from Hannah Beilharz

‘How we begin’ is a collaborative project that begins with an exploration of the table as a socially elegant artistic form. The project works from an understanding of the table as a specific context and place, a location where individuals form constellations, become collective in their activities through the agreed contract or physical structure that is the table, the meeting time, the situation that we all bring ourselves into. The work explores this concept of the table as a place where people gather, and where a particular type of collectivity can happen. Upon starting, a shared interest for our group was how social elegance can become a part of how we work together and share space, and what social elegance really means in a lived moment, and so the title ‘How we begin’ reveals these central themes and interest of the group. ‘How we begin’ seeks to focus on and highlight the importance of the table around which we sit and eat food together, not only as a break from the work of discussing and organising our artistic ideas into concrete forms, but as a very central part of the collective art making process.

‘How we begin’ seeks to focus on the intuitive and invisible, small scale collaborative moments that occur in this context, and specifically in the process of developing an artistic project as a group. These include making tea, getting to know each other through listening, telling stories, slowly revealing ourselves over time and repeated meetings. The work focuses on these unnoticed or invisible, subtle moments between individuals as we do the socially elegant work of becoming a collective. The small negotiations involved in cooking and eating together, or sharing space include the building of understanding between cultural and social differences, through a shared experience that is also a creative process. What we make in these moments is immaterial, but completely essential, the sustenance and nourishment we all need to live life. These immaterial, fragmentary, and invisible presences and moments captured are central to the work ‘How we begin’.

The processes of chopping and peeling onions, negotiating ways to cut vegetables, when or if it is too much garlic, making and serving tea, reveals an important process not dissimilar to the creative process of making work together, which shows the negotiation between being collectively conscious to the needs of the whole group, while also able to be our individual selves. As the focus of ‘How we begin’, these processes showcase the socially elegant or sometimes inelegant nature of everyday interactions, and what these further reveal about the process of collaborative artistic practice. Combinations of processes that are involved in ‘How we begin’ include: cooking food and making cyanotype prints, making our own tea blend and collages that include documentation of previous performances, the sharing of new food recipes, discussions and written reflections in the form of poetry and critical reflection, both on the theme of social elegance and how our other performance works are developing. Through these combined methods, the table becomes a live art performance space and an open invitation to the audience at the Bang Bang exhibition: to experience and share with us the messy and complex processes of becoming a collective.