Inspiration: a functional approach to creative practice.

9.1.3 Actions3 – collective individuals

This group consists of collaborative works and the making of them into the films What is Love?, A Fallen Angel, Confessions of an Angel, The Collective Hearts, as well as videos made of conferences, and the actual papers presented at the conferences (October 2007 – December 2008).

Colour then evolved to pastels, which presented a mix of several colours, a multitude of ideas, where there is no one strong opinion, but rather liberal and flexible choices. This can be seen in films What is Love?, A Fallen Angel and the creative output created by participants in the film The Collective Hearts.

Text dissolved into the image, becoming a prominent factor where the image existed for the text. For example in the film What is love? what people say creates their movement and the image of the film. In the final participatory workshop, made into the film The Collective Hearts, the spoken text served as a guide that enabled body gestures by the facilitator, and produced inner images that were later drawn and made into images by participants.

Less movement was directed by me as a director, and more movement was allowed to flow spontaneously from the characters in the films. In the film A Fallen Angel the movement is the direct outcome and expression of the actors, in a natural matter of their expression. Movement became the outcome of the speech, and by then I stopped using movement as a tool. This is also seen in the natural movement of the tree’s leaves in the film Confessions of an Angel. The videos made from the conference presentations also changed from fixed hand movements, to body language that spoke in itself, turning movement into a part of the message, not a separate tool.

The presentation of the Self evolved to show the individual as part of a group, putting the self into works with others, for the purpose of seeing how the self can find himself among the others. From the initial notion of the self as an individual expressing a message with no context, the self evolved to be situated amongst other practitioners, and then developed to share the creative process with others, to create together with others, as can be seen in final art workshop The Collective Hearts.

In the next section I will describe how this range of actions gradually showed commonalities, developing core themes.