Although published over six month later than it should have been, Not Going It Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating is a project very close to my heart. It started off with Paul O’Neill inviting me to collaborate on reworking a text he’d published before – first in Art Monthly in 2007 and then reworked for a Manifesta Journal issue on collaboration, which came out in 2009–10, and which I’d referenced in my own thinking about the highly collaborative nature of so much artistic as well as curatorial work.
Paul had been invited to revisit the text by the New York-based organisation apexart, where they had noticed an increase of collaborative proposals for their annual open call, and they wanted to explore this further in a publication on the issue. The book we’ve ended up with, and for which Paul selected other contributors, is a mere hop, skip and jump across the myriad ways in which and reasons why people collaborate, but it does provide an interesting range of entry points across different continents. The book has an introduction by co-editor Elizabeth Larison and finishes with a meandering conversation between Paul and me, followed by a short text, titled ‘Beyond Hierarchy: Articulating Collaboration’, which builds on my PhD research.
Other contributors include the entry on collaboration by Nikolett Erös and Eszter Lézár for tranzit’s ‘Curatorial Dictionary’ from 2011; a series of vignettes that underline the hard work in varying circumstances that goes into collaboration, beautifully woven together by María Berríos, Pip Day and Sofía Olascoaga; a re-edit of a recently published text on ‘care’ by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung; an imaginative and informative elaboration on collaboration across former Eastern European countries by Agnieszka Pindera; an insightful set of case studies in West Africa by Serubiri Moses; a slight re-edit of a carefully crafted essay on a project in Mexico City by Nina Möntmann; a lengthy extension of Gregory Sholette’s thoughts on the aftermath of ruangrupan’s documenta 15 (first published by e-flux); and the current ideas of the youth boards of Index and Publics on collaboration. The book can be ordered directly from apexart and is available as a printed volume and a PDF.
Gerrie van Noord 