A request for my thoughts on cooperation, or 'cooperative' working, in and with art.

First questions that arise: who am I to speak about this? And: do we want to borrow and adopt terms and strategies from corporate contexts, or appropriate and change them to negate dominant relationships? Why are you asking me? What am I responding to? How many thoughts and experiences can I cooperatively share as an ‘essay’ if I can be paid for about four hours of preparation and writing? To what extent can performing ‘laziness’ be fair and valuable?

One possible answer: creativity and imagination are not exclusive to the domain of the arts. Humans and non-humans are resourceful and cooperative in all kinds of professions and forms of work. They create, bring change, and broaden the status quo. We sense we are interdependent and respond accordingly. A perhaps cynical voice would say that cooperation is necessary for survival. It is not morally better. It is also not something that is 'just now' happening in the arts.

Cooperation means: 'A farm, business, or other organization which is owned and run jointly by its members, who share the profits or benefits. "We run the agency as a workers' cooperative,” Oxford Dictionary tells us after a few seconds on Google.

So, what are the profits and benefits in art? Is it happiness, beauty, inspiration, surprise, deconstruction? Is it credits, a CV and self-promotion? Is cooperation in art a matter of give and take, quid pro quo? Do we attach ourselves to someone's name by offering them, in this industry of scarcity, a platform? What is honesty in a cooperative artistic practice?

Another possible answer: more, and lesser, orchestrated encounters that lead to cooperation can bring energy, development, creation. A work of art is a coming together of knowledge, idea, craft, imagination, and composition. Cooperation is often a necessary foundation. Art requires materials or expertise from an artist. This is nothing new. Artists have collaborated with collectors or other forms of patronage. Artists joined each other to operate as a collective to protect themselves from the risks of the profession. Resisting an individualist profit-driven society by deliberately slowing down, by challenging authorship and ego.

That reality is here. As curators, we like to organize and rearrange the various forces in the context in which we work together, seek to de-emphasize power structures where possible and if more cooperation is desired—protect and facilitate it. We also know what language to speak and which sounding buzz words to use to survive ourselves through cultural capital.

Anno 2022/3, a curator should be able to quickly write down some important thoughts about cooperation as easily as about ‘care’, ‘community’ or ‘colonialism’ – to stick with the ‘c’s’.

What I do not have at hand after many years of cooperative practices, apparently, is the urge to preach about it from the position of the arts. To occupy a seemingly marginalized corner of otherness and pat myself on the back that we are doing better than any other who’s questioning the existing systems. Borrowing words from the corporate and other fields reveals exactly how it is: in many ways, the arts are at the center of society and relate to it; our labor is part of the same structures, and our shared profits – and losses – are so, too.

It is the deceleration, surprise, mesmerizing force, comfort, or discomfort of imagination that can pull us out of a familiar, privileged, individualized perspective.

It might even get better when we liberate ourselves from the capital of buzz words.