Collaboration as acknowledged co-production: a site-based approach to Tribe

Introduction

In this article, I examine the production of an art project called Tribe (2013) made collaboratively between artist Sarah Cole and a youth group called the Young Women’s Group (YWG hereafter). ¹ Rather than address the production of this artwork through the typology of collaborative art that would follow the production between artist and ‘collaborators’, the article contemplates Tribe as emerging from a broader collection of processual human and nonhuman relations. This draws the understanding of its production away from just the artist and collaborating group, towards the multiple situated relations that unfolded through the artwork’s spatio-temporal specificity. Such an approach develops the way geography has engaged with collaborative art as it looks beyond its aesthetic category, situating its production within this broader collection of relations. In doing so, I argue for a more nuanced conception of collaborative art making, one that accounts for the contingent, processual relations that are involved in the emergence of an artwork, but not included in its collaborative ‘form’. Through this approach, I suggest a delineation between ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-production’, where (a) co-production is understood as the emergence of localised unfolding relations and (b) collaboration in art is understood as the acknowledgement of a selection of this co-production. I suggest that this approach is helpful as it allows us to identify the hidden complexities of Tribe’s production, uncovering relations which are otherwise masked by standardised and ‘overcoded’ ² understandings of collaborative production in art. In doing so, a division of labour is identified in Tribe’s making, whereby some labour is acknowledged as collaborative, and others not.

Contemporary geographical research has approached art through a range of thematic frames including focus on specific artists’ work, ³ artistic skill, techniques and methods, ⁴ experiences of art encounters, ⁵ sites of art production ⁶ and production processes. ⁷ Collaborative art has also been given some specific thematic attention including its transformative potential, ⁸ and as an urban interventional practice. ⁹ What is lacking from this rich body of work, however, are accounts of how artworks specifically emerge during collaborative production, including processes beyond the agency of artist and collaborators. This article engages with this gap by tracing the emergence of particular features of the Tribe exhibition through the workshop period using a site-based approach. ¹⁰ Such an approach gives space for specific human and nonhuman relations that were not understood as collaborative to be implicated in the production of the exhibition. This site-based approach, I suggest, is well equipped for this task as it resists the partitioning of the world into reductive categories – such as collaboration – and accounts for the force of emergent, contingent relations. Marston et al. explain this position:

Against the deployment of forms or categories that operate by carving up the world into a delimited set of manageable object-types, we look to the unfolding state of affairs within which situations or sites are constituted as singularities – that is, as a collectivity of bodies or things, orders and events, and doings and sayings that hang together so as to lend distinct consistency to assemblages of dynamic relations. ¹¹

Thus, instead of looking to Tribe’s production through the form or category of collaborative art – an approach that would present a delimited set of co-productive relations – this article looks to the unfolding and contingent ‘state of affairs’ Tribe emerged through. This situates the work between artist and collaborators within a broader collection of co-productive relations. A site-based approach is to attend to or ‘test out’ ¹² these broader relations. This builds a nuanced understanding of Tribe’s production, one that identifies it as site-specific, rather than based on a predetermined set of relations acknowledged in the form of the work.

Crucially, this article contends that this broader set of relations that co-produced Tribe includes nonhumans. Thus, later in the article, it will be demonstrated how plastic animal masks and Onesie jumpsuits impacted the production of Tribe. I mobilise this concept of co-productive nonhumans through Jane Bennett’s thing-power materialism, a position that identifies ‘the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle’. ¹³ This lively understanding of nonhumans, Bennett explains, ‘upset[s] conventional distinctions between matter and life, inorganic and organic, passive object and active subject’. This ability of matter to ‘perform actions, produce effects and alter situations’, I argue, enables specific nonhumans involved in Tribe to be thought of as co-productive as it posits them as active in the emergence of relations, rather than being merely a result of them. ¹⁴ The pairing of Bennett’s thing-power materialism with that of site-ontology work in geography is particularly useful. Drawing from John Frow, Bennett identifies that the human and nonhuman ‘needs to be flattened, read horizontally as a juxtaposition rather than vertically as a hierarchy of being’. ¹⁵ Thus, both Bennett and Marston et al. have, to varying degrees, a kinship with flat ontology, the school of thought that understands humans and nonhumans as equal in regard to their existence, agency and relations, thus discounting any ‘hierarchy of being’ between them. However, while nonhuman relations are identified alongside that of humans in the flat ontology of Marston et al.’s work, Bennett’s thing-power materialism helps develop the understanding of how nonhumans are active in the production of relations within sites. Used in tandem, these complementing works support an understanding of the co-productive role of nonhumans in the making of Tribe.

A site-based approach is also particularly suited to Cole’s production method in Tribe, as she actively incorporated contingent events and relations into the work. ¹⁶ In this sense, Cole’s skill was her ability to read the intensity of relations that grouped around the workshop period within and beyond her collaborators and integrate these into the exhibition. Although this article presents a close account of Tribe’s production, it is not an attempt to describe how everything was made. Thus, the productive relations engaged with in this article are not an exhaustive list. Tribe’s production could have been connected to multiple other sites. Instead, and acknowledging my own situatedness in this site-specific account, I present a set of relations that emerged during my research of Tribe. In doing so, the article takes the form of an exercise that demonstrates why we need to look beyond the categorisation of collaborative art to better understand artistic production, and how this could be used in future research on art.

Similar approaches have recently appeared in geography. Lizzie Richardson has conceputalised co-production as a lens to look beyond and develop understanding of collaborative knowledge production in economic geography. ¹⁷ Through the example of creative writing practice, Richardson suggests how co-production occurs through types of emotional work and in specific ‘micro-space performances’. ¹⁸ In doing so, this understanding of co-production ‘decentres’ collaborative knowledge production away from a dominant central actor, towards ‘temporary, fragile and in-between spaces’. ¹⁹ Nina Williams has offered a similar decentred approach to provide a progressive concept of creativity in geography. ²⁰ Shifting autonomous agency away from the artist-creator, Williams suggests a ‘dispersed sense of creative agency, so that creativity is emergent amidst many constitutive elements rather than sustained through a willful subject’. ²¹ Holding parallels with Richardson’s application of co-production in terms of decentring an individual source as creator, Williams emphasises how this notion of creativity occurs through ‘processual, corporeal and material nascent relations’. ²² This article holds a certain attunement to both Richardson’s and Williams’ approach, identifying Tribe’s production as emerging beyond the human relations within its collaborative form, to a broader collection of human and nonhuman co-producers. This article also develops this trajectory by focusing specifically on collaborative art production and empirically evidencing its emergence through the tracing of specific exhibition features in Tribe. It does this to advance geographical understanding of collaborative art, demonstrating that it functions by creating a division of labour whereby specific human co-production is acknowledged and included in its form. Furthermore, the article also advances geographical work by honing in on the productivity of specific nonhumans in artistic production, offering an account of co-production that explicitly details the lively impact of these in Tribe’s creation. ²³ A site-based approach supported by Bennett’s thing-power materialism is used to engage with this, as it takes Tribe’s production as a site-specific collection of human and nonhuman relations, resisting the narrow focus of acknowledged co-production created by its collaborative form.

The article is divided into four main parts. The first part provides an empirical grounding, introducing the Tribe project, Sarah Cole’s practice, and the Young Women’s Group. The second part discusses the concept of collaboration in art as acknowledged co-production, where co-production is the emergence of localised unfolding relations. The third part looks to Tribe as a site, tracing its emergence through the collaborative workshops between Cole and the YWG, and uses a site-based approach to build a site-specific understanding of its production that goes beyond this collaborative relationship, towards hidden human and nonhuman co-producers. The fourth section offers some conclusions around future research using a site-based approach to investigate artistic production.

Tribe

Tribe was commissioned by Peckham Platform, ²⁴ a contemporary community art gallery in Peckham, South East London. The gallery adjoins Peckham Square, a public space in the centre of Peckham that also hosts a library and a leisure centre. The Square opens out on to Peckham High Street, a bustling road that connects to Camberwell to the West, and New Cross to the East. The gallery building, painted in vivid green with its name embossed on a neon pink sign, stands out from the surrounding urban environment. Tribe consisted of two distinct parts. The first part involved a series of five creative workshops between January and April 2013 ran by Cole with the YWG, which had 15 members. They were held at Camberwell Community Centre in South London and Peckham Platform’s gallery space. The events during these workshops were drawn upon by Cole to form an installation in Peckham Platform’s gallery space. The workshops were based around creative activities such as drawing and dancing, playful activities such as skipping, and word games. Cole explained that she did not have a specific activity plan before the workshops started. Rather, she would decide on each workshop’s activities based on a combination of the dynamic of the group during the previous workshop and any themes or topics she thought were emerging (these will be discussed in more detail below). The second part of Tribe was a mixed media installation exhibited between 7 May and 23 July 2013 (see Figure 1). The installation was immersive, dream-like and slightly surreal. It featured a full drum-kit which visitors were invited to play. This meant that, before seeing Tribe, you more often than not could hear it, due to the sound of drums spilling out into the surrounding streets and public square. As you walked in, you stepped onto grass, as the entire gallery floor was covered with real turf. The feeling, sight and smell of the grass filled the space, which, being indoors, produced a confusing sensory experience. Once inside, you were met with a collection of objects that sustained this intrigued confusion – different coloured Onesies hanging from the ceiling via a pulley system and coat hangers, camouflage bean bags and fold-out camping chairs to recline on, a record player playing a vinyl of eerie notes made on a metal music box, ²⁵ a cuckoo-clock fixed to the wall chiming every half-hour, metal music boxes secured to one of the walls, and the drum-kit. There was also a selection of films. On a large widescreen television fixed to the wall next to the main entrance was a film of a sparrowhawk in a small garden, talons firmly dug into a pigeon while eating it alive. Two other films featured on noticeably smaller screens. One was by the gallery’s side entrance and featured one of the YWG dressed in a Onesie and plastic animal mask drumming with her hands on a large cardboard box. The other was by the drum-kit at the other side of the space and showed the YWG in Onesies and animal masks playing in and around Peckham Square. The resulting experience was akin to those dreams that do not quite make sense on recollection, but at the time of dreaming seemed totally normal.

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Figure 1.

Tribe (2013).

Peckham Platform was a project originally set up and funded through University of the Arts London’s (UAL) Widening Participation Programme. The funding for Tribe therefore also came through this programme. Tribe was commissioned by the CEO and Artistic Director of Peckham Platform, Emily Druiff. Their commissioning process works by publishing on various online forums and email lists invitations for artists to submit exhibition proposals based on a brief to work with a specific ‘service user group’ ²⁶ connected to the gallery’s location in Peckham. The submitted proposals are then reviewed and decided upon by Druiff. When I first met with Druiff to discuss the possibility of following one of their projects for my research, some 10 months before Tribe started, she had already decided to pair the YWG with Cole. However, what Cole would be doing with the YWG was still very open; the only certainty was that there would be an exhibition in the gallery during the dates mentioned above. This openness towards what Cole would be doing with the YWG was something Druiff wanted to maintain.

Cole has a distinct interest in socially engaged methods, specifically in the nature of collaborative production and the different ways this manifests in practice. She describes her practice as ‘the orchestration of collaborative encounters and conversations with people in different environments and situations’. ²⁷ Sharing and participation created through consultation and material exploration is central to Cole’s collaborative methodology. ²⁸ Within this collaborative leaning lies a specific interest in the role and presence of the artist in art and society. Discussing the orientation in her practice Cole said, ‘I try to become part of the furniture but maintain a critical distance’. ²⁹ This interest in her role and presence as artist is something that also threads through Tribe, elements of which will be discussed through this article. As I followed Tribe through the pre-exhibition stage, it became evident that Cole was keen to draw upon elements of coincidence and chance – including those beyond her creative agency and collaboration with the YWG – in the ideas for the exhibition. Thus, her working process was based less on predetermined actions, and more mediative of the contingent relations that emerged through the workshop period. Cole enjoyed this way of working. She embraced things that emerged out of the blue, an approach that is in fact central to Cole’s practice. It was reflecting back on the empirical material when I realised I needed a way to enunciate the importance of seemingly coincidental events and hidden relations in the exhibition’s production. In this light, a site-based approach seemed particularly useful because it offered a way of thinking that helped identify the role of these other relations in the emergence of Tribe as an exhibition. Before presenting this site-based approach to Tribe’s production, the article first discusses the concept of collaboration as acknowledged co-production.

Collaboration as acknowledged co-production

Social arts practitioner and theorist, Pablo Helguera, describes collaboration as ‘the sharing of responsibilities between parties in the creation of something new’. ³⁰ However, the sharing of responsibilities in production is not something unique to collaboration. Collaboration in this regard is about making certain forms of labour during the co-production being made visible and some invisible. ³¹ Speaking on this dynamic, art theorist John Roberts asserts that collaboration in the creation of art is not new. ³² The shared production of creative works has taken place long before the social turn in art. Roberts explains, ‘All art, within or beyond the studio, is subject to the discipline of the social division of labour. The singular painter is as much reliant on the labour of others (paint manufacture, canvas preparation, studio assistants) as the artist-duo’. ³³

A similar argument has arisen elsewhere. In the 1970s, sociologist Howard Becker ‘took a sociological chainsaw to the artist as “creator,” arguing instead that art emerges from a collective effort, in which the artist is dependent upon a network of other human actors’. ³⁴ Becker states,

All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people. Through their cooperation, the art work we eventually see or hear comes to be and continues to be. The work always shows signs of that cooperation. The forms of cooperation may be ephemeral, but often become more or less routine, producing patterns of collective activity we can call an art world. ³⁵

The activities of these other ‘actors’ include things like

conceiving the idea for the work, making the necessary physical artefacts, creating a conventional language of expression, training artistic personnel and audiences to use the conventional language to create and experience, and providing the necessary mixture of those ingredients for a particular work or performance. ³⁶

Indeed, artists throughout history have relied on the practical, supportive work of others in the production of their work. ³⁷ The difference between this ‘hidden or dissolved . . . notion of technical back up’ in art creation and the collaborative labour present in collaborative artworks like Tribe is, according to Roberts, ‘fundamentally a question of cultural form’, where collaboration becomes ‘a self-conscious process of production’. ³⁸ Collaboration in art is acknowledged co-production, where this acknowledgement becomes part of the artwork’s aesthetic form.

This shift towards social production has had implications for artistic identity. Roberts explains,

[T]he collaborative content of labour becomes a distinct mode of production through the subordination of the artist’s individual will and identity to the group. The individual artist’s identity is dissolved into the collective-artist, and, perhaps more pertinently, into the collective identity of the non-artist, just as the identity of the non-artist collaborator is subsumed under the identity of the artist-collective. ³⁹

Through the acknowledgement of co-producers in artworks, be they technical, creative or otherwise, and the subsequent dispersal of the individual artist’s creative agency, the work becomes collaborative in form. Thus, Cole’s acknowledgement of the YWG in Tribe categorised the artwork as collaborative. Roberts, however, falls short in that he implies an account of co-producers that is too narrow. ⁴⁰ His assertion that the distinctive form of collaborative art lies in a ‘self-conscious process of production’ implies that all co-production is made visible. This is not necessarily the case – there is still a selection process that identifies who is and is not counted in the ‘shared labour’ of the work. The next section will show the specific connections between the exhibition’s emergence and the YWG. However, it will also demonstrate how certain human and nonhuman co-producers outside of this collaborative form also played a part in its emergence. To do this, the next section looks to specific parts of the exhibition and, taking a site-based approach, traces their emergence through the workshop period. In doing so, it shows how Tribe’s production connected to a set of relations that went beyond its collaborative form.

A site-based approach to Tribe’s production

A ‘site’, for Marston et al., is a specific hanging-together of unfolding relations and is ‘an emergent property of its interaction human and nonhuman inhabitants’. ⁴¹ A site could be a home, a public square, a Geography department, a theatre, an exhibition. Each of these, however, emerges from a distinctive set of unfolding relations and is therefore unique and processual. In this regard, and as Escobar describes from this body of work, ‘“sites” are reconceptualised as contexts for event-relations in terms of people’s activities’; ⁴² they are ‘dynamically composed of bodies, doings and sayings’. ⁴³ In order to discuss the composition of site, Marston et al. suggest, we must ‘follow interactive practices through their localized connection’. ⁴⁴ Geography has seen site-based approaches applied to a variety of empirical circumstances including the Nollywood film industry, ⁴⁵ Walmart, ⁴⁶ boundary walls ⁴⁷ and Orson Welles’ essay films. ⁴⁸ Each of these look at their site of interest as something which encapsulates the specific mutability and openness of material practices in the world, rather than fixed ‘cases’ to frame and study in order to compound predetermined generalities. Geography, however, has not yet seen such an approach applied to collaborative art production. This approach is useful, as it allows us to look beyond Tribe as a typology of collaborative art, towards a specific site of intensity that connects to a broader collection of co-productive relations. There is not space in this article to sufficiently address every part of the exhibition. Therefore, I focus on a selection of objects in the exhibition that were prominent in interviews with Cole. These include the Onesies, grass turf, ‘Onesie Nation’ film, animal masks, ‘Drummer’ film, drum-kit, ‘Sparrowhawk’ film and Buckingham Palace sign. This site-based account is presented by tracing these particular features back through the workshop period of the artwork. In order to aid a sense of gradual composition, these are discussed as they emerged through the workshops, and in some cases, after them. However, as will be established, some of these exhibition features emerged across more than one workshop or through relations contingent to other features. Thus, the order I discuss them is more for ease of presentation than strict chronological order. This approach ultimately evidences that the production of the exhibition cannot be attributed to just Cole and the YWG and instead must be understood as the unfolding of a specific set of relations between humans and nonhumans during the workshops and beyond. ‘Co’-production, I suggest, emerges from this connected series of localised relations.

The Onesies in the exhibition can be traced back to Cole and the YWG in the first workshop. Their emergence was also specifically entwined with the choice of ‘Tribe’ for its title by Cole. Cole explained that

I think the word [tribe] had been bouncing around in my head having heard Grayson Perry use it a lot. It then surfaced [in the workshops] when talking to Sam [youth worker] about the way the group had developed their own euphemistic language and, on meeting them, discovering how cohesive they were despite their many differences. When they talked about Onesies it just seemed to fit. ⁴⁹

Onesies are all-in-one jumpsuits with a hood and a zip up the front. At the time of the workshop period they were a popular youth trend and so happened to come up in conversation with the YWG during the first workshop. Later in the same workshop Cole got the group to think about different connotations of the word ‘tribe’. ⁵⁰ They were given a large piece of paper and wrote down the word twice, one in a ‘spikey’ bubble and one in a ‘fluffy’ bubble. ⁵¹ Around the former, Cole asked them to write words and phrases that had negative connotations and around the latter positive connotations. ⁵² Due to the group’s particular interest in Onesies, one of the positive phrases they wrote down was ‘The Onesie Tribe’, which they then proceeded to describe themselves as, as part of their ‘euphemistic language’. ⁵³ By this, Cole meant language that had a hidden meaning. Cole described the young women as being fascinated with Onesies. This led to her wanting to introduce them into the workshops. Due to costs, Cole initially intended to use cheaper, paper Onesies. However, Cole asked Peckham Platform’s Executive Director for additional funds to buy a collection of ‘real’ Onesies for the YWG. ⁵⁴ This was agreed. Cole brought the Onesies along to the fourth workshop, for the group to dress-up in, and were used in the two films the YWG featured in.

The initial spark for the grass turf came during the second workshop from one of the YWG’s youth group coordinators, Sam. ⁵⁵ Cole was interested in the group’s use and manipulation of language, so during this workshop she got the group to write down their favourite quote and share it with the group. ⁵⁶ Sam’s favourite quote was ‘All flesh is grass’, based on a poem by Christina Rossetti. ⁵⁷ Being the YWG’s coordinator, Sam was very popular with the young women. Rather than just a professional managing the youth group from the outside, Sam was very much part of the group. Due to this embeddedness in the group, and her status as coordinator, Sam appeared to hold a quiet authority in the group. ⁵⁸ The young women would seek acknowledgement and assurance from Sam, looking up to her somewhat like an older sister. This meant that the young women became excited about and attached to the ‘All flesh is grass’ quote. Consequently, the YWG made it one of their ‘sayings’ during the workshops with Cole. This meant the group started sporadically shouting out ‘All flesh is grass’ to each other, almost as an affirmation of Sam’s esteem in the group. ⁵⁹ Cole explained that the use of language by the YWG was important to them, and they would use words and sayings that have alternative meanings behind them. However, they would also adopt certain terms – like ‘All flesh is grass’ – not to mean something else, but as something they would shout out during the workshop as an expression of group identity. The YWG were keen to use some of their group ‘sayings’ in the exhibition, and so part of the reasoning for including grass turf stemmed from this. ⁶⁰ The grass was also linked to a thought Cole had regarding the gallery location in Peckham. Peckham Platform sits on the side of Peckham Square, a busy thoroughfare for the area that includes a public library and leisure centre. Cole wanted to open up the gallery to this surrounding space, ‘to create a conduit through the gallery’. ⁶¹ The gallery has two entrances, at the front and the side, with a ramp leading up to each. These ramps are permanently laid with artificial grass and so after the group’s attachment to Sam’s quote, and its appropriation into their group language, Cole thought she could make the gallery a ‘conduit’ by turfing the gallery floor, connecting to the artificial turf and extending the outside space of the gallery inside (see Figure 2). ⁶²

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Figure 2.

Grass turf in the gallery and artificial turf at the front entrance.

The idea for the first ⁶³ film piece surfaced during the fourth workshop after Cole had observed the YWG behaving differently when wearing their Onesies. It was filmed during the fifth and final workshop. Entitled ‘Onesie Nation’, it was displayed on a small, flat computer screen fastened to the wall opposite the main entrance. It featured the YWG in Onesies and plastic animal masks playing on a small grassed area off Peckham Square (see Figure 3). The animal masks had emerged through a series of events. During an activity in the first workshop, Cole asked the group, ‘If you could be any animal, what would it be?’ ⁶⁴ After discussing this, the YWG decided on secret animal egos. ⁶⁵ Following this, Cole brought along plastic animal masks for the group to play with in other workshops (see Figure 4). However, the animal masks did not precisely match these alter-egos, due to the limited choice of masks Cole had to choose from when purchasing. The YWG therefore chose a mask from this collection, which included a fox, cow, owl, wolf, and sheep.

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Figure 3.

Still from ‘Onesie Nation’ film by Sarah Cole and the Young Women’s Group.

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Figure 4.

Member of the Young Women’s Group wearing animal masks.

During the filming of ‘Onesie Nation’ in the fifth workshop, the YWG did not like being identifiable on camera, so Sam, the youth group coordinator, suggested they wear the masks to hide their faces. The title of the film linked to the group describing themselves ‘The Onesie Tribe’ and ‘The Onesie Nation’, something which Cole observed throughout the previous workshops. The idea for the film came from Cole. Discussing this element, she explained,

I wanted to capture something of the way they behaved as a pack of cubs when they wore the suits, something more pre-adolescent in contrast to the more edgy ideas of women being prey in the city. ⁶⁶

The ‘Onesie Nation’ film thus heavily related to the wearing of Onesies by the group, and the different behaviour this created, but the decision to make it came from Cole. Rather than seen as a ‘costume’ per se, for Cole, the Onesies were ‘more about metaphor – [of] transformation, comfort, privacy and play’. ⁶⁷ Seeing how fascinated the YWG were with Onesies and how they impacted their dynamic when wearing them, Cole ‘felt [it] important for them to be present’ in the exhibition. ⁶⁸ Indeed, when I asked the YWG about their favourite ‘thing’ in the project, the group replied in unison, ‘the Onesies!’ ⁶⁹ Epitomising Cole’s contingent approach to the work, the location for the film – a small grassy area – was circumstantial. Cole said, ‘the invitation of the mound of grass behind the gallery seemed too fortuitous to ignore (re: teletubbies) ⁷⁰ and also offered another, less obvious reading of place (less urban, more magical)’. ⁷¹

The idea behind the second film, ‘Drummer’, emerged coincidently from an observation of Cole’s during the filming of the ‘Onesie Nation’ in the fifth workshop. It was presented on a small portable DVD player sat on a wooden plinth by the back entrance to the gallery space. It featured one of the YWG, Emily, ⁷² wearing a Onesie and an animal mask, hitting out a drum beat with her hands on a large cardboard box in the middle of Peckham Square (see Figure 5). During the previous workshops, Cole had discovered Emily played drums and had a drum-kit in the garden shed of her home. ⁷³ Emily saw the shed as ‘her “safe” space’ because her drum-kit was there and she could make a lot of noise. ⁷⁴ Cole then noticed Emily mock-drumming on a cardboard box in Peckham Square after filming ‘Onesie Nation’. Emily agreed to feature in the film only if she could wear her Onesie. ⁷⁵ Speaking on this, Cole said,

I really liked this image of teenage exuberance in a garden outpost and kept it in the back of my mind until the filming day [the fifth workshop] when I chanced upon the idea of her using one of the cardboard boxes as a drum. It was good fortune that it was at twilight and she was wearing the mask – it felt like the convergence of ideas and opportunities had led us to making a video that spoke about the dangers of urban space that also held something of the ‘Onesie’ nation desire for freedom and self-expression. ⁷⁶

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Figure 5.

Still from the film ‘Drummer’, by Sarah Cole and the Young Women’s Group.

‘Drummer’ thus emerged through a ‘convergence of ideas and opportunities’ entwined around Cole and Emily’s participation in the workshops while also incorporating reference to their location in an urban public space.

It was activity around this film which led to the real drum-kit featuring in the exhibition. Following the filming of ‘Drummer’, Cole asked Emily whether she would play the drums in the gallery during the exhibition opening. ⁷⁷ She agreed, but only if she could wear her Onesie while she played. Emily worried about the quality of her drum-kit, so Cole said she would get a different one for the show. Cole delegated the sourcing of the drum-kit to one of Peckham Platform’s Gallery Assistants, Kiki. Kiki found a second-hand kit on the free advertising website Gumtree.com.Cole decided to keep the drum-kit in the exhibition after the opening. Initially, the plan was for it to be in the space during the week, but not to play, and out in Peckham Square at the weekend where it could be played. However, it was later decided by Cole and Peckham Platform to have the kit in the gallery permanently and that visitors could use it whenever they wanted.

The Buckingham Palace sign was installed above the main entrance of the gallery. This emerged from the YWG’s euphemistic language and group ‘sayings’ that Cole observed through all the workshops (including ‘All flesh is grass’, as mentioned earlier). These sayings, the announcement of them during the workshops, and knowing their secret meaning, embodied an important part of the YWG’s group identity. Cole explained these euphemisms and terms were part of their general language during the workshops, but they would also occasionally be expressed in a more performative manner, with members shouting things out to the group. One of their popular terms was ‘Buckingham Palace’, which they used in place of a certain swearword. ⁷⁸ The YWG were keen for the term to feature in the exhibition, which led to the ‘Buckingham Palace’ sign built above the front entrance of the gallery. It was made from wood and Perspex and had inbuilt audio speakers (see Figure 6). However, the YWG wanted the term to remain a secret group saying, so Cole did not disclose the meaning to visitors or the media. ⁷⁹

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Figure 6.

Buckingham Palace sign outside of Peckham Platform.

A freelance gallery technician, Patrick, ⁸⁰ built the sign. Patrick ‘did everything apart from the grass’ for the exhibition, including building a wooden plinth for the DVD player, mounting the televisions to the wall and making a pulley system to hang the Onesies on. ⁸¹ Speaking to Patrick about the Buckingham Palace sign and the pulley system, he explained,

Oh, well, the greatest achievement was the sign outside with the plugged-in speakers. That was really fun . . . I hand sawed-out each letter. We [he and Cole] got a font, printed it out – probably 220-point type – laid it all out, drew around everything, then I got a jigsaw [to cut it out], and it took me a day. Then I got the Perspex samples, got the right colours, bunged in all the lights. We plugged it in through the wall, which initially they [Peckham Platform] weren’t happy with, going through the wall. [It went] through my own homemade extension pipe, which then led [inside] all the fluorescent tube lights and the speaker [wires]. Luckily, I’m quite well versed with speakers and audio stuff. I bunged all that through, wired it round and that was that.

The pulley system came on the day before [the exhibition opened] . . . and so me and her just sat and drew it out, worked out where it would go, then got it, built it, put it up. ⁸²

Patrick explained that all of his work was done in communication with Cole, who he described as ‘very prepared with what she wanted . . . [she was] great to work with’. ⁸³ He said,

In terms of communication, she was the best artist. She’d let me know [about things], she’d email me. And that’s all I asked for, ’cos I’m happy to help any artist with any query, and try create solutions. So, me and her had several discussions. ⁸⁴

Asked about the importance of the relationship with the artist, Patrick claimed,

It’s the most important thing, and most helpful. Having a good rapport with the artist or curator, depending on who’s taking charge, is the best thing you can have as a ‘tech’. [. . .] When you have a good rapport with them and good banter, and everyone’s happy, it’s just smooth sailing – and they don’t fear to come to you, and you don’t fear to go to them to say ‘this is a bit of an issue’. ⁸⁵

The rapport Patrick had with Cole helped generate trust. Due to the space the sign was put in, it had to ‘be a bit angular and uneven’, which Cole was unsure about. However, Patrick persuaded her that it would be fine: ‘I think she was a bit unsure, but I said trust me and she did. I did it and she was so happy with it’. ⁸⁶ Aside from his manual skills, Patrick brought with him an important social agency regarding the sourcing of materials for the installation. Patrick buys all the wood for the projects he works on from a timber yard in Peckham called Whitten Timber, and the rapport he had built up with the people there enabled Peckham Platform to get good deals on materials. Thus, Patrick not only built the Buckingham Palace sign, using a particular skill set, but also, through his connections and rapport with the timber yard, facilitated the sourcing of materials and linked the making of the project to the local economy of Peckham.

Among all of the exhibition parts, the film ‘Sparrowhawk’ was arguably the one that epitomised Cole’s contingent approach to the production of Tribe (see Figure 7). It was filmed after the workshop period, a few days before the exhibition opened. A chance event Cole witnessed away from the workshops provided the material for a feature that noticeably juxtaposed the exhibition around it, and on enquiry can be understood as a dominant assertion of Cole’s presence in the artwork. While at home in her kitchen, Cole looked out into the garden and saw a sparrowhawk land with a pigeon in its talons. As the sparrowhawk began to eat the pigeon alive, Cole grabbed a camera and began to film. The pigeon eventually died and the sparrowhawk flew off. The film in Tribe shows this grim encounter in full. It was displayed on a large flat-screen television, attached to the wall next to the front entrance of the gallery. Cole saw this film as a contrast to the playful metaphors of the Onesies. As described above, Cole saw the presence of Onesies as ‘something more pre-adolescent in contrast to the more edgy ideas of women being prey in the city’. ⁸⁷ ‘Sparrowhawk’, she explained, was to juxtapose this comfortable, cosy metaphor, engaging with ‘ideas of women being prey in the city’. ⁸⁸ However, this film also represented a distinctive assertion of Cole’s artistic authority in the artwork. It was included in the exhibition without discussion with the YWG, who were surprised when they saw it at the opening. Due to this, the YWG expressed some annoyance with ‘Sparrowhawk’. They were also unhappy with the film being presented on a screen larger than the screen for ‘their’ films. Cole expressed a mischievous awareness that the nature of its inclusion might affect the group in this way, expressing that the exhibition needed it to cut through the cosiness of the surrounding atmosphere. This asserts a clear expression of artistic authority in the artwork, creating a tension with the collaborative form of the work while still representing Cole’s aptitude for producing work based on contingent relations.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 7.

Still from the Sparrowhawk film, by Sarah Cole and the Young Women’s Group.

This site-based tracing of Tribe demonstrates how these elements emerged gradually through the workshops and beyond. The influence of Cole and the YWG in the resultant exhibition is evident. However, the next section looks beyond this ‘collaborative’ relationship and locates the human and nonhuman co-producers that were also integral to how Tribe materialised as an exhibition.

Hidden co-producers

Tracing certain parts of the Tribe exhibition has brought to light a number of people beyond the acknowledged collaborative production between the YWG and Cole who played a key part in its emergence. Sam, the youth group coordinator, suggested the use of animal masks in the ‘Onesie Nation’ film, and played a part in the inclusion of grass turf. Furthermore, Cole remarked that Sam and fellow youth worker Alexa played a key role in managing the atmosphere of the workshops. ⁸⁹ Sarah explained,

They [the youth workers] had a very intimate relationship with them, developed mostly through their having spent a lot of time with them on a regular basis (something that is very important for most teenagers – just being present). This was more apparent with those group members who had been part of the group for more than a few years, but the sense of stability was present for all. ⁹⁰

The stability and comfort they brought to the group made it easier for Cole and the YWG to work together. Although the youth workers ‘took a back seat’ during Cole’s time with the YWG, their presence was important for the young women, and this helped produce a space where they could work well together. ⁹¹

As well as Sam and Alexa, Patrick, the gallery technician, made the Buckingham Palace sign for the outside of the gallery, constructed the plinth for the DVD player, and devised and constructed the pulley system for the Onesie outfits. Kiki, one of the gallery assistants, helped in researching, sourcing and buying the drum-kit for the exhibition. What is perhaps more hidden, however, is the productive agency of nonhumans.

John Roberts and Steven Wright state that ‘Collaboration is that space of interconnection between art and non-art, art and other disciplines, that continually tests the social boundaries of where, how, with what, and with whom art might be made’. ⁹² This section draws from this sentiment of ‘testing social boundaries’ in the production of art by contemplating the active role of the Onesies and animal masks in the emergence of the exhibition. This position is supported, as introduced at the outset of the article, through Jane Bennett’s thinking on thing-power materialism, something which bolsters the understanding of nonhumans as active in the production of relations instead of merely an outcome of them. Bennett has a distinctly New Materialist view of existence, resisting the fixed, anthropocentric categorisation of humans and nonhumans:

This is not a world, in the first instance, of subjects and objects, but of various materialities constantly engaged in a network of relations. It is a world populated less by individuals than by groupings or compositions that shift over time. ⁹³

Within this view, Bennett places a vibrant agency with matter, including those constituting nonhuman forms, and remarks their ‘inclination to make connections and form networks of relations with varying degrees of stability’. ⁹⁴ The following part of the article therefore looks at how the Onesies and animal masks entering the YWG workshops altered behaviour and produced effects. ⁹⁵ It is in this regard, I suggest, that they are co-productive.

As discussed earlier, Cole introduced Onesies and animal masks into the group workshops for a number of contingent reasons. The Onesies were originally going to be made from paper, so when the YWG found out they were getting ‘real’ Onesies, Cole explained this spread a collective excitement and sense of meaningfulness through the group and in the project. The ‘real’ Onesies were made from 65 per cent polyester, 35 per cent cotton. They were all the same style, with a hood and a zip up the front. Each member got a choice of colour – navy blue, light blue, grey, pink, orange and turquoise. The animal masks were made from thin plastic, with a length of elastic at the back, which meant the group could wear them easily when running around. There was a selection of a fox, dog, bear, cow, rabbit, sheep or cat. Cole said that when the YWG wore these things, they altered their behaviour and interaction with their environment. They became very attached to them and brought out a performative collectivity in the group. In Cole’s words, the Onesies and masks became ‘vehicles for group behaviour’. ⁹⁶ Seemingly acting as a source of extroverted confidence, they became more playful, acted sillier, jumped about and danced around with each other, in doing so emboldening their group identity. They would only act this way on camera if they had their Onesies and masks on. Not only did this shift in behaviour directly impact the Tribe exhibition – the films in the exhibition epitomise this – but it was an unexpected emergence in the workshops. Cole did not introduce the Onesies and animal masks to purposefully trigger this behaviour. Rather, the behaviour was a contingent occurrence brought about by the thing-power of the Onesies and masks.

Bennett’s thing-power materialism enunciates the ability of nonhumans to exceed human agency and expectation: ‘[it] draws attention to an efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings, designs, or purposes they express or serve’. ⁹⁷ Cole was not to know the specific impact they would have on the YWG, and the relations they went on to create through the exhibition. In this sense, they were in excess of Cole’s expectations. They moved beyond being human instruments, actively altering behaviours and effecting the emergence of the exhibition. However, and echoing Jonathan Darling’s application of Bennett’s thing-power to Home Office asylum letters, I do not want to ‘privilege the material over the discursive’ in relation to the Onesies and animal masks – their matter and ‘excess’ meaning were ‘co-constitutive and mutually emergent’, emerging through their encounters and relations with others in the workshops. ⁹⁸ Indeed, Bennett locates this relationality as central to thing-power: ‘Thing-power is also a relational effect, a function of several things operating at the same time or in conjunction with one another’. ⁹⁹ Thus, it was the Onesies and animal masks working in conjunction with other humans and nonhumans in the site of Tribe that saw it emerge in its specific form. Marston et al.’s concept of site, therefore, can be thought of as a hanging-together of multiple human and nonhuman co-producers. In the instance of Tribe, some of these were acknowledged by Cole, which categorised her work as collaborative.

The co-production of the Tribe exhibition cannot be attributed to just Cole and the YWG. Instead, it should be understood as emerging from a specific set of human and nonhuman relations during the workshops and beyond. ‘Co-’production, I suggest, is this series of localised relations making up the site. Importantly, it was through the specific combination and order of these emergent relations that the exhibition materialised in the way it did. This specificity of the relations is an important part of Marston et al.’s site-ontology work and is underpinned by Deleuze’s notion of the virtual and the actual. This is used to animate ‘the ways that a site might be considered a conduit both for repetitions of similar orders and practices and for the emergence of new, creative relations or singularities’. ¹⁰⁰ They articulate, ‘Deleuze describes the “actual” and “virtual” planes as, respectively, the states of affairs and bodies “actualized in sensible composites”. . . within the world, and the vast regimes of differential potentialities through which those actualizations resolve themselves’. ¹⁰¹ For Deleuze, and by association Marston et al., the ‘virtual’ is ‘the regime of potentiality’ – that is, infinite possibility, whereas the ‘actual’ consists of ‘instances of articulation’ – the ‘material actualizations’ of potentiality. ¹⁰² Practically speaking, this provides an understanding of things emerging (material actualizations) that, ‘given other combinations of potential and actual relations, would resolve themselves differently’. ¹⁰³ The Tribe exhibition emerged, therefore, through a specific combination of human and nonhuman relations. Consequently, to attempt to trace the exhibition’s production through the lens of its collaborative form would present a restricted understanding of the relations that cohered around its emergence.

Marston et al. explain, ‘through the activity of intensive relations, extensive space finds moments of coherence’. ¹⁰⁴ The Tribe workshops, with a focus on the production of art through collaborative methods, can be seen as a purposeful ‘activity of intensive relations’ that pulled potentiality into ‘moments of coherence’, creating a specific combination of relations between humans and nonhumans to emerge. These relations led to the conditions from which the exhibition was derived. Cole had explained early on in our meetings that she did not have a particular idea for the exhibition – that the process of working with the YWG was more important than the actual product. ¹⁰⁵ When pushed for any ideas for the exhibition at our first meeting, she said she really wanted to resist any prior direction. In this sense, Cole was open to the contingency of ‘site’. This ethos of process over product was further enforced when Cole stated she thought good collaborative work was, partly, about the duration spent with collaborators – the more time spent with them the better. ¹⁰⁶ Accordingly, it is possible to think of the Tribe workshops and collaborative work in art projects more broadly, as productive in the sense that they allowed for an intensity of relations to unfold within a specific creative context. Cole’s skill was to attune herself to this intensity and mediate an exhibition that temporarily encapsulated this in material form.

Conclusion

Thinking of Tribe through a site-based approach has facilitated an understanding of its production that goes beyond its collaboration, identifying the exhibition as emerging from a broader collection of processual, contingent relations. This was done by tracing specific exhibition features through the workshops and locating their linkages to various humans and nonhumans. This brought to light a series of hidden co-producers, including gallery assistants, technicians and, supported by Bennett’s thing-power materialism, animal masks and Onesies. The intention of this article has not been to ‘uncover’ all co-producers of Tribe, of which there are multiple. ¹⁰⁷ Rather, it has been to identify that collaborative art, as an art form, works by creating a division of labour whereby selected co-production is acknowledged and included in the work: ‘the socially produced character of art is made explicit in the form of the work’. ¹⁰⁸ Where Roberts broadly states that co-production is made visible in collaborative work, the case of Tribe has offered a more nuanced suggestion that the artwork acknowledges it has been made with selected others. This maintains a distance between the co-producers of Tribe and its collaborators.

What a site-based approach can embrace and articulate, this article has demonstrated, is the processual and contingent elements of art production. It can also show how the artist navigates this, in doing so offering a nuanced insight into artistic work beyond their individual, internal agency. What I would like to suggest by way of conclusion is that such an approach can travel past collaborative art and be applied to other forms of artistic practice. Take a painter for example. The form of the work is produced by the artist making gestural marks on canvas or another surface. Taking a site-based approach to this relationship between artist, paint and canvas could tease out other relations that collected around the artist and led to them making the specific marks at a specific time. ¹⁰⁹ This opens up the painting process as an emergent site of intensity which the artist attunes themselves and navigates to create a painting, just as Cole did with pulling together the Tribe exhibition from the workshops. What is significant here is the understanding that artistic production, in whatever form, emerges from a site of intensity, a site made up of other specific co-productive relations. This site of relations can be coaxed out and traced, offering specific insight into artistic form, production, methods and techniques. In the case of Tribe, such an approach deepened the understanding of its collaborative production by identifying this was supported by a series of human and nonhuman co-producers. It also shed light on Cole’s way of working.

Taking a site-based approach to art production has its empirical demands. Although I do not have the space for a full discussion of this here, I would suggest we need to look at art production not as a creative endeavour from A to B – A being the artist’s idea and B being the finished artwork. Rather, it should be thought of as emerging from a processual and often contingent set of relations which cohere around the artist as they move through the world. This also means that we need to look beyond the agency and action of the artist, towards their position in broader sites of relations which come to impact their work. ¹¹⁰ Empirical research into artistic production requires a methodological approach which can temporarily grasp and make sense of this mutability. Based on researching Tribe, I would suggest two things. First is to seek out what the artist may assume insignificant, trivial or everyday in their process of working. This could offer crucial insight into hidden aspects central to the production of their work. Second is developing a dialogic relationship with the artist(s) involved so that you openly explore their production process together. Here, the methodological approach becomes based less on interviews per se, and instead a dialogue tracing important relations and events. A fixed set of questions would apply a frame around the site of production leading to a restricted understanding of the relations present. Adopting and building on these practical methodological points, I hope could support future geographical research in developing a more nuanced understanding of artistic production.