Jenny Beyer has been co-hosting and executing collaborative projects since 2006. It all started with Sweet & Tender Collaboration, an artists’ initiative devoted to self-organization, collaboration and solidarity, active between 2006 and 2012. At K3|Tanzplan Hamburg, Jenny Beyer initiated the collective project Treffen Total (2010, 2014, 2016, 2018). The recent series of COLLABORATORIES is devoted to the exchange with colleagues about the role of the audience in the context of different artistic approaches.

Collaboration is (for you)

Collaboration is not the same as cooperation. The goal of a collaboration is collaborative work itself. Collaboration is not efficient. It is is heterogeneous and antagonistic. It is polyphonic. It creates time. It takes time. Collaboration is incalculable. It is generous and precarious. It is an exercise in giving. In listening. In letting go. Collaboration is a shared practice of expressing one’s own wishes, values and concerns. Collaboration does not strive for consensus. In a collaboration, roles dissolve, hierarchies are acknowledged but never fixed. Collaboration is a shelter – a safe space where encounters can take place.

It is in collaboration that I learned how to enjoy my work. By experiencing what I am doing through the eyes of others who were sharing the doing with me, I started to care about it. When my working partners became my friends, I discovered that I am responsible for the work in a different way. And by experiencing this difference, I learned how to understand art beyond its aesthetic or market value – as a source of individual and collective empowerment. And let’s be clear about it, if we approach our artistic practice as a means of empowering one another, we will not only get an opportunity to emancipate ourselves from the aesthetics and economy of art, we will more importantly nurture different perspectives on both.

This text was written in August 2020 in collaboration with Igor Dobricic.

more informations about the projects

TREFFEN TOTAL 2018
https://treffentotal.de/page/2/

TREFFEN TOTAL 2016
https://treffentotalblog.wordpress.com/

TREFFEN TOTAL 2010
https://treffentotal.wordpress.com/

Sweet & Tender Collaborations
https://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetandtender/sets/