Collective Collective

Collective Collective is a project between eight racialized-majority visual arts collectives, based in Toronto, Canada: BAM, Durable Good, Gendai, Guidance Council, MICE, Rice Water, Whippersnapper, and Younger than Beyonce. Our collaboration is a response to the systemic racism and exploitative conditions in the arts, as well as the interrelated lack of sustainability within the sector.

Collective Collective came together as part of a program initiated by Gendai in 2019, MA MBA: Mastering the Art of Misguided Arts Administration. This was a series of co-learning sessions for a self-organized cohort of Canadian DIY arts collectives with majority-racialized members to reimagine the way colonial, neoliberal, ableist, white dominant cultural organizations are structured and operated. Since then, we have been working as an artist supercollective that reorients the now-institutionalized movement of institutional critique out of the institutional framework and into collective practice. We are now in the midst of a three-year project to collectively test out collaborative organizational and curatorial practices that center values of collectivity, solidarity, and mutual aid through intercollective resource and labour sharing. 

Collective Collective is a study and a proposition for models of organizational governance that centers collaborative, non-hierarchical ways of working. It is a dream, a rehearsal for a post-apocalypse, a re-embodiment of all the ways resistance has and continues to happen. We look to collectives and movement organizing work, to learn not only about how we can dismantle or divest from our colonial institutions, but about living and being together.

We operate as action-oriented artist-researchers, building relationships with arts practitioners of colour to learn about sectoral labour conditions through feminist methodologies of listening and sharing stories, in order to collectively envision and test out alternative forms of working and thriving in Toronto’s arts sector. The individuals and collectives that we bring together through our work are mobilizing in response to the increasingly dire state of our arts ecosystem, and a desire to invent better alternatives. 

Following the idea of education as a liberatory practice, we make space for emergent conversations, citing the pedagogical methods developed by Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Pablo Helguera, adrienne maree brown, and others. 

We believe our commitment to long-term relationship building and our drive to test and implement new ways of working together will result in a more equitable ecosystem within the arts and beyond.

Members of Collective Collective. Top left: Peter Rahul, Jenna Robar, Hanen Nanaa, Alexandra Hong, Geneviève Wallen. Bottom left: Marjan Verstappen, Marina Fathalla, raven lam, Ornette, Marsya Maharani, Aira, Petrina Ng. Missing: Lan “Florence” Yee.