Erica Scourti – collaboration
The second artist I met was Erica Scourti. I wanted to meet her for a couple of reasons. Firstly she is working in contexts that I would like to – regularly doing residencies and making video and digital work that has a presence online and in exhibitions and screenings. Secondly she sources and uses language/verbal content in interesting ways. Thirdly, she uses forms of participation or crowd sourcing to create her work and I wanted to ask her how she thinks about collaboration.
Erica’s work is well documented on her website (http://www.ericascourti.com/). Some of my favourite examples include ‘Life in AdWords’ for which she e-mailed her diary to Gmail and performed the resultant list of suggested key words in a series of videos. Also ‘Twenty Press Releases’ which used key words provided by artists to explain their work to generate quasi-nonsensical texts that were then shown alongside her work.
Not all of Erica’s work is collaborative but she often uses material generated or performed by others. For example ‘Reality Life’ involves the titles of reality TV shows being performed by teenage girls. I asked Erica about how she conceives of her relationship to the people she works with. I realised that the way she asks people to create content for her is the reverse of how I have been doing it. Where I have spoken to people as a starting point and then shaped an artwork depending on the content that comes from the conversations, she largely beings with quite a clear structure and a clear request of what she wants from people. Their content is inserted into a pre-given format. This sets her up very clearly as the author of the work and is perhaps a more efficient way of working as opposed to having a lot of content, much of which gets jettisoned. It also gives a clear request to people about what you want them to do and what is going to happen to that content.
Erica acknowledged that working this way can still be hard on a personal level. Essentially she is making relationships with people but seeing these relationships as ‘work.’ People give things to you and you are instrumentalising them as the material for your art piece. One way she manages this is to offer people something in return. Currently, for example, she is sending people video postcards as part of a project. Within particular project relationships with each individual will vary, sometimes she has very brief encounters with people and sometimes they might have a long conversation or have a relationship that goes unseen in the work. I guess that within Erica’s work, which deals very much with digital-content and the socially-networked word, the question of interpersonal relationships and power dynamics is pertinent. The fact that her work makes me think about the ethics of using teenage girls (who she sourced from a website for people who want to get into working in TV) is interesting. ‘Reality Life’ is a good artwork that makes me a bit uncomfortable, but then gets me reflecting on how young people are and behave online more generally.
Alongside her own practice, Erica works on commissions including community and education projects and at times the relationship between the two has blurred but she attempts to split them quite clearly. She has separate sections on her website and she thinks that it is useful for being seen as an ‘artist’ to keep your own work separate from what are commissioned, community based projects. I imagine there are also times when the converse is true, perhaps there are aspects of her artwork that she must keep separate. The power dynamics of a collaborative process in an education/community setting is different. She sees these projects as a collaborative process where she is not the ‘author’ but is working with, for example, a group of young people to create a work together. The outcome is not her artwork but something they have made together. The two ways of working can support and influence each other but also have to be kept distinct.
