Arts
The Packet: Collaborating and creating art as a community
View(s):
Carving out a creative space (above) and (right), their zine collection. Pix courtesy The Packet
After my conversation a few weeks ago with The Packet, a community of artists, I am given a series of homemade zines to go through – small and affordable self-published magazines with text and images. The edges of each slim volume are spray painted and they are printed in black and white. There are 14 booklets and each book is a collated email thread.
The email chains are like a digital tag game. One thread is started by someone and there is a pre-arranged sequence in the chain. Each person is required to reflect, respond and pass on the email chain within 48 hours. A circle is complete when the first person receives the email last after everyone else has responded in some manner.
The email responses vary from memes, screenshots, recipes, deeply personal confessional narratives, journal entries, art, photographs, doodles to flat non-replies when the occasion merits or the timing is not right: “I am confused. I just want to pass this” reads one email. There is both a sense of intimacy (an uneasy sense you are eavesdropping on something you are not meant to) and performance (the authors know you are eavesdropping on this conversation and that these emails are not private).
These zines are a part of The Packet’s “Instigating Collaborative Study” practice which was a response to an open call by Pro Helvetia New Delhi, inviting new ideas and experiments from artists and organizations in the region. The call prompted artists to reflect on creative responses to the pandemic and explore new forms of artistic communication, community, format and collaboration. Out of over a hundred applications, The Packet was one of eight chosen for the ‘Now On’ grant.
“Instigating Collaborative Study” began as an attempt to carve a space for thinking and to form a community, spending three months in regular conversation through reading, building a zine archive, conversations, cooking together, self-publishing, workshops and weekend residencies. 10 art practitioners in Sri Lanka were invited to engage in the process while online workshops were held with Somnath Bhatt and Exhausted Geographies. Tashyana Handy, Sarah Jaufer, Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah, Muvindu Binoy, Kitty Ritig, Isuri, Iman Saleem, Firi Rahman, Bilal Raji Saheed and Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke participated in the exercise.
The Packet began organically through a group of friends and then expanded. It is currently made up of Venuri Perera, S. P. Pushpakanthan, Sharika Navamani, Sandev Handy, Imaad Majeed, Cassie Machado and Abdul Halik Azeez. The collective first began by playing on an idea to publish something or invite people to collaborate on projects, circumventing a lot of the usual avenues, instead directly passing art around and connecting with people.
“Normally you would interact with the art world with institutions – you’d maybe go for a meeting or a festival or something like that. All these events started creating more common spaces for artists to be together,” explains Halik. He notes that there was then a need for artists to work and converge casually and spontaneously outside institutional frameworks and not necessarily thinking about art as something that is trying to respond to some complex, broad idea from the outset. Essentially, the kind of conversations which take place outside a classroom when a professor leaves – thinking and discussion detached from formal structures.
Historically, artist collectives have emerged for numerous reasons. Sometimes, it is to converge on collective goals and to function as a social unit. Sometimes, for practicalities and shared resources. For members of The Packet, a casual space to think and reflect has been invaluable for both group thinking and personal creative practice in the past months. Sarah explains that the scale of ideas which comes through in conversations constantly provides fresh perspective: “You think you have thought something through and someone says something completely new to it.”
Over the months, the group has got together to cook, have meals, discuss, congregate online when physically apart, work on individual or collective zines. And even these smaller rituals feed into larger creative processes. “If you think about collaboration outside artwork, even putting a meal together is very much a collaborative process,” says Imaad. There’s space within the activity and the prevalent kitchen banter to figure out personal tastes, dietary concerns and skills. “You learn how to accommodate people and that means you learn what people are particularly good at and not so good at and so you assign tasks accordingly.”
This collaboration, playfulness and intimacy located within the process of making art or even thinking about art without the pressure to produce an end-product, feels like a key part in understanding The Packet’s ethos.
“There’s a tendency for or a need to speak this really grand narrative – who or what your artwork says about you, or to think about your art on meta or larger political terms. We were thinking about the power of the political potential of intimacy and friendship and playfulness and what happens when you move further,” explains Sandev reflecting that when you start articulating something for yourself, it becomes an interesting political point or place for larger politics to emerge from.
The email threads in the soon-to-be-launched zines offer a reflection of this desire to speak from within, without theorizing from outside – the threads are layered exchanges during the pandemic, offering a glimpse of individual mindsets, reflections and ideas amidst the coronavirus and a time of change. Putting together the zine has not been without challenges – zine-culture is inchoate in Sri Lanka and to produce, print, distribute personalized zines take time, as they have discovered with the current production.
The collective draws from American cultural theorist, scholar and poet Fred Moten’s belief: “that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.”
Kitty’s notion of art has morphed over the years. She questions the value systems which underpin art and believes that art and study are deeply embedded with our lived realities– a thought that is an extension of Moten’s belief. “For me right now, art is not a product,” Kitty notes. “Just me – walking, sitting, talking, writing and producing anything. It’s also art. So all of us are basically art in our own way.” An artwork can be a side effect of living, she says simply.
The group, which has exhibited at the Serendipity Arts Festival in 2019, also have an ongoing artwork for Serendipity Arts Virtual: Future Landing. Their Instagram page has also become a platform to reach out to wider audiences- another example of the group doing their thinking in public. For a stranger, the account can be bewildering. Multiple people have access and the posting is organic, chaotic, and largely anonymous. There are inside references and there’s everything from TikTok videos to cat pictures and it takes a viewer time to recalibrate and figure out what’s going on. The Packet hosts Instagram Live sessions, setting music to visuals while responding to contemporary events, riffing off one another’s posts and thinking out loud in public.
In some ways, it feels like looking at a painting with the pencil lines and rough sketching still visible. And it is this process, this creation of space to allow things to happen which underscores The Packet.
“There’s a whole lot of process before you put an artwork out here. There are so many conversations that happen, so many exchanges that enrich and sometimes don’t even show themselves in the artwork. Sometimes the artwork comes out like this really abstract, disconnected theoretical thing. But there’s so many relationships, conversations, ideas that have been exchanged, fights that have been had and so many great things that have happened in the backdrop before an artwork comes out and just really valuing that is important,” says Sandev.
For more information about The Packet and their work: http://www.instagram.com/the_packet