Our last salon event for 2023! Held on the sunny top floor of the Marie Reay building in Kambri, in the centre of the ANU campus. For this salon we chose the theme Time and Attention. We find that collaboration can be challenged by lack of time and competing demands on our attention, and that the processes of building relationships, building trust, recognising capabilities, developing ideas, planning and so on are richer and more rewarding when they are not rushed. Yet it can be difficult to carve out time for or give our close attention to these processes in our busy schedules.
In Salon #3 we worked with Naomi Zouwer who led participants through experimental drawing activities that created an embodied experience of time, attention and collaboration. Naomi is a visual artist and an academic in the UC School of Education and has worked with many schools and community groups on collaborative art projects. We started with a few warm-up drawing exercises before moving on to ‘exquisite monsters’, a variation of the exquisite corpse drawing game. Very apt for a salon! The drawing activities focused our attention and required our time, embodying the theme of the salon. After embellishing our monsters we created a collective installation, which became the catalyst of a group discussion that meandered across a number of ideas related to time and attention: trust, obligation, productivity, the unknown, creativity, idleness, surrender and playfulness.
Before the Salon, the Collaborative Cultures team crafted a short refection on time and attention in relation to our own collaboration, which we shared during the salon:
“Sometimes, we have felt that we don’t have time for this collaboration. We have other meetings, other deadlines, other projects, other responsibilities. The meeting we’ve scheduled is another thing to fit into our week. It can feel non-essential, a luxury even. When we come together, though, it’s good to see one another. We don’t talk about our collaboration right away. We take time to ask how we are going. Sometimes there are big things happening, in our work and in our lives. We recognise how more of our collaborative instincts comes from our human being selves, not just our professional selves, and giving that proper care and attention supports our work together. We listen and adjust as needed. We can worry, sometimes, that we aren’t contributing enough to this collaboration, or about all the things that need to be done.
Our meetings are long, an hour and a half, sometimes longer. Coming together we are aware of our differences, as well as our similarities. We are aware our attention can be fragmented; sometimes this can feel inevitable in the environment in which we work. We share our ideas and thoughts, and together we observe the connections and relations between them – themes and parallels emerge. We feel the energy of doing productive work together. We recognise that the benefits we derive from our collaboration now are a result of the time and attention we have given to it previously, throughout its formation and development. We have learnt that what is fragmented will come together. There is a sense of stability. We can trust our collaboration. The foundational principles behind this work, that we have spent a long time exploring, help us to build that trust. There is also a sense of momentum. We feel this momentum ripple out into other aspects of our work and lives. We feel rewarded by the time we have given to our collaboration.”
