Who creates the conditions to care—or not care—for conflict? Conflicts, much like education, are replicated in loops, often through forms that persistently ignore structural exclusions, differences, and violences, and are many times reinforced through and into multiple collaborations and educational and infrastructural contexts. The institutional and professional structures I have experienced tend to chronically deprioritise space for conflict and discussion, and instead move towards dismissive education (“go educate yourself”) and unquestioned productivity (moving on without addressing harm). In situations with colleagues when we have asked the questions: How do we handle this together? What tools do we have? We have struggled to find ways of responding. This essay considers these questions through examples of conflict, and moves towards finding practices that build my—and hopefully our, dear reader—capacities to figure it out.
Moving in the brilliant echo of Sara Ahmed's book Complaint!, where complaining is understood as a trans*feminist tool that can transform structural problems, this essay invites you to act as a feminist ear and to listen to, read, and witness quotidian conflicts around you. Rather than eradicating these conflicts (and/or cancelling people, for example), bypassing an acknowledgement of their lack of space for reflection and discussion, this essay hopes to consider the conditions that day-to-day institutional and collaborative conflicts so often reflect; conditions of structural ableisms and racisms that must be transformed.
Caring, minimising harm, and transforming the ways we work together might be done in such a way that our bodyminds are able to be in a space without being required to endure harmful conditions and then falling out, burning out, or quitting in order to exit a situation. We are those of us who are involved in the work of undoing ritualised harms, and we (meaning those of us who identify with anti-racist trans*feminisms) understand what might be needed to care, both in our work-learning and in those structures that we move in and between.
Institutions themselves are cyclically violent places that maintain their violences through bureaucratic, situational, and social structures. When institutional practice is perceived as the normative context for working together (in or outside of these physical buildings), it comes as no surprise that strategies for how to manage conflict are not modelled, discussed, or enacted.
In the following section of this text, I share the conditions of a particular conflict that I was involved in (with personal information omitted). In the case of this conflict, I ended up leaving the project altogether because of what appeared to be irresolvable differences in values. This story, though it is, in theory, a single unremarkable experience, presents an opportunity to think through and discuss what it is that conflict produces in precarious working situations. I address this conflict, describe what went wrong, and share the practices and behaviours of the collaboration in question that maintained institutional violences outside of the institution’s walls, continuing its unchanged and unquestioned pedagogical practices. As I hope this conflict illustrates, there is an urgent need to create a toolkit filled with ways of approaching conflict in collaborations in the arts.
I work as an artist and designer based in Berlin, Germany, moving between contexts largely dependent on state funding that supports my work. My practice moves with collectivity and collaboration, and so the working environment varies according to both infrastructural conditions, like the possibility of funding, and intrapersonal conditions, like working from a shared political framework—or not.
In my collective work, which revolves around the studio that I maintain and care for as MELT with Iz Paehr, we originate our practice with principles of disability justice and trans*feminisms at the centre, and work with a process-based practice that allows for failure and collective practices of learning. In collaborations that I am part of, I connect with collaborators on themes that circle around unmaking unquestioned conditions of hyperscale GAFAM/GAMA, BATX, FA(A)NG, MAMAA’s technological dominances through, for example, inventing other metaphors like “CS” with Helen Pritchard, working with Black Feminist-led poetic intervention with oracle(s), and maintaining a solo writing practice that unfolds into pedagogies, writings, workshops, and experiments. I mention this because most of my work begins from a collective position—but not all of it. With each collaboration comes different positions and levels of commitment; some groups meet only to develop one idea or to find out what might be of mutual interest between us, while others commit to working together as a structure in the longer term, positioning a whole practice based on a common agreement.
When I was invited into the beginnings of a project with a new collaborator, in which multiple other colleagues would be included, I thought, “why not?” At the time this “why not?” came for me, I was working in some artistic research contexts while simultaneously working a cleaning job that supported my everyday expenses. The conditions of my migrant precarity, and the combination of not having stable funding, wanting to practise within collaborations, and wanting to move out of cleaning as a primary support for my work, turned my “why not?” into a “reactive-yes” quite quickly, which brought me into the project. Had I been in a more secure place, both financially and otherwise, I hope I would have considered more fully the conditions of our work together, and wondered further: How does this work relate to my larger practice? Are our values aligned? What can I learn from this work?
In the Possibilities Podcast, in the episode “Possibilities of Listening with Alexis Pauline Gumbs”, Gumbs speaks about what she moved through to find her “yes”. She shares how difficult it was for her to actually say “no”, having practised doing so through the entire month of “No-vember”, but that through that month of “no” she found what she really did want to say yes to. Finding this yes by saying no created space for the clarity of what a yes could be. These yes(es), as Gumbs says, are more about feeling into what is right for you and your intentional work, and they sit in contrast to reactive-yes(es) that are more likely formed in response to scarcity and precarity. My reactive-yes, which brought about some initial work on the proposal, then—after waiting about a year—became a “financial-yes” thanks to the funding body that granted the project. So my initial why not? became a reactive-yes which was then solidified as a financial-yes.
After we began to work in the group, the massively different perspectives that we came from became clear. It was a bit like when you meet your friend’s friends and you realise you’re a bit of an odd one out for your friend, and so for you, those other friends are really very different from yourself. Each of us came from very different perspectives in our relation to both collaborative and technical practice.
In my experience, meeting new collaborators with different perspectives can be generative when each member of the group remains open and respectful of difference. In this case, things went differently. We began working under a tough set of conditions because myself and the other person who was socialised as a woman fulfilled the unquestioned roles of care work, including the reproductive and intellectual labour of furthering the ideas behind the proposal. To do justice to the theories and practices that we included in our joint proposal, our collaborative practice would require fundamental transformative justice-oriented work to avoid replicating the same colonial, anti-trans ableism that existed in the unquestionably violent materials that we would attempt to approach in the project. This project’s scope was remarkably ambitious, and relied on the institutional rewards that come from ignoring ableism and racism. By this I mean: because of the funding structure, we were positioned to receive money based on criteria observing productivity and legibility. A way to work with disabled brilliance and anti-racism could have been to centre methods of slowing down and practising unknowing.
Check-box and parachute logics that often operate in freelance art worlds continued in this project where, because of my position as the “feminist killjoy” and my care for disability justice and trans*/queer, anti-racist considerations, other collaborators felt as though they did not need to act as feminist accomplices because I “had it covered”. They did not understand my struggle as intrinsically related to their own. Through this check-box logic, the project could be seen as trans*feminist in nature because of the inclusion of these theories and my presence in the collaboration. In practice, thought, this was not a trans*feminist project, because the calls of these theories and practices would have necessitated a transformation of all of our work and methods, which was not possible.
During one research meeting in the beginning of our work together, I learned more about ssl certificates—which tie public and private encryptions together to manage linking websites—in a learning-as-we-went kind of way. In this same meeting, together we read “Decolonisation is not a Metaphor” (2012) by Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang, which brilliantly formulates ways in which colonialism shows up consistently within work that claims to have a decolonial aim, yet does not "bring about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life”. In this germinal essay, Tuck and Yang assert that this is what decolonisation largely does.
To juxtapose ssl certificates, which govern potentials for connection online, next to “Decolonisation is not a Metaphor”, which asserts necessities for movement and for giving land and space back to those from whom it has been stolen, was potentially extremely generative. What could it mean to consider technological protocols of connection with their colonial histories alongside the need for indigenous sovereignty? However, after reading this text together, it became clear that the reproductive labour, conditions of gendering, and care for different materials shared by collaborators continued to go unquestioned.
Half of the collaborators had not read this text, which was cited in our collective application. I was shocked when I understood that they felt comfortable signing their name to something they had never read, agreeing to its premise without consideration, without understanding the undertaking we were committing to, showing no consideration for the basis of our artistic research proposal. I had not expected this from the collaborators who had agreed to work on a project with explicit aims to consider the meaning of violent classification, extraction, and imperial forms of knowing the world. In this meeting, where we had attempted to share our different knowledges to learn collectively, my interest in understanding computational systems in more technical depth did not outweigh the trouble and discomfort that arose.
Why is it that when we speak about white people giving up resources, and the need to practise unlearning the violently dehumanising coloniality of being, the experience becomes so quickly threatening? In this project, it was painfully clear. After being labelled as the feminist killjoy by my previous collaborator (as if one feminist in the room is enough!), and after being misgendered multiple times by a new collaborator who had no practice around caring for pronouns, my reactive-yes/financial-yes became a NO. I could not and would not work on a project where what I had understood to be my role as a collaborator was in fact to be a teacher. We couldn’t meet on grounds of learning together, mutual interest, or material experimentation with so little cared for in terms of the intellectual underpinnings of the processes we had proposed to undertake. Yes! yes, yes … no, No, NO!
After leaving the project, I reflected through my own writing on what had gone wrong, which led to the idea of writing this essay about the experience and, with friends and colleagues, trying to understand why the conflict could not be attended to. After some time, I realised that I consistently placed blame on myself. Much like Ahmed’s reflections in Complaint!, I thought of myself as the problem; “When you point out the problem, you become the problem.” I kept thinking: I didn’t recognise what I was getting into, I wasn’t clear enough, I didn’t have protocols of care, I didn’t find a way to slow processes down when they felt problematic. In contrast to other collective practices of mine, I wondered if coming from my position as a white, neurodivergent, and trans*gendered person meant that I alone didn’t have the capacity to slow things down, to discuss problems that came up, and to support the processes that would be needed to address the problematic thinking and practices that I had gotten involved in in this collaboration. I blamed myself: how did I not recognise this from the start? How could I be so unaware?
My other ongoing collaborations, that work from anti-racist, disability justice, trans*feminist praxis, produce somewhat of an echo chamber. As a freelance artist, it often becomes the case that I do not collaborate with people who do not already share very similar values with me. The opacity needed to create space for care for myself and my disabled, trans*, people of color kin relates to the ways in which space is accessible to me and my collaborators. When the door is already too heavy to open, in a literal or a metaphorical sense, encountering further harms through ideological and embodied differences with collaborators becomes even more difficult or impossible to endure.
In this work it then seems that filter bubbles of potential collaborative partners are formed before I’ve even met those in question; there is a kind of sorting through experiences that do and do not align, which denies space for conflict as a potentially important space of working together. As most of my collaborations have so far come from institutional contexts, including the conflict ridden-one I spoke of above, it has led me to wonder: Why don’t institutions themselves, as highly conflict-filled spaces, and as places that often form communities of diverging positionalities, teach us to work with and within the conflict and difference that will inevitably arise?
After leaving this project, my former collaborator sent me an email letting me know that they were transforming my fee from the project into residencies for others. Included in this open call was the sentence: "We highly encourage applicants from underrepresented communities.” I wondered and worried: What does this awkward statement mean? Who is protected here? And who is this “we”?
When reading this statement, I had a stress response. I left the project on the basis of untransformable differences, by which I mean realities and embodied differences that cannot become otherwise, and the rejection of the possibility of knowing another way. To advertise to underrepresented communities, like my own, so strongly recalled the check-box logic that had already emerged within the troubled beginnings of the project. It seemed to clearly set up its logic as follows: “If we have another X (insert minority) person, then we can still call the project X (trans*feminist, decolonial, anti-racist, anti-ableist (add identity here)).” By replicating this logic, “person X”, like myself, becomes burnt out, gaslighted, exploited and/or dismissed when the going gets tough or when differences in opinion and capacity to manage conflict are not able to be held and tended to by the group.
Then how can we, as art workers, take responsibility, so that when we, art workers, operate as freelancers, there is a place for harms to be attended to? How can we stop defaulting to practices of public shaming, so that when things go wrong and breaks must be made, we do not silently or vociferously or consistently take people down on social media, or whisper behind each other’s backs? I have heard that gossip is essential information, and I don’t disagree. However, the question I am posing here is that within arts institutional education—that is still insistent on producing creatives as those with singular, individual prowess—what other energies, tools, and practices can be taught and learned so that conflict, difference, and moving through discomfort can be trained for, and made possible—even generative—even when those who might attempt to work together come from very different backgrounds? Paying attention to these questions will help new collaborations stand more of a chance to work safely, respectfully, and fruitfully.
The conflict outlined above highlights the significant structural differences between one-off collaborations and collective work, the latter often better positioned to commit to working through hurdles and growing together. In shorter-term collaborative work, in my experience, there is less space for focusing energy on the past, present, and future of the work, because the terms of meeting are not (yet) predicated on a lasting development of agreements, values, safety, and trust. If conflict arises in a short-term collaboration, the work required to resolve this conflict is often greater than the work of the collaboration itself, resulting in an exit-response. That the conventional approach to conflict is to ignore it, entirely removing groups or persons or calling out publicly, clearly illustrates that there is a missing set of tools for attending to and working with difference. In longer-term collaborations there is often more space for moving through conflict, however finding tools that allow for transformation still require commitment, learning, and sustained attention over time. In response, I (alongside many others) am thinking towards a set of tools needed to attend to conflicts, rather than to ignore them.
We must find ways to hold discomfort, and to understand conflict as that which can be transformed. We must practise holding each other accountable, especially in contexts of precarity, in collaborations both short and long term. In institutions, conflict must be embraced and attended to, so that these necessary tools can be developed, and so that difference and discomfort are not avoided but can be perceived as things that make transformation thinkable, actionable, possible. How can we position conflict not as the inevitability of rupture, but as possibility for connection?
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