I was expecting some tutor resistance to my resistance to the unit content. But I was reassured by Hayley’s empathy and understanding for my position, and the rich direction that she offered as a consequence of that place of understanding. There was a sense of her looking between the written lines of my resistance, looking for the tiny fractures into which a splinter of insight could be inserted then wriggled around until the fissures could be opened further, allowing glimmers of realisation to enter my conscious.
The first glimmer: look for collaborations that bring friction, that can challenge my position, that can change my perception and working practices. My work, auto-ethnographic in desire, reflects my particular position, though that is one that continually develops and grows with exposure to alternate ways of seeing and understanding. Friction is healthy, is expanding, equals growth. Stay with the trouble it cause and embrace the opportunities it brings.
The second glimmer: Be selfish and ambitious – I can still pursue my own intents within a collaborative setting. This was something I was concerned about, the unit content (what I have read so far) not adequately addressing personal aims and desires within a collaborative setting. But then, that is for the collaborators to negotiate and navigate, to contract to a shared purpose or question or intent through exploration, research and practice. Collaboration is an experiential, somatic as well as intellectual practice – there is only so much that can be assimilated from merely writing and reading about it.
Glimmer number three: Look beyond the immediate interpretation of ‘collaboration’, that of working with another person or persons. Collaboration can happen with objects, philosophies, materials, landscapes. Heidegger was mentioned here. My practice over the past year or so has focused on my relationship with the world, with my place in it, how I explain myself. I have started to think of it as auto-ethnography. Now there’s another possible layer for me to uncover, a phenomenological lens, of “being-in-the-world”. I already have ideas from the merest of resonances, without any deeper reading yet.
Glimmer four: Create and inhabit personas, characters, other selves and be speculative in approach. Don’t ground myself in a particular reality. There is a resonance here – my love of science fiction and fantasy, of vast emotional landscapes that cannot be grasped in words, rather existing on a somatic plane. Here I also think of the music love and how it creates ‘feeling-images’ for me.
The fifth glimmer: This is one I have discussed at length in therapy. See and then step over my edges. Take risks. Make mistakes. Fail – though failure is just another way of defining learning. Ignore the need for perfection. Keep stretching the comfort zone. Let go. This is a practice that I need to work on – everyday. I naturally err on the cautious side, often playing out multiple outcomes, many catastrophic, in my head. A self-protection tactic of sorts, but one that stops me taking the risks I so want to the courage to take.
And the last of those glimmers: Bend and shape the unit to how I want it to be. Be flexible in approaching the material. Jump ahead, back-track, approach it non-sequentially, confront the apparent didactic nature of its requirements. Be more ‘rhizomatic’ in moving around it. Yes there are specific learning criteria and outcomes – but there can be different pathways to achieving these.