Artists of Sweet&Tender Collaborations meet again after more than 10 years

Premiere: 19 Februar 2025 | Kampnagel Hamburg

»Attempt of Togetherness« by and with Sweet&Tender Collaborations will premiere as a performative installation at [K]ampnagel in February 2025. Artists from different countries and contexts come together to work on the question of how transnational collaboration is possible today. In the words of Lebanese artist Etel Adnan: »The world needs togetherness, not division. Love, not mistrust. A shared future, not isolation«, »Attempt of Togetherness« strives to build networks of affection and to think and work collectively.

Sweet&Tender Collaborations was founded in 2006 by danceWEB scholarship holders with the aim of implementing self-organisation, collaboration and solidarity in artistic processes. By 2012, the S&T artists had organised numerous collaborative projects in France, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Mexico and Switzerland, among others.

Jenny Beyer and her team have decided to formulate their next project as an invitation to Sweet&Tender Collaborations to meet again after more than ten years. In doing so, the artists are facing up to the challenges posed by the circumstances of their coming together and making them the content of their joint work: they are a large group from all parts of the world. They meet again after a long period of separation, during which their lives have taken different professional and personal paths. They have limited time and resources to physically spend time together.

»Attempt of Togetherness« goes beyond the question of ideational co-operation and the examination of strategies of transnational knowledge transfer and explores the possibilities of economic and cultural fusion: who brings what to the project, what economic as well as non-monetary cultural and personal capital is invested and shared? Jenny Beyer and Sweet&Tender Collaborations have been negotiating these questions in the digital space for several months. A first concept meeting took place in July 2024 in MASSIA, approx. 180 km south of Tallinn, Estonia.

In February 2025, they will translate their collaboration into a performative installation and share the results of several months of group and communication work with the public at Kampnagel. Eighteen artists will come to Hamburg for this and make both the diversity of their artistic positions and their reunion after twelve years the basic theme of the performance.
What interests in choreographic, physical and collaborative work did they once share and what do they have in common today? And what hurdles have to be overcome in order to come together?