Interview with iCoDaco artists in residence
After the second and the third weeks of the residency, Bal Castro from the Spain-based collective and Nea Landin from the Sweden-based collective shared some insights into this exciting process.
BAL CASTRO, Spain-based collective
During the second week of your residency, your research focused on the collective decision-making process. How did you approach this topic and what tools did you use to reflect on it?
For this collective decision-making process, we jointly chose to do a practice which consisted of following the babies who lived with us for an hour. In this collective process, my main tools consisted of listening and the massive contribution of ideas. My way of approaching this collective process was to listen and adapt to what the group was suggesting and from that adaptability to contribute as many ideas as possible, although most of them did not come to anything, because when it comes to discarding ideas, many times the idea is found.
How does a decision-making process as such affect your artistic creation within the collective, both on the level of creativity and practical outcomes?
Currently, when I am in an individual creative process, I consider myself a creator who is usually quite clear about what I want to work on and how, being very open and awake to my sensibility and the moment in which I find myself. In a collective decision-making process, I naturally tend to discard any kind of preconceived ideas and adapt to the group. I adapt my creativity to what is generated in my body and my ideas. It is true that at some point I have the feeling of not being heard, but when this feeling appears I usually take the ideas that are generated and adapt them to my own sensitivity, to feel part of them.
The third week of residency was dedicated to a key question of performance arts - the relationship between theme/context, topic and physicality/piece. Did you aim to harmonize your individual approaches within your collective, or to make use of dissimilar practices?
When it came to choosing the topics, theme, context or physicality, each one of us exposed and shared the themes that each one of us was most interested in. So a priori I did not have to harmonize my approaches with the group. Later we decided to vote on the ideas that would go forward, discarding the least voted ones. In this way, we democratically decided the different themes, contexts, and physicalities that will be dealt with in the future. This way of choosing was a lot of fun for me, since I let go of what I wanted to deal with and went into other creative universes, letting myself be convinced by them and voting for them.
Nea Landin, Sweden-based collective
During the second week of your residency, your research focused on the collective decision-making process. How did you approach this topic and what tools did you use to reflect on it?
During our first residency week in December 2024, we had already decided on a question to guide our work forward. The question we’re dealing with is “How can all our perspectives exist in one place at once?” Our approach, this second week, was to place the question at the center of a mind map and feed in our individual desires as a sort of collective dreaming practice. This way, we could take note of how our needs and fantasies interlinked or overlapped, making it easier to steer the ship.
Additionally, to create a visualization of a collective artistic process, we utilized a pendulum made from rope and a paint bottle with the simple score of keeping it swinging around the room until the paint ran out. How would you react to a bottle of paint swinging around the room? Would you move out of its way to see where it goes? Would you grab it to change its direction? Would you punch it to provide more force? Our individual qualities and the group dynamic became quite noticeable, just by the way we approached the task at hand.
How does a decision-making process as such affect your artistic creation within the collective, both on the level of creativity and practical outcomes?
We are definitely still at the beginning of getting to know each other, this was just our second week of meeting. We are figuring each other out: Where do our various boundaries go? What are our different needs? The tools we worked with provided a framework for communication by generating more of a bird’s eye view where ideas and preferences could be looked at in relation to one another rather than as isolated instances. Creatively, this ensured everyone’s thoughts were being considered while practically generating an understanding of what directions might be more fruitful to explore together as a group.
The third week of residency was dedicated to a key question of performance arts - the relationship between theme/context, topic and physicality/piece. Did you aim to harmonize your individual approaches within your collective, or to make use of dissimilar practices?
The aim of the week was to harmonize. We wanted to understand how to be together, and as a group it already seemed urgent to understand the theme and context we are working within. During our first couple of weeks, we had started conversations around various sub-projects - as a full group as well as in smaller constellations. Utilizing the mapping from the previous week, we were able to add and group thoughts and ideas in order to talk about and choose directions. This led to physical explorations inside the studio as well as some meetings with experts in relevant fields to map potential future collaborations.