It’s been really gratifying to be able to continue thinking about how we talk about collaboration and how ideas about collaborative ways of working are disseminated through publications. Of course I do that in my teaching at the Royal College of Art, but recently I was invited to do a talk at Kingston University as well as Central Saint Martins. The former was upon the invitation of a former student who now runs one of the four MAs whose students I encountered there; the latter was initiated by students on the MA Culture, Criticism, which is now headed by a former RCA colleague. Doing the talks in quick succession meant I could recycle the material gathered, but it also gave me the opportunity to think through what might resonate with each groups specifically: the first occasion presented me with students who had all just started the first year of their two-year course; the second with students in the final stages of their two-year degree, while working collaboratively with students from other courses.
A useful entry point for both talks was a summary of ideas on collaboration in curatorial discourse as gathered by Nikolett Eröss and Eszter Lázár, members of the tranzit.hu collective, as part of their ‘Curatorial Dictionary’, initiated around 2011, which was reprinted in Not Going It Alone. I’ve used the ‘Curatorial Dictionary’ in my own teaching for years as it is such a useful text to consider the vocabulary that we all adopt so easily without necessarily always questioning whether we do indeed mean or understand the same thing when using the same words.
Gerrie van Noord 