Collaboration

The importance of working with others (Audio clip)

In August 2009, Joyce Majiski and Maria Luisa de Villa spoke about the importance of working with other artists as part of the LLAMA Project. At the time  Joyce had had the opportunity to work with Haruko and Cesar for many days as part of LLAMA’s Yukon residency. Maria Luisa had recently arrived in the north and was about to immerse herself in the collective experience with the others.

Listen to what they had to say about the experience of working with other artists in this 2.5 minute recording.

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Collaboration in the Arts: Why? What? When?

by Haruko Okano

Several descriptive words come to mind when thinking about collaboration in the arts. Reciprocal, developing new skills and future exchanges.

Effective collaboration in the arts, as in other fields, has its own set of necessary skills. Like the general population, some are better at it than others. Nor is it something that all artists are interested in practicing.

Collaboration is processed based, and takes time to establish. When done well all participants should come away from the experience with more knowledge and breadth of positive experience than when it began. It is a challenge to balancing your own ideas with those of others. It demands power sharing, allowing for all voices to be heard and respected and input of ideas to be inclusive and integrated into the whole.

Well-balanced collaborations carry the earmark of all involved not as individual signatures but as a new group signature. Ideas and their process and interpretation must be developed through group process and understood in common. Collaboration in the arts sometimes is the art itself.

You may ask why collaborate when it seems much simpler and faster just to do it yourself.

Collaboration has the potential to combine skills and creativity beyond what one individual might offer. It often stimulates creative inspiration in each other that may be lacking when working solo. Collaborations expand the potential size and complexity of what you can develop as an art project and can cross-pollinate between artists, between artists and others outside of the arts. Collaboration is, and can be, a sustainable relationship that leads to other opportunities to sustain your artistic practice. It can inform your solo practice because it is the practice field for articulating your own process, finding common ground among your peers and learning from other artists in your media, and from other arts disciplines, while contributing your own expertise.