4.  Collective improvisation – how Reading International’s itinerant, collaborative model could help to create a more open and speculative space.

“Why do curators always have to work so hard” [56], asks Jan Verwoert, and extends this to the practice of artists, writers, and educators in the curatorial, educational system. Because the bind, spell and appellation of the institution, the pressures created by the cultural industry to produce marketable products both of and as art, and in and as education, as well as our own often impossible standards to be the best in a relatively precarious environment, still make it impossible for most of us to be truly in control of the way we communicate with our audiences, with our collaborators, with our students and with each other. Bringing together competing and sometimes impossible aims and goals for artists, curators, funders and partners to create the perfect outcome can be very challenging. And this, of course, is key to the process and to the problem of collaboration. To be in control would mean to seize our means of “producing communication in curating and in general” [57]. This, in turn, would mean to actually work and communicate fully on one's own terms, to be able to shape and make decisions on the medium of communication that defines both systems of curating and education. It also means that we would be able to find and define our own pace or communicating and working, be as responsive to social situations and conditions as we can while accepting that collaboration is a continuous learning process. As anyone involved in collaborative processes will confirm, collaboration is not easy and often does not fit into standardised means of production. It is absolutely necessary and inevitable as a means to negotiate any change at all from either within or without the cultural institution, but it does not always sit comfortably within the institutions of art and of education where precarious working conditions continue to be the norm.

Collaboration is also key to the projects within Reading International’s programming and the examples outlined above highlight some of the curatorial and educational models that question and present both historical and current ways of collaboration between artists, curators, educators, and audiences, offering a starting point for discussion. The itinerant nature of Reading International as an organisation depends on establishing good communication and good social relations from which these discussions, exhibitions, and events are possible. This involves a constant flow of communication between artists, curators, students, staff, partners, funders, sponsors, academics, bosses, press, audiences, etc. The nature of these projects and the fact that we are working from a position of relative scarcity, of funding, of staffing, and without a physical space, inevitably means that this extensive, rather open system of knowledge production has ruptures, that communication is sometimes difficult, that partners, collaborators, institutions might not always agree with each other, and with our processes or ways of working. Also, the practical limitations of setting up an organisation as an art project and as a new platform from inside an art school in a university have in itself many practical, procedural and resource challenges.

Since December 2017, Reading International’s part-time staff has delivered to an audience of 43.000 people, produced more than 60 events, exhibitions, performances, screenings, and talks, worked with 65 artists and conducted workshops with over 1000 participants, including local audiences, partners, youth groups and school children. The curatorial, educational and artistic collaborations involved some external curators, artists, doctoral students, and academics. 120 students were involved as performers, exhibition guides, interns, artist assistants, invigilators, technicians, administrative assistants, both voluntary and paid. 70 community members and local artists engaged in seminars, 50 teenagers were involved in different productions. The scope of collaboration in any such a project is extensive and involves the creative sensitivities, voices, and bodies of artists, curators, students, and audiences to figure out each time anew how to successfully communicate with each other, share authorship whilst negotiating its institutional framing. We have continually asked ourselves how we can maintain the criticality of this fragile new container and how can we defend a way to run projects with soul and with love, in a collaborative, less competitive nature, as artists, curators, and educators?

What we found is that overall a high level of improvisation is required as a key artistic and organisational skill. In fact, we have come to realise that it is one or perhaps the most important skill that has to be constantly re-learned and re-applied to enable us to work together. Improvisational skills would have certainly been key to the practices and projects that we have programmed, and were embedded in the examples outlined above, be it Okin Collective, operating in the peripheries of South Korean capital, the Students’ Cultural Centre Belgrade, the collaborative artist students experiments instigated by Rita Donagh in Three weeks in May 1970, and NOVEL’s series of curated events, Method Fund and Lada Nakonechna’s explorations, navigating states of ruin, or collaborations with the local library, by the reading in Reading artist team.

In order to produce as a collective Verwoert proposes to develop a sense of “collective improvisation” [58], as a methodology for taking control of the means of communication and to grasp and nurture a more generous and heterogenous spirit in cultural practice. “The capacity to grasp and gradually shift the terms of possibility/impossibility from within the situation, on the other hand, constitutes the intelligence of any creative process attuned to the immanent logic of its own unfolding.” [59]. He realises that the autonomy of communication he suggests could be achieved if we were able to improvise successfully as a group, is of course only relative and perhaps speculative. He also recognises that it requires training and awareness. I would like to suggest that we could equally try to apply improvisation as a key factor in the education context. An improvisation mode would have been required for those pedagogic models that I have briefly mentioned in the introduction, which were favored by the artists who featured in my earlier study. By conjuring, discussing and curating collaborative, and inquisitive situations with Reading International, while involving artists, students and audiences we may have indeed created ‘invisible’ teaching situations for students and audiences and created art-life-education crossovers, whereby teaching involves spending time together. Artists have ‘directed’ teams of students and audiences, developed work in collaborative situations. And we have supported artists and audiences, to ‘give birth’ to new ideas, sharing moments of creation. These descriptions already open up obvious connections to ‘curatorial’ strategies that might equally involve strategies of caring, directing, socialising, and so on, as a way to describe the process of collaboration.

And maybe, we do have a small advantage in the peripheral setting of the regional art school and the regional cultural environment. Maybe because of the more precarious situation of the cultural practitioners on the margins, there is perhaps more openness to improvise collectively. By working together in this context a creative gap, a new space seems to have opened which allows for something different to emerge and for us to re-define our social interaction and the way we communicate with each other. Perhaps it is through this sense of improvisating with others that the art school is now starting to realise and learn how it can become a catalyst to create a more open and speculative thinking space as it engages with its wider regional public. This engagement inevitably exercises and incorporates different levels of collaboration, co-operation, and self-organisation.

Those who have taken part in any of our events would experience their itinerant nature, with events popping up in different and sometimes unexpected places (coffee shops, libraries, churches, lecture halls, offices, shops, parks, outdoor spaces, hoardings, and billboards). This, in turn, might have helped to turn around challenging situations and to erase the divisions between outside and inside the university and to create unexpected experiences for artists, students, and audiences and perhaps some a glimpse of space in which liberated forms of exchange can develop. [60]