Knock on Woods: Corporate Retreat

August 28, 2008

Knock on Woods: a roving international artist residency
Un projet de Yvette Porter
En collaboration avec Quartier Éphémère www.fonderiedarling.org
Événement de clôture et discussion: 5 septembre 2008 de 17h à 19h @ articule

La résidence et habitation internationale, Knock on Woods, est un site nomade qui se consacre aux artistes d’ici et d’ailleurs et leur offre un moment de répit à l’abri d’un globalisme déroutant.

Knock on Woods is a nomadic temporary site that dedicates itself to offering local and international artists a sense of rootedness and respite from a hectic and bewildering globalism.

See images of the CRUM Corporate Retreat on the Knock on Woods site

The activities during the 12 hour residency compressed into this eleven minute video.

An animated gif of the Lego Tree
(click for action)

The CRUM residency took place from 10 am to 10 pm, on August 31, 2008, outside the Darling Foundry

(See below for photographs of residency activities)

A heterogeneity of interests and commitments takes the individual members of CRUM to faraway places at different times. Distance and time are thus challenges to maintaining a collective identity within a cultural context that emphasizes individuality.

The CRUM will use Knock on Woods for a corporate retreat of 12 hours. Within the temporary autonomous zone and wilderness environment constructed by KOW we will undertake a period of unstructured intellectual reflection – we will exist together as a collective in the present moment. This will be an action in direct opposition to the neo-liberal results-oriented model to exist in the future or conservative tendencies to exist in the past.

The retreat will be based upon two existing modes of enquiry: the Banff Centre for the Arts Leadership Development Program, as a program that creates “unique learning processes inspired by art and nature” in order to generate ideas, explore possibilities, and “make them real with meaningful results”. The other influence will be the exercises outlined in the radical pedagogy of La Pocha Nostra,* a reflection upon tactical interventions into post-colonial notions of race, culture and sexuality. This structure will inform the intersections between our combined competencies in sound engineering, architectural theory, information systems and general maintenance.

1. The CRUM is and artists’ collective but it is incorporated and therefore exists as a corporation – a legal entity that has a legal personality distinct from those of its members. What happens if we choose to participate in typical corporate activities such as building a vision, strategy workshops, scenario planning, and leadership development? What happens if we borrow elements from a corporate retreat that borrows elements of artistic practice to strengthen corporate performance?

2. What if we then combine this with a radical pedagogy that exists to make the marginal the mainstream — to invert the unbalanced power structures inherent in the corporate legal entity?

*Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2005)