Collective Efforts: Navigating Friction in Collaboration

Collaboration invites failure. Frequently romanticised as an antidote to hyper-individualisation, working together comes with its own set of difficulties. “Collective Efforts” will begin a conversation between emerging and established architecture and design collectives, asking what challenges they have encountered and how friction can be generative. How can we embrace these obstacles as an inevitable consequence of collaboration?

Speakers:

- Andreas Lang, Public Works
- Martha Summers, HI-VIS!
- Aude Tollo and Ella Adu, Patch Collective
- Maria Lisogorskaya, Assemble
- Mich Rossiter and Bruna Borges, Architecture Foundation Young Trustees

Self-Organised: Models for Learning is a series organised by Leela Keshav, Francesca Romana Dell’Aglio, Rory Sherlock, Sharvaree Shirode, Abhishek Wagle and Francesco Zuddas.

If it is a truism that learning is hard work, this is not merely because of the complexity of certain topics or subjects to be learnt. More generally, learning is a difficult social practice, the hard to achieve balance in a dialogue between individual idiosyncrasies and collective aspirations. The image of the lone scholar in their studiolo necessarily depends on a counterpart of groups that are constantly forming and disbanding from within, but also often set against, the institutional set-ups of education. This events series explores the multi-faceted relations between institutional education and its many possible others that take the form of self-organised, collaborative models conceived and run by that vast, chaotic, and contradictory group that we call learners. Bridging between inside and outside of the AA and its institutional yet quasi-domestic spaces, the series makes use of different formats – from peer reviews to walks, dinners to co-design workshops – to trigger discussion, raise hope, but also accept frustration, on the current predicament of architectural education and what constitutes a learning environment that can set itself apart from the prospect of a bureaucratised and commodified model solely shaped from the top-down.

The Self-Organised: Models for Learning event series accompanies the exhibition on show in the AA Gallery titled Warburg Models: The Architecture of the Itinerant Archive, open from 19 January to 7 March 2024.

Please get in touch to let us know of any access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these. If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely please email publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk.