplating these keywords in parallel to the collective’s development over the last four years, the following text was written:

A love letter to collectives 

When you, I, we host one another’s thoughts in this space – an interval that holds both breath and doubt – our mutual presence composes an agreement. The fabric of this agreement is trust — a latticework that sees our aspirations and convictions criss-cross. We extend ourselves to one another on the understanding that we are committed to maintain this fabric. We hold it up as a canopy, a place that shelters us.

This practice is one of both yielding and demarcating. It is not the denial of an ‘I’, subsumed in a ‘we’ that risks concealing our variations. Rather, this practice is of manifold ‘I’s that lean into one another, forming a mesh of pluralities and poetics. This is a practice of togetherness, of respect.

In this place that we create, we see one another in both the brash light of realness—that is, the awkward gait of real life, accosted by hiccups and contingencies—and the tender aura of friendship. Friendship is how we name the multitudes of life, a life, our interwoven lives. It is an exercise in acknowledging where the other is coming from, the loads they carry, the questions they dwell on and within, the paradigms they inhabit—whether by choice or otherwise. It is to be both witness and interlocutor to the other’s wrestling — grappling with their urgencies in tandem with one’s own. Friendship is being moving in tandem with being — not necessarily in unison but with an openness that defers over simplifications or polarities. It is a site of sharing, a paradoxically robust vulnerability. It resists the imposition of unilateral degrees of comfort. It does not instrumentalize supposedly the languages of folly to trivialise the bruises of others or side-step accountability. It does not insist on sitting in comfortable boxes.

Collaboration is a labour of friendship, maintained by introspection. It is care work, as much intellectual as emotional labour. This is a multilateral, polyphonic ethic. It does not shy away from judgement, or subject the capacity to judge to moral condemnation; rather it embraces this ability as a necessary sensibility in determining, mapping out and making sense of your needs, my needs, our divergent but equally legitimate needs. This is an attempt — for we are ever attempting, in the spirit of leaning in under our shared canopy — to see, to truly see.

This is a witnessing.