As part of a training session with Adam Ramejkis to help facilitate Lego workshops at Chelsea and Camberwell in November, a group of us came together to experience the workshop so that our experience could help us help the large groups of students that will be attending sessions.
I was there with collaborator Poojitha Lal, and we are also collaborating with Adam, so it was an ideal time to use the medium to reflect on the collaboration. After warm-up individual and group exercises, we moved on to model individual collaborative experiences. First, something good about a specific collaboration, then something negative about a collaboration, and finally what we wanted to bring more of into a collaboration. We could share as much or as little as we wanted about our models.
By approaching each of these three models in a tactile way, I was interested to let my physical impulses show me what I might not know about the current collaboration with Poojitha around trying to create more cross-disciplinary exchange at CSM. I didn’t start any of the models with specific ideas of what I would make, instead building intuitively in tactile reflectivity.
I was surprised by both the distinctions and connections between all of the models. The “positive aspect” felt very hopeful and playful, albeit a bit tenuous in it’s grounding. The “negative aspect” became darker and more sinister, with a feeling of claustrophobia or structural compression not allowing the central flower figure to grow or move freely. And “what I wanted to bring” surprised me in it’s silliness, with concrete figures, a cat and a translucent stretch-body rabbit in a protective bubble rising above.
All three of them had a sense of rising above, a verticality. The initial with wings, a great sense of freedom, the second with the movement impeded by the structure, and the third rising with a protective layer to ensure freedom of movement within.
We then moved to think about and model core values of collaboration within our groups of 6 people, an exercise which we used the previous exercises to inform. We discussed for a few minutes and then each began building representations of different elements. Verbalizing and externalizing elements that makeup a specific collaboration and then expanding into the general felt like a good way to build an understanding of all of the different skills, values, and elements that go into collaborating, rather than letting it be seen as a thing that students can figure out on their own.