Love, Dinner, Flowers, Dances (Money, Work, Deadlines, Power)

This is a project which encourages people to collaborate and to reflect on the process - its complexities, imperfections, joys and strengths. The idea is founded in Italian feminism, specifically the Milan Women’s Bookshop Collective (the title comes from their collective writing) and their belief in ‘The Practice of Doing’ as a way of building lasting networks and relationships, overcoming difference through building respect for each other’s particular contribution to shared tasks and projects.

The project was originally shown as part of a group show in London in early March 2020 as a sound recording (https://soundcloud.com/user-153957995/love-dinner-flowers-dances-money-work-deadlines-power) + poster + a booklet including the writing and illustrations. All text, image and sounds © the individual contributors.

You are warmly invited to contribute. What you have to do is, as set out below:

1. Find someone to collaborate with (in your household or virtually).

2. Make a brief (maximum two minute) sound work together - for example this could be a soundscape, a song, a poem, music, a talk, a dialogue, a story or a mixture of any of those. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated - you can record it on your phone - but it does need to be creative and engaging. See the (very different) contributions that follow.

3. Then write about 200 words each about the process of collaboration - what was good, what frustrating or didn’t work. There’s lots of examples below.

4. And please send a (copyright free) illustration too.

5. Then send it to the email morecollaborativesounds@gmail.com with i, the sound file as an mp3, m4a or similar compressed file, ii, the writing about the process - about 400-500 words - IN THE BODY OF THE EMAIL please, not as an attachment, and iii, an illustration as a jpeg.

6. You retain all rights to the material.

   Then if I like it (and I’ve liked everything so far) and it won’t offend anyone then it will be published on this blog page. Do give it a try - everyone who’s taken part so far said how much they enjoyed it.

Why don’t you have a voice Recorder Like That: Howard Walmsley & Angelica Cabezas

Prior to the invitation to contribute to this project, we had decided to embark on an audio collaboration. Angelica had just moved to another city and our prospective collaboration would be an exchange that would in some way embody the conversations and ideas we had when we were in the same physical space. 

Audio files would be passed between us… pieces of music, concrete and expressive, voiced observations, snatches of conversation, field recordings, poems, human and animal sounds. 

There would be no timescale or determined outcomes, simply a creative drift, a ludic exploration of what might happen.

During a telephone conversation we had discussed the leap, the risk that presents when crossing into new territory. The raw experience of creative and emotional exposure. This would probably have been quite different had we been in the same location, however, it did offer a sense of the unexpected. I had no idea what sounds would emerge when I pressed play. Angelica had no idea what I would then do with those sounds.

The first files arrived in the form of numbered messages.

This in turn provided the shape of how they are cut into the first edit.

The content is Angelica finding her voice, describing the distance and the sensation of speaking into a void, not sure as to where and how it will be heard.

As a starting point, these were cut into tracks I had made, some sound collages, made from location recordings, some music / audio beds.

Collaboration would create something that the individual participants could not otherwise produce. The result is something that can only happen via that cooperation. There would be a tipping point where the work manifests its own spirit, begins to dictate its own language, rules and mythologies. As we begin to understand that language, the work would progress.

The invitation to participate in ‘Love, Dinner, Flowers and Dances’ presents a moment when our project meshes with another, a detour on our excursion, creating another layer of collaboration.

Our timeframe was divergent from that of this project, i.e. we didn’t have one… and therefore what we offer here, is a snapshot of our opening exchange, the first marks in the new sketchbook.

Death Mountain: Jojo Taylor & Jon Thurlow

Jon Thurlow

In collaboration we agreed to get the idea off the ground  by actually NOT collaborating!  Instead of ‘jamming’ ideas and sparking off each other which we’d done in the past, Jojo created a melody and wrote lyrics alone and then passed a home recording to me to create music or sounds to accompany it and pass it back.
What stuck me when I received the recording is how much feeling the melody captured by not being sung to a strict tempo.  The strength of the emotion meant that decisions about accompaniment became easier:  I favoured sounds that support the melody over instrumentation and  without  a formal  tempo I could move away from thinking ‘song’.
The drone sound is a pre-set from a 90’s Casio keyboard and the zings are created using an old xylophone.  
The piece was recorded on a zoom field recorder - singing and drone in a rehearsal space through a vocal PA. and xylophone in the front room  - and mixed at home using Audacity.  Jojo suggested adding  birdsong (a free online download)-I thought this added texture  . During mixing we had to boost the drone volume with some audacity gizmos because the recording volume was too quiet and  xylophone sounds was loosely included in the spirit of ‘anti-tempo’ rather than trying to achieve perfection with endless ‘do it agains’ to get the timing ‘right’.
A less formal approach proved to be more efficient than I’d expected and the collaboration moved swiftly from exchanges of ideas to recording and to mixing.  We had to overcome doubts about whether the process was too DIY but by not formalising the creative idea we captured the essence of it. 

Jojo Taylor

Jon and I have worked together before. In the past we have spontaneously and simultaneously worked on a new idea, and then gone off alone to work on it some more before regrouping. Jon on guitar and me on vocals. This time Jon suggested that I work alone initially-think of an emotion and write words and possibly a melody if it comes and then pass to him to add an instrument.  I found I was writing an automatic list of words and sentences until I came up with a melody as well. Then I could feel with compassion what I was recollecting and add more to form the lament. I chose the emotion of loss. It came easily and the more it came the less I could stop it.  Ideas come at random times-I was up awake at 4 am running into the front room as I had woken up with 2 lines for the lament in my head-and wanted to quickly write them down…‘Alive and housed inside skin-like a bird that cannot sing’. I also had words that I had previously thought of that were waiting for a project and they fitted with this

‘You’re dying heart broke mine’ and ‘Death mountain’. I find it fascinating how work comes together…would this piece have ever been written in this way or at all if  Sabrina had not asked us if we wanted to contribute to her project and Jon and I had not worked together previously. 

I was interested to see how this new approach would work. Once Jon heard my vocals and melody we thought it sounded good with no tempo structure, instead it was a meandering tune. Then we changed our minds and we tried it to a metronome beat and found a BPM we were happy with, Jon tried out a guitar accompaniment  but because of the random ebb and flow of the piece it became difficult to pin a decisive rhythm to it, without loosing something of the feeling. We decided not to set the metronome as it made the Lament too rigid, the loss was in control of all tempo and like grief it flows at its own beat. So Jon went for a drone sound on keyboard and a lighter xylophone. I think it made it really difficult not having a metronome to keep a pace but it really did sound too uniformed with a beat imposed on it. Now it has no formal time constraints and the musicality in Jons sounds keep with the natural ebb and flow of the piece.

During the editing process, the more I thought about it the more I wanted it in part, to seem like it was being sung outdoors in nature.-so I added birdsong from Freesound. (I asked Jon first, because I had got carried away the day before trying to change sounds in the mix and Jon wasn’t impressed!-Argument  averted-phew).

I found I wanted to experiment with ideas whilst editing but I had to be mindful it was a collaboration and ultimately we needed to agree on how the piece was going to evolve,  so even if a thought came and I tried it out-he may not like it and we needed to discuss it-eg the levels or adding birdsong. A small thing like where to place the briiiiing on the xylophone could take a lot of time discussing- especially when Jon is saying it’s not in time and I am thinking hang on we aren’t using time in the traditional sense-so in time with what? 

It was a lot of fun, there were some small frustrations on both sides due to being tired, working intermittently on it around everything else, and not having much spare time at the same time to work on it. And for me I would like to do a better recording of it so the quality is much improved but we used what we had rather than not do it, but I do find lack of technology holds the sound quality back.

Lyrics:

Death Mountain

And when I see you breathing in 

I know yore not giving in 

Alive and housed inside skin 

Like a bird who cannot sing

Your dying heart broke mine

So I will float for a little time

But Death mountain

Is not for the living

Death mountain 

Is not forgiving

Heavy, rapid, slow

Deep, quiet and shallow

Just keep breathing in 

So I know you’re not giving in 

Keep breathing 

Stay in the land of the living

And I will float, 

I will float I will float 

And I will float, 

I will float I will float

Six days gone: Anne & Matt O'Driscoll

Anne

It took a long time to come up with a workable idea for a collaboration. For me, what had initially been an exciting proposal full of creative possibilities became a chasm of hopelessness as the deadline approached. We dismissed initial ideas of playing with words, conversations, random sounds and I feared we might be submitting two minutes of total silence, collaboration was failing to materialise. To play a game requires collaboration and agreement on rules so we started to make headway when we agreed that Matt would write a song and I would keep out of that process as our initial ideas to write a country song collided grumpily. I suggested that as Matt spends his working life at sea then maybe a sea shanty type song might be an idea. He got stuck in, I demanded a chorus, he wrote more and then I picked out a tune in a mournful key on the piano, dictated by the words. I have never written music for anything before and I certainly couldn’t have started without the inspiring words so it has been a true collaboration and great fun as it started to take shape. I thought it would be easiest to sing unaccompanied but I haven’t managed to keep in tune very well and I’d like to improve it but time is pressing! 

Matt

It took along time to get started. I got the sense that we were each waiting for the other to make the first move. Anne had the idea of a game of some kind, alternate words in a poem or just free association, but I couldn’t  get very enthusiastic about this.

Something about life offshore was her idea but I ran with it as I thought it was something I could do. We started collaborating on the words thinking we might do something country and western. Anne seemed to think that this necessarily entailed adultery and even murder. I found this a little difficult to relate to .......

So we came to a stop for a while, but Anne had already mentioned a sea shanty and then recklessly (I thought) said that if I did some words she would set it to music. I wrote some verses, she took them over to the piano and started playing, I wish this process had been recorded.

Anyhow, in what seemed a very short time she had produced the tune and not only that had started singing it. So then the pressure was on to produce some more verses and a chorus, also to adapt things so that the rhythm of the tune and the meaning of the words were not working against each other, this was instructive.

I had imagined that we would have to record some kind of accompaniment also  but, not only was this beyond our GarageBand expertise, once Anne had sung the song it seemed entirely unnecessary.

I knew Anne could sing, but I truly had no idea that she was a composer, I’m not sure she did either.

Rocket: Laura Parkin & Stu & Idris O'Donohoe

Laura: When we started thinking about the project I really wanted to write a song inspired by the times, a sort of elegy for the country riding the Brexit rollercoaster. I’ve written music before but never words to go with it. After several false starts my fears were confirmed.. I’m never going to be the next Billy Bragg. A rethink was in order. I knew (without asking) Stu wasn’t sure where to go with the project. After a chat and much grumbling we decided the easiest thing would be to record random soundbites from our son Idris and build a story around them. We got some really lovely clips which are a happy souvenir from the project but it soon became clear that it would take months to edit them into something which made sense. Time for another change of tack. We decided to take the lead from the 3 year old amongst us. We explained we wanted to record him on our phone while he was playing and asked him to talk about what he was doing. This was recorded in one take which I edited down (and threw in a couple of the bits recorded earlier). Stu wanted to leave it at that but I thought it needed something else. Finally I suggested Stu had a go a writing a bed for the piece on the Blipblox. He loved that idea. That was also recorded into a phone and I edited the two parts together. Despite the grumbling I think it’s safe to say neither of us would have managed to complete the project by ourselves so that’s a successful collaboration, right?!

Stu: Grumbling? Artistic differences maybe. Laura and I share quite a few musical and artistic interests, but in many ways, we are poles apart. So the only sensible way to a harmonious collaboration would be to involve someone who we both knew we could work with. Enter our 3 year old son, Idris; story teller, singer, artist. The idea to record his ramblings was straightforward enough and we soon ended up with a plentiful haul of clips of him chatting and singing. However it soon became clear that the task of editing into something meaningful would be monumental. As we were grumbling about what to do next, Idris asked me to help him build something with his magnet tiles (magnetic squares and triangles). I asked if I could record him and if he could talk about it. We had a few clips from earlier which fitted in with the theme so Laura edited them together on her laptop. Laura was keen to add some music, we have plenty of instruments between us, but Laura suggested I do something on the Blipblox which is basically an analogue synth for kids. It’s a proper bit of kit with LFOs, filters and a built in sequencer; but in a toddler friendly box with big knobs and levers and a ton of flashing lights. I recorded a few options with a space rocket feel and we chose the best one and edited it together with the story. We definitely would have been stuck for inspiration without Idris’s help!

The Bathers: Dominic Bilton and Ruby Sherwood-Martin

The Bathers (Large Plate) 1896-98 Reproduced with kind permission of the Whitworth Art Gallery

Ruby: The original concept Sabrina gave me to work with was to explore the idea of what it means to collaborate and have a creative partnership. I thought of a few musician friends and some poets that I knew as I wanted to create a music piece with spoken word over the top of it. I thought it would be more dynamic and interesting to instead have a ‘lecture’ on a piece of art history, which is a subject that I’m very interested in. This gave me the idea to co-create a piece about Cezanne and Zola, which is a topic which my friend and colleague from the Whitworth, Dominic, is pretty much an expert on due to his project Queering the Whitworth. Since the project was about collaborations, I thought about the fascinating, and at times volatile friendship between the Zola and Cezanne, and how that might be translated as an artwork. I approached Dominic with this idea and he was interested in collaborating on this project. Originally I was going to be present when he was to record his part of the work but it was too difficult, due to the nature of our workload at the time to do. He instead sent me a phone recording of him doing a short lecture on Cezanne’s relationship with his sexuality, which was actually recorded at the gallery where we both work. One thing to know about Dominic is that he’s a brilliant storyteller, so after I received the recording I approached the actual musical composition as if I were composing for film. I was also inspired by the artist Elizabeth Price as she uses a combination of sound, music and words in her films; this attitude she has towards making art helped me with my own process. The style of the music came pretty naturally as I wanted to make something that was emotive, yet maybe slightly removed and distant so I used electronic sounds which mimic orchestral musical instruments, like harps for instance. I then edited some of the lecture, mostly editing out silences and background noise (as much as I could- the Whitworth is a busy gallery!) and worked in a drum beat, again using electronic sounds. After some editing I showed it to Dominic, who liked it, and I then finalised it. Dominic and I worked remotely, so a lot of the work relied on emails and messaging which was an interesting approach which I hadn’t done before; but I think it worked as we’re both happy with the final product.'

Dominic: I was approached by Ruby who asked if I would be interested in working with her on a collaborative piece of work about Cezanne’s male Bathers, which the Whitworth is currently displaying in the aptly titled exhibition Cezanne at the Whitworth. I wasn’t sure at first what the collaboration would entail but Ruby asked me to record a two minute section of a talk I have developed called Queering Cezanne. Queering Cezanne developed from a project I have been working on for some time at the Whitworth, aptly called Queering the Whitworth.

Initially it was a little difficult to arrange the time together to be able record the talk as Ruby wanted to be present when I was talking however, I recorded the talk stood in front of the works in question on my own and then sent it over to Ruby. I was given the instruction to record two minutes of my talk but I found this to be really difficult because I talk quite slowly and to get all the information that I needed to squeeze into those two minutes, so the piece made sense and flowed, was impossible. It ended up being about three minutes in the end.

The recording was sent over and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect on its return but when it was sent back and I listened to it, I was surprised at how talented Ruby was at putting together my talk on Cezanne to music.  I wouldn’t know where to start at doing things like that. So, I was really impressed at how good it came out.

What I did not like was how camp I sound. I really do not like listening to my own voice, it’s the worst. I also thought I sounded like I knew what I was talking about and that too shocked me. I was shocked because I’m from a council estate in Leeds and here I am talking about post-impressionist artists like I know what I am saying. So, the collaboration has made me realise I’m not that boy from the estate anymore (or at least I don’t talk like him anymore).

I really enjoyed working with Rub on this project and I really hope you like the piece that we worked on.

Change: Eddie Sherwood & Sabrina Fuller

Sabrina: I let Ed choose what we’d do and he chose a poem accompanied by percussion and change as theme. The first thing is that doing anything with anyone else takes about ten times as long as it would to do it on your own. I mean – this sort of thing is never quick at the best of times. This has taken months, but it was great to do something with Eddie and I really learnt from the process, even though it reminded both of us that I have no sense of rhythm whatsoever. Except I seem to be able to grope the rhythm out of a poem – he sent me off to read Carol Ann Duffy and I could find her rhythm but he couldn’t (small moment of triumph for me there). Anyway Eddie said no rhyme no rhythm and, though I’m not keen on sounding like a Christmas carol, I did my best. Then he produced a rhythm, and I pushed him and pushed him til it had a bit of life to it (and a middle eight). Not my greatest vocal delivery, but we were in urgent need of completion. The mixing session pushed our relationship to the edge, but we have product at last, and I have a far greater understanding of rhythm in poetry than I had before we started, though I still can’t find the ‘one’.

Eddie: I had never played percussion to poetry before and Sabrina had never written a poem that would be accompanied by a drum beat. At first I couldn’t find the rhythm in her poem – there wasn’t an obvious one. She was having problems reading to a simple beat. It was very frustrating at first and I suggested that there should be some kind of rhyme in her writing (call me old fashioned). After many hours of hair pulling and argument we finally reached a compromise. Experimenting with rhythms for the piece was the next step and the fun started. Should it be 6/8, 4/4 or 13/8? What instrumentation – conga, snare, cahon? Then came the mixing…. In the end I think we came up with an interesting and thought provoking piece of art – watch out Kate Tempest….

Dinnerware Soda: Rosie O'Driscoll & Andrew Rickett

Andrew: At first, to come up with a composition, we were thinking about word association games but then started to consider collaborations we already have formed. This led us to our shared Spotify and as it was near new year Spotify’s seemingly curatorial algorithm had provided us with our most enjoyed list of 2019. We decided we would record ourselves reading the list, the voice speaking would be the one who laid claim to being responsible for it. Turns out after sharing music for so long it is now impossible to un-pick the tangled web of our music tastes. We did like the idea of working with our shared spaces and expanding the collaboration with the non-humans that affect our everyday lives. This led us to recording the objects around us from our flat. A collaboration with everything from the kettle to the squeaky floorboards by the kitchen door, from the cars outside to wine glasses. These recordings were then mixed and, after realising that the 120 on the mixing program was counting bars not seconds, these noises have been composed/squished into a two minute ambient piece. Listening back to the mix it seems that our flat sounds creepy, perhaps the sound work is an evocation of the house spirits (Rosie’s was a G&T and mine a whisky). We have asked the non-human collaborators for their comments on this process, but they have been finding it hard to type.  

Rosie: We spent a long time coming up with and dismissing possible ideas for how to go about this - neither of us had really worked with sound before and to start with the collaborative aspect made it difficult to settle on any one idea. In the end the idea of seeing what we had in our very immediate surroundings that we could make interesting noises with probably came as much from musical incompetence and unwillingness to record ourselves saying things as anything else. Once we actually started doing this though it progressed into something more interesting and became some bizarre collaboration not just between the two of us but also the place we live as we wandered round shaking things and dropping things and running off with the microphone to catch the washing machine beeping or the floorboards creaking. We (ok Andrew) put the clips into FL studio and after a lot of collaborative failure to work out how the hell to make it fit to two minutes managed to layer up all the clips. Somehow the most mundane of objects, given voices, come together into something quite unnervingly organic and bodily. It was a lot of fun as a process, something neither of us would or could have done individually and I’ve learnt a lot about the musical potential of a roll of parcel tape and the contents of a recycling bin.

Double bass & hand pan collaboration: Evie O'Driscoll & Rosie Bergonzi

Like all good collaborations, this one started with breakfast in Weatherspoons. Rosie and I studied together at Goldsmiths, where we used to make music together regularly. However we hadn’t seen each other in nearly a year, and hadn’t played together for several years. I was working in London for a few weeks and we had made vague plans to catch up, and had previously spoken about having a jam with double bass and hand pan (a steel drum type thing also know as a hang drum, that Rosie has acquired several of). After a while we found a time that worked for both of us, a late morning before i would go and play a theatre show, meaning I would have my double bass with me, and so a both a catch-up and a collaboration was possible, with minimal effort. And so we began with breakfast at the Brockley Barge before heading to Rosie’s living room to collaborate. 

Rosie had done many ‘pan jams’ before, with playing duo with hand pan and a whole range of other instruments. Most often these were with classical musicians and took a more structured ‘collaborative composition’ approach. At first she suggested an approach she had used previously as a starting point for collaborative composition, which was using a random word generator. We tried this for a while but for me it didn’t seem necessary. We then thought about making some more ‘composed’ grooves and picked one that we would then try to reach at some point. However, this particular clip is pretty much completely free, and too me sounds much more organic, musical and communicative than ones where we tried to do something preconceived. 

We spoke afterwards about how much we enjoyed the process, despite both being a bit uncertain beforehand as too wether it would actually be fun or not.

The theme is London - Why? Rebekah Ford & Rivelino Lopes

Rive: We had a discussion and Rebekah suggested that I start with a Cape Verdean beat and I decided to make one in Ableton from a traditional genre called Coladera. I passed it on to her, then we had a discussion about what the theme of the piece should be and she got cross with me because she thought I’d gone off in my own direction without collaborating. She recorded our conversation and then started to chop it up in Logic and then put it to the beat and passed it back to me. I then added more percussion, chimes and effects in Ableton and passed back to her. We had another conversation which she recorded and she chopped up more bits. Once this was arranged, we had another argument and then I suggested that we rearrange the order of the audio clips to make more linear sense. Once she had done this and worked on the levels, I added a small break in the work and a beat effect under something that she said in the piece as I had been inspired by the drum and bass gig I was at the night before. I then helped her master it. This was an interesting project because I got to use my Cape Verdean roots in a different way. I enjoyed working on this as it’s the first time I’ve worked on a project that’s not just music. It was quite hard to find time to do this as work and commitments got in the way.

Rebekah: I read the brief out to Rive and then he immediately went off on a tangent about London. I did suggest that we start with something to do with his love of Cape Verdean beats and that we could in some way begin there. What he played me was really good and I liked it but he presented it as a fait accompli and that was what I got cross about. It was quite interesting to find a different way of communicating with my partner; this is the first time that we have collaborated on a sound project so we were finding our feet and as with many creatives, we clashed on occasion. However, I thought that if I recorded our conversations about the work then we could use that as the nugget of the piece and stay on brief. We decided to work in the style of an exquisite corpse for logistic reasons and keep handing it back and forth and layering our contributions. This was a bit confusing as we were using different software but we somehow managed. There was squabbling but an awful lot of laughing too which you can hear in the piece. I took Rive’s beat and processed it through several effects then back into Logic, chopped all the audio from our two conversations and arranged. We had a heated discussion about the order of them but Rive was right (annoyingly) and so once I’d placed them all and set levels and done some basic effects, Rive showed me how to finish and master the piece properly which I’d not done before. It’s been a really lovely thing for us to do and also quite challenging trying to understand where the other is coming from. Rive’s a beat maker and I’m a visual artist so we somehow found a middle ground that’s been a creative eye of the storm.  

Not at my age: Len & Ben Grant

Len: I’m used to interviewing people and less confident with music so imagined a spoken word piece for my contribution. My first idea was to collaborate with Pooky, my partner’s childhood friend because I was staying at hers in London as the deadline loomed. She’s an actor so was up for it. I’d ask her about her experiences growing up with Abigail... maybe I’d hear stuff I hadn’t heard before. She suggested I ask Abigail much the same questions when I got home and the recollections could be interwoven into one piece. As it turned out, I left earlier than expected on the Sunday morning and we didn’t do it. The next morning I drove our son to Manchester Airport and plonked my iPhone on his knee.

Ben: My dad didn’t give me any warning about this. I’m still not sure what it’s about. 

Roman Walks: John Fyffe and Stefania Tufi

John: This is an email that Stefania sent to her friend and colleague Robert. He had a stop-over or something in Rome, maybe a Conference – he’s always jetting around the world.  He only had a couple of hours, so Stefania offered to do him an itinerary so he could have a really nice walk round Rome.  He’s been to Rome before so he’s seen the main tourist places like the Colosseum.  So we had a discussion about it over tea and we decided on the basic itinerary.  I guess that’s the start of the collaborative process – you have to think about who the itinerary is for, what they might like etc. We settled – I’m not sure how - on a walk that we do every time we go to Rome.  I don’t feel like I’m in Rome til we’ve done it.  It’s my ant-track, if you like.  We agreed that this was the kind of itinerary we would go for.

It’s an email, so it’s not really supposed to be read out, but it’s an authentic written piece that she sent to someone. It might not sound great read out.  We’ve recited it in manner that maybe seems to suggest who contributed what, but actually that’s not necessarily true – we’re playing with the notion of authorship in the creative process. Sounds very poncey! It really was collaborative, though – and hugely enjoyable.  In the end I think we were doing it for ourselves rather than for Robert.  I’m a bit surprised that Stefania sent it! 

Stefania is super-organised and I’m not.  So she sits down and calls me in to start the email.  Robert is a nice guy. And curious about things, so I think he’ll have liked looking for the references. He works with Stefania, so he’s a colleague and a friend.  I’m like an acquired friend, so obviously Stefania and I have different relationships with him which was always going to impinge on the creative process.  She started typing.  I’m standing behind her interjecting.  Mostly facetiously.  I thought the itinerary needed livening up -  I mean, who wants to read lots of ‘turn left, then turn right, x church is on your right’?  - and so started throwing in silly jokes.  I was like ‘no, you’ve GOT to put that in’ – sometimes Stefania accepted them, sometimes she didn’t.  But she was controlling the keyboard, so…. I think S felt some of the jokes were too silly (they were!) and some she felt ridiculed her hometown, but once we’d started on this track, it was difficult to get off it.  We had a real laugh and it all got a bit rollicking as we got more and more Carry On, to be honest.  But she STILL had control of that keyboard…!!

This was basically two completely different styles meshed together.  I had one idea of what I thought would be good – something entertaining – and her idea was more practical – something useful.  I’m sure that we spent a lot longer on it than she wanted to.  But I think it came out ok.

It’s always interesting working on something together, because obviously we have very different styles, but we’re both quite bossy about the process and what we want. We always end up looking loads of stuff up – history etc – which I love. It’s always very interesting  – Stefania is super-creative and very clever, so I always learn lots.  I’m more chaotic.

Stefania also gets a bit mad because I get picky about phrasing/typing/spelling.  She writes English much better than I do, and she doesn’t like it when I seem to be correcting her.  I’m not – I’m just editing on the run.  It’s just what I do myself when I’m writing my own stuff -   I’m ultra-picky with my own writing and constantly changing things.  But she’s on the keyboard, so… At the end, we went through it again and tied it up and edited it.   We’re both very fussy about reading things over a million times, but I could carry on doing that forever, whereas Stefania decides ‘that’s it’ and wants it finished.

I had a really great time.  It was so much fun! I don’t know what Robert thought about it, though….

Stefania: So John wanted me to do the typing ‘because I’m quicker’, but there was definitely a mismatch in terms of taking the lead – he made many more decisions than me and was having a whale of a time while I was getting mildly grumpy. There were more laughs than clashes, though! The fact is, Rome is ‘my’ Rome and John is allowed to slag it off (in terms of customs and cultural aspects) only to a certain extent. While collaborating on this I realised that my claimed ownership of the place is more totalising than I thought and my emotional investment in this spatiotemporal existential dimension has grown over time. I’m sure that Brexit has a lot to do with this (my psychological distancing from increasingly unfriendly Britain?), but I’m rather surprised at my (undeniably!) annoyed reaction at John’s wanting to take the mickey out of nearly everything. The other aspect that I’m really aware of is that his mental mapping of the city is (inevitably) different from mine – to me his representation of the walk looks rather linear whereas I perceive Rome as an assemblage of rounded spatial shapes that overlap and merge if I try to visualise specific spots that are particularly meaningful to my life and relations there. So while negotiating a fairly linear walkscape (a British approach?), I kept thinking of spatial digressions and opportunities to go off the main trajectory.

In terms of the collaboration, I’m exhausted but quite happy about the result - after constant negotiation about content and tone, and after constantly trying to curb John’s flood of witty remarks, I think we have a reasonably useful itinerary that allows for changes, de-tours and repetitions, depending on taste and on-the-spot decisions.

PS Having just seen what John wrote, his self-deprecating narrative is so so British – and I disagree! John was so strict when I was writing my PhD and his advice was so fundamental that my style of writing has got John written (!) all over it…

PPS I didn’t let him see this until I’d seen his comments and now he wants to change his but I’m not going to let him – I’ve got the keyboard!

Seven to Ninety-seven: Michele Pouncey & Natalia Maximova

Natalia and I managed to meet up last night after trying endlessly to find a convenient time that suited both of us. As we both work full time and Natalia has a young family we found it very difficult to arrange a meeting where we could talk through ideas so we just grabbed a moment and went for it.

In October last year we were arranging an exhibition together for the Rusholme and Fallowfield Civic Society to celebrate its 50 year anniversary. Membership and interest in the society is dwindling so we were hoping to raise an awareness of its (amazing ) achievements and also to gain interest for its future. We decided to interview the societies chairman - Peter Helm who was a massive influence on the societies achievements - he was instrumental in gaining 'conservation' status for Victoria Park in 1972 and has written and researched architectural and social history in the area , he co wrote a book 'Looking Back at Rusholme' and worked with local schools to raise awareness of the history in the area. We also felt this filmed conversation could sit within the archives alongside all Peters achievements. It was a rare opportunity which added not only authenticity to the archives but also an important visual documentation of its founding and history, it now sits within that archive and has added great value, clearly expressing true human spirit for the preservation and passion of the area in which he lived.  

He was  more than happy for us to interview and film him, at the age of 97 you would think this would be quite a task and strain but on the contrary - he was amazing and we were both stunned by the experience of listening to his stories which he told with a passion and ease alongside lots of humour! It was a memorable experience for us both even though we hadn't planned what or how we would structure the conversation, our main concern was finding a camera that worked !

We wanted to discuss this 'collaboration' for this 'collaboration' and I have attached the recording.

Natalia and I have only met recently through the society but we both agree that working together is quite simple, we 'jump in' and do what's needed and we just manage to make it work.I think  this uncontrived way of working is successful because there is an unspoken understanding between us - it just feels natural to work together - we make a good team!

We sat in the dining room of Natalias home overlooking the garden, in the room we had Natalias daughter - a very well behaved 7 year old (Elya) and my  (not so well behaved and demanding) 7 year old beagle (Ella) - (bizarre that their names and ages are virtually the same !!) So there is a lot of background noise that sometimes dominates the conversation and it s also very distracting...

But its a true representation of a 'grabbed moment' - kitchen table, domestic environment, children, animals - both of us not long finished work and on a cold and wet January evening. Would it have been any better if we had sat and planned it? Maybe in content but we both feel the 'essence' of collaboration is clearly there in the recording..we hope you agree..

Hanging a picture but really playing trivial pursuits: Ana Escobar & Ben Smitten

Ana did the recording without letting Ban knows while Ben was talking about recording us while hanging a painting.

 Then Ana recorded us talking about what is like to collaborate, and she made the sound piece since we wouldn’t agree to what to do with the sound pieces we had.

 If we had not collaborated the piece would not have been fluid, and definitely less fun. Working/coming with an idea together was difficult because we didn’t find enough time to talk about it properly, or had different agendas! Although it was easier cause we cold talk about it even if it was about talking about how difficult it was…MAD!! Haha

 For me (Ana), the collaborative process is a tricky one, if all parts are not more or less equally invested in the project- however when it works it’s a beautiful umbrella that expands beyond your own-self-horizons, which is not only great because you are expanding but also because you are learning! It’s frustrating when it doesn’t work out because you want to do things that cant be done because there is not reaching agreement…ahhhhhhhhhhh….get me out of here J

 Ben and I collaborated but then I ended doing most of the work which should have sucked but I enjoyed it the same. 

No alcohol 'til its finished: Anne Tucker and Alison Hamilton

This describes a collaboration I had with my friend Alison. We spent all of yesterday afternoon and evening and a bit of this morning making marmalade. We’ve ended up making about 30 jars in four separate batches!
We have done this before - historically we’ve been doing it together for about three years (with her partner John) and before that she used to do it with her mum and I used to do it every year in various different ways when we lived in the commune.
So we worked together pretty successfully this time. It’s a bit of a tricky thing :  you have to get the timing right so it does not overcook; you also have to negotiate safely a lot of extremely hot boiling sugar,  cos you don’t want to burn anybody .... and there’s also hot jars, hot lids and moving backwards and forwards lugging big pans of liquid . Recipe for disaster - so NO ALCOHOL TIL ITS FINISHED! 
Right - now what happened this year is that I arrived after the first phase; so all the oranges had already been chopped and cooked in the water and all the little Pups and pith had been put in bags ready. So my job when I first arrived was to  do what we called “milking the cow bag“  - where  you squeeze all the pectin out of these little bags full of pips - you squeeze and squeeze and squeeze so loads of pectin-filled pith goes into the liquid. 
Having got as much out as we possibly could, we put the jampan of water and oranges on the cooker, allow it to warm up then we add the sugar which we’ve had to measure out .... and I have to say one of our trickiest mementos between us was  making sure we had 1.6 kg of sugar going into each batch.  Since  we couldn’t put 1.6 kg of sugar into one weighing scale, we had to do two loads (which meant we had to therefore work out where have we got to at the end of the first one and then how many grams left to put in for the second load) aaargh! Arguments (a little) .... that was fun as well as worrying and the only moment we had a panic during the last two days was when was the third batch we were cooking seemed to be taking extremely long - we began to wonder whether we perhaps hadn’t put enough sugar in it or got the measurements a little bit wrong. 
Resolved with MATHEMATICS! Everything ended up fine and now we have just completed the whole process 29 little jars of marmalade and they are absolutely beautiful tasting!
Such  good fun - we  didn’t have any problems. 
The interesting thing is that 
A) we have done marmalade together before so likely to go ok
But
B) we are very different personalities - I am very happy go lucky; Al is much more methodical and organised  so you could imagine this being a recipe for disaster 😜😝😛
But it wasn’t!