I'm a Finnish-Dutch artist, organiser and teacher living in Amsterdam-Noord. In my work I explore the revolutionary potential of collective creativity. As an autodidact DJ, filmmaker and anarchist, clubs are my art school and protests my phd.
I'm a Finnish-Dutch artist, organiser and teacher living in Amsterdam-Noord. In my work I explore the revolutionary potential of collective creativity. As an autodidact DJ, filmmaker and anarchist, clubs are my art school and protests my phd.
2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
Collaborator: Elke Uitentuis
Tags: Amsterdam, education, research
Placing collectivity at the center of art education has been a subject of research at the DAS Graduate School since the recent pandemic. The aim is to strengthen mutual solidarity, stimulate political awareness and learn to recognise the creative value of collective ways of working.
We believe it is invaluable that our students learn what it means to work together as a creative collective. Working in a creative collective is fundamentally different from working together in groups to hand in a given assignment. As a creative collective you must jointly determine the content and conditions from which to start, jointly monitor the process and jointly achieve the self-determined goals. This requires different skills than working in a partnership where the tasks are defined in advance, where a structure is established in advance and the goals are determined in advance.
As part of a creative collective, you learn to embrace the process, to give and take, to move flexibly, to share authorship, to deal with conflicting interests, conflict resolution, to be creative in an organic way, generosity and letting go. If we learn these skills, we can learn to practice solidarity. The skills allow you to form selfless alliances to pursue higher goals together. And because major social changes are needed to avert the crises that are heading our way—climate crisis, institutional racism, housing shortage, etc.—we want to invest in these skills and in collectivity. Together we are strong!
But how do you guide lessons in collective creativity? After all, as a collective you have to determine and implement a lot jointly. How can you do such a D.I.T. process (Do It Together) as a coach or teacher? What learning objectives are involved and what are the different steps in the learning process? We created a lesson program for Collective Creativity that we use as a guideline. We also hope to inspire other courses. We are convinced that when we invest broadly in collectivity, we invest in a future. A future in which we can jointly implement necessary changes.
The learning objectives of the Collective Creativity programmme are:
- Gaining knowledge about the theory and praxis of collective creativity in the arts;
- Researching and experimenting with collective creativity within the arts;
- Developing skills in collaboration, communication, decision-making, generosity and collective planning;
- Critically analysing and evaluating collective art practices;
- Realising a collective creative project.