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Blogpost: “What makes us a collective?”
http://cultural-sustainability.eu/2014/11/19/what-makes-us-a-collective/
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Artistic processes driving sustainable change
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Workshop
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Introduction
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What makes us a collective?
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What is threatening our collectives?
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Words as a form of interaction
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What happens when we put nonverbal interaction to the forefront?
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My name is Casper and I am a composer, trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in 2006. Aside from my activities as a composer, I have been working for a number of years as a career guide, helping newcomers getting a foothold on the Danish labor market. On top of that, I recently started as a student on a Master’s in Educational Anthropology at Aarhus University in Copenhagen.
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In all of my activities, as a composer, a career guide and as a student in Educational Anthropology, I a headline to sum up what I am trying to do, namely “Building Sound Collectives”. I am trying to figure out how we can create culturally sustainable collectives. I am doing this through as a composer, using artistic methods; as a practitioner, making connections between people; and through academia, studying, reading, and soon I will be doing field work as well.
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A collective is a group of people
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First of all, we must find out what mechanisms make us establish collectives in the first place. And what keeps them going. It seems that what initiates and sustains a collective is that people in it have some activities in common.
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At a basic level of human interaction, we are producing and consuming things together.
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At our workplaces and educational institutions, we engage in activities around production. Producing goods, services and knowledge is the main common motor, in these places, that will drive the collective – in a sound direction or not.
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In our spare time, we are consuming things together. We go shopping, watch a movie, eat, drink and take drugs. Consumption is the driving force in the collectives we build in our spare time, and again this may go in a sustainable direction or the opposite.
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What about playing football, dancing, playing music, painting, making jokes etc., where do these activities fit in? I suggest we add a second layer of activity:
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With this model, I am suggesting that there is a connection between what we are doing when we are playing and what we are doing when we are producing and consuming: Our playing activities draw and feed back upon our activities around consumption and production.
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hierarchy; competition; exclusion;
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words are categorising things, and therefore they are tools for hierarchisation of human relationships;
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collaboration
curiosity
empathy
seeing the other peronsn as a whole human being; not focusing on their status or
humor;