Imagination Tool for Institutional Operations: A Long Project Between Gudskul & 7 Toronto Collectives
In 2016, during a dinner at the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, Japan, Emelie Chhangur met Leonhard Bartolomeus (Barto) of the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa. “That’s how most projects begin—by having some sort of social interaction that leaves questions unanswered to investigate later,” she tells me. The collective’s project for the triennial was an early iteration of the then-unknown pedagogical platform Gudskul, comprising a “collective of collectives” which included ruangrupa, Grafis Huru Hara, and Serrum. The following year, Chhangur, then curator and assistant director at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), invited ruangrupa to put the institution itself into residency with Gudskul. Over a series of email exchanges, it evolved into, in Chhangur’s words, “a longer-term engagement not beholden to institutional programming cycles and deadlines,” an “imagination tool for institutional operations.”
Over the course of two month-long visits in March and October 2019, Gudskul members met a range of Toronto collectives in the hopes of fostering a knowledge ecology. Collectives included Unit 2 (run by the electronic music duo LAL), Tea Base, Younger Than Beyoncé Gallery (YTB), Sister Co-Resister, Department of Public Memory, Gentrification Tax Action, and Ruben Esguerra and his Mobile Recording Studio, among others. “I wasn’t so much interested in making something about the connections between collectives around the world and those in Toronto,” Chhangur tells me. Rather, she says, “[W]hat I think was more needed was communication between folks who were already working alongside each other in a city for a very long time, that didn’t necessarily connect, to hang out […] and hold space for each other. I recognized that immediately at that dinner with Barto in Japan, so totally out of the context, in a totally different sphere.”
Initially, the plan was for all the stakeholders gathered over three years to form a temporary collective that would co-design a pedagogical framework. Halted by the global catastrophe that would soon follow, the collective turned to creating a workbook: a knowledge-sharing and mapping module that addresses the complex concepts and tasks involved in creating sustainable collective platforms. “I am mostly interested in the self-organizing potential of relationality over choreographing outcomes,” Chhangur tells me. Adapting some of the prompts from this workbook, I met virtually with the curator, as well as Barto, Farid Rakun, and Gesyada Siregar of Gudskul, along with Geneviève Wallen and Marsya Maharani of YTB, Rosina Kazi of Unit 2, and Ruben Esguerra of the Mobile Recording Studio. Together, we discussed the transformative potential of being, sharing, and working together, and its importance at a time when the role of creative labour is
