Collaboration towards DEMONTAGE

I wanted to work with someone else than myself...

... so I looked around what for a branch or practice interest me and where i thought my competences as artist may be involved in a realisation. My student status allowed me to work for free, as the projected experience would give worth and make concrete some of my competences. Speculation interfere all domains.

As i didn't have much experience in offering and presenting myself, i took on a status of something like a consultant, producing observations, analysis, hypothesis and working fields to be used by the partner for his mandate. In that case, the partner is an architect and the involvement of an artist in architecture is a well-known and large debate. What could be the result of a post post-modern architect working with an artist whose duty is not to fill an empty place but who is involved from the beginning in the project . The result was quite brutal: the confrontation of my approach and expressed requirements for an intervention and his mandate made it impossible for him to continue. There were too many contradictions between the requirements of the urbanistic program and the real situation of the studied site. The abstracted and for him formulated demands toward a realisation brought the mandate to be understood as an impossible one, where too much cynism and ignorance had to be compromised.

At that point, the situation required a new configuration, something could happen. Having opened a concrete field of investigation&realisation, it was possible, and maybe even necessary, to produce something that may respond to the percepted field. This production could string together forces that were concerned by that field. On a distorted way, my artistic intention came to reorganize the forces concerned by a first mandate to produce an object corresponding to a concrete field; a physical site and a field of inquiries.
In fact the mandate should have been completely reformulated and so on the whole urbanistic program and the conception of the city its politic. I don't have to give a lot of arguments why this wouldn't really happen.

So, something like a "classical" kind of collaboration failed and the first intended object to be produced never came to life. But... A field of forces was opened for both, and in facts much more, partners where each one could transfer his competences/positition/activity and feel back those forces investigating his own field of production and perception. It is possible to affirm that on different scales, several persons experienced an emancipation of their daily field of action and production, mine included.
The field of collaboration I contracted was a small, time-limited, specific and non-habitual one. A group of actors reunified around a object to be realized. None of them quitted or stopped its activity, all were involved in the production, with different levels of presence and intervention. All followed the project until now ( I mean now! the intensity altough is not the same, but a memory remains and may be reactivated ... ). Now I have also to be explicit on the point that I was the energetic, autoritarian and arbitrarian link who made that field consistent/real, pushed by my desire of realising a certain object. I and my desire are the energetic line trough that field, making it active a definite time.
It is not really that way that I imagined the nature of a collaboration, on the other side I was able to produce something that required the involvement and investition of organs that are not concerned by art production. A lot of reasons may have motivated them to collaborate, and a lot of them don't deal with art or my personal concerns. It is even nothing really spectacular, as this happens a number of times, and in that specific project there was even no big risk for anyone of us. It just made possible for me to produce and realize a thing that I would never have been able to do alone.

Now I insist that this process is not the art piece, it is an economical and political form of production within another system.