Special Editions

Bojana Cvejić (ed.): Collect-if

The book Collect-if is a document of the project Collect-if, which was in progress from March to November 2003. We can read letters, reflections, diary notes, sketches, follow the doubts, decisions and distress of the collective creators. The collection has more sections: The Project Proposal, 1st meeting, Avant Medana (Instructions on how to form anarchist collectives), Introduction (Retro-glancing through the history of art collectives), Propositions and Materials, and Steering a Course.

Collect-if began in the spring of 2003 as a creative platform for the reflection on different dimensions of collectivity in contemporary performing arts and society. From the beginning, it was conceived as an international co-production, with production and creativity potentials from diverse creative environments. Aside from the inner team, the project was also conceived with invitations to the theoreticians with different views of the problems of collectivity in the theoretical field that is, in the largest spectrum of humanism, researched by the field of the so-called study of performance and performativity or “performance studies”. The project developed in a collective of a Collect-if, with constant reflection on the potential and real hierarchical patterns that usually enable a balanced distribution of responsibility in collective work and that at the same time create transfer relations and centers of knowledge for the work to be performed within the framework of production conditions and requests. Where in that process is the collective and where was and will be Collect-if? The answer will also be on display in Ljubljana.