Collaboration Creates Community

“There is an art to flocking: staying separate enough not to crowd each other, aligned enough to maintain a shared direction, and cohesive enough to always move towards each other.” – adrienne maree brown

Driven by the conviction that we are living in a time in which differences are huge – in opinions, equality of opportunity, generations – the question arose whether we could find common ground to encounter each other, understand each other and learn from each other, despite our mutual differences. Therefore, Nest organised its annual programme around artistic collaboration between artists and curators, but also with institutions of various sizes. It has turned out to be a process of learning by doing par excellence – no partnership is the same and, as a result, the playing field is always different. Still, in practice, there are laws, ranging from the seemingly self-evident and shockingly simple to profound and complex. Sharing powers of decision, investing time, building mutual trust, transparency, the wonders of synergy, but also letting go of complete control.

The book Emergent Strategy, Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017) by adrienne maree brown turned out to be an inspiring manual. The book – whose genre is hard to pin down, part self-help, part manifesto – is about philosophies around building collaborations. With poetical metaphors, personal anecdotes and often humorous footnotes, brown guides you through strategies and philosophical questions in order to strengthen collective capacities and change the world around us. Collaboration, she argues, is the best antidote for polarisation and distrust. “How do we turn our collective full-bodied intelligence towards collaboration, if that is the way we will survive?” brown asks themself aloud. They guide the reader along the most natural forms of collaboration in nature: how birds fly in swarms, how ants build together, and how fungi develop incredible growths everywhere on earth. They then translate that to a human scale. Visual art, poetry, literature: they are art forms that are predominantly solitary, and the freedom this entails – you do not need anything or anybody to simply make a start – has always appealed to me. Can this freedom coincide with the artist who, if only once, opens up their practise of the world to someone else’s (critical) view?

Double Plus Good is the finale of a series of exhibitions in Nest that examined different forms of collaboration and solidarity. In the exhibition Telephone (November 2022 to January 2023), the work of two seemingly totally different artists, two different generations, a completely different medium, blended together in a surrealist choreography. More than 350 self-portraits by Philip Akkerman sought a connection with the self-playing pianos, synthesisers and musical compositions of jazz musician Jameszoo. Non Profit at All Costs (September 2022 to November 2022) was an exhibition in which artist and guest curator Farida Sedoc combined the cultural roots and legacy of black music and protest movements with other artists and iconic images from magazines, newspapers and digital media. In every moment a junction (May to July 2022), an exhibition that ran parallel to the Venice Biennale, artists invited by melanie bonajo showed their urgent need for physical encounters, intimacy and collectivity in a symbiotic group exhibition. For the music festival Down the Rabbit Hole (July 2022), for which Nest curates the art programme, 18 painters made a Gesamtkunstwerk that was 32 metres long and six metres high. And The Grand Palace of Everyone (March to May 2023) was a collaboration with art space No Limits! Art Castle and showed 26 collaborations between artists who engage with the institutional world, and artists who to this day have often been refused access, for various reasons. The exhibition asked questions about participation within the different, parallel, art worlds that our rich landscape encompasses, and whether we are served well by an art history that is eager to label and prefers to put art and artists in boxes and movements.

And now Double Plus Good, in which we focus specifically on occasional collaborations. On the one hand, the exhibition shows artists who place themselves in a vulnerable position by opening up their oeuvre to another artist and thus, tentatively, let each other’s ideas merge on paper, in film and installations. On the other hand, Nest works together with Aveline de Bruin who manages the magnificent and large De Bruin-Heijn collection, and Laurie Cluitmans, curator at Centraal Museum. They represent different domains within the art world, and share the desire to borrow from each other, to learn and to join forces.

The artworks in Double Plus Good were created through the coming together of different backgrounds and generations. Collaborations between teachers and students, between lovers and lonely hearts, between artists with a shared history. In their work, they enter into a conversation with each other, challenge each other to take the next step or dive deeper into the matter at hand. This does not mean that collaborations are by definition harmonious, peaceful and equal symbioses. In Do Not Abandon Me, the artworks by Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin in this exhibition, you feel the weight of the collaboration. Bourgeois started the series of works by painting torsos on paper, after which she gave the images to Emin, who was free to do with them what she wanted. ‘I felt like I was holding the baton of time, of history’, Emin later said in an interview. She carried the drawings around with her across the world for two years, but did not dare touch the colour fields with her dip pen. Frozen and too scared of ruining the extraordinary paintings of her great icon. In one day, she made additions to all sixteen gouaches in pen and ink and drew smaller figures who connect with the torsos like lovers. I think I can see that sense of unrest and doubt in the trembling line that eventually found its way along the pink, red, blue bodies of Bourgeois, and I experience this as a great force in the work.

For Nest, collaboration turned out to be what running is for some people: you become better by training, you learn techniques, and in the long term it takes on a slightly addictive quality. By building long-term relationships, a growing community develops around them that is multi-faceted and encounters each other on a deeper level. It is the foundation of Nest, whose name I’ve increasingly come to see as a powerful metaphor. A metaphor that would have fit perfectly in adrienne maree brown’s book with examples from nature. After all, a bird has to fly away to build its nest and is highly dependent on its environment for this: the ecosystem that enables the bird to collect various twigs, feathers, hairs, as well as pieces of plastic and flattened cigarette butts, in order to create a sheltered spot for guests and offspring. If it only stays on its branch, singing beautifully, nothing happens.