Concorting

Nurturing processes and collaborators with knowledge, care and compassion. Includes: questioning, feeding, mending, alchemizing, thriving.

To concoct is to nurture. It means approaching artistic collaboration not simply as a means of producing a work, but as a process that deserves knowledge, care, compassion and food. It begins with hosting, continues with questions, cultivating curiosity, making room for contradiction, and the hope for strange beginnings.

Then comes feeding. We nourish the process with stories, research, shared meals, references, gestures, and time. We feed one another’s imagination, offering what we know while remaining open to what we do not. Collaboration becomes an exchange of sustenance, where generosity matters as much as expertise.

But concocting also requires mending. Things break: concentration, expectations, sometimes the work itself. Misunderstandings and disagreements are not failures; they can reveal where attention is needed. Mending means tending to these ruptures without pretending they never happened. It is the quiet, often invisible labour that allows a collective process to continue.

Through alchemizing individual practices, incompatible ideas, and unexpected encounters react with one another, hopefully producing something really collective. This is not about dissolving everyone into agreement, but about discovering what becomes possible through difference.

And also hopefully there is thriving: a moment when the process develops its own vitality, when collaborators feel able to take risks, surprise themselves, and grow beyond their original intentions.

Concocting wants to understand artistic collaboration as an ecology rather than a machine. Its not about a finished work, but the process, where somehting is awakened, sustained, repaired, and if possible set free. The soil matters, in which a possible work grows, the relationships that sustain it, and the new possibilities that continue to ferment long after the making is done.Add your description here