[Ithaca Inspired🍂] Collective Creativity: Finding Collaborators on Campus
Looking to work together with others to get inspired, but don't know where to start? Check out this article!
Courtesy Unsplash
Although there’s nothing like being your own collaborator, from conceiving an idea in your mind to bringing imagination to life, the synergy of collaborative art-making can create unique moments of camaraderie, solidarity, protest, beauty, joy, grieving… the list goes on. We’re social beings. At a place like a university that can quickly turn isolating, having you feel as though you’re minimized in the midst of the most crazy, wonderful chaos, connecting with another through creating is more than just fun, too. It’s essential.
So, how do you find your creative other(s)? Here are two (five) cents by yours truly (and decidedly, other creatives who have found community).
👁🐣 Looking inside
Like with many journeys, this one begins from within too. Working on fears that prevent you from expressing yourself can be a good kickstart in the right direction. Do you want to compliment their DIY earrings, but are too anxious? What holds you back? Are you shying away from posting that 56th take of you shredding away, because you’ve seen nobody here really do that? What prevents you from feeling like you could be the first? Do you want to talk about the installation at Johnson’s Museum that’s fascinating you, but feel like it won’t fit the ongoing conversation? Striving to detangle yourself from loops of overthinking and self-doubt can help you articulate, and put forth into the world, your passions. You don’t have to wear your heart on your sleeve of course— just the part of it that you want to be heard. It’s not too uncommon - the eyes of the one you’re talking to lighting up when you mention that one artist you thought was too obscure, but now you’ve both found out you love in common.
👩❤️👩👩❤️👨Finding spaces
This one is most peoples’ first instinct — entering spaces that are the focus of your interest. Attend meetings for clubs that involve your genre of creative work, enroll in classes titled [your creative medium], go to events that are showcasing your kind of work, or are asking you to — your next collab awaits you there. It’s important, however, to find spaces that don’t just align with your interests, but also feel safe, welcoming, and nurturing for you to open yourself up to others.
Courtesy Unsplash
🏡🧡Creating spaces
Can’t find a home for your work— what if you built it? Be the one who posts “7pm folk-punk jam on the slope” on Reddit, or the one who starts, impromptu, an anonymous account on horror poetry with the bio “accepting submissions.” There’s something truly fulfilling, beyond just finding collaboration, in creating just the space that others were looking for.
💌🤝Reaching out
If there’s a photographer’s account you just stumbled upon and were mesmerized by, and you want to be on the other side of the lens, don’t be afraid to send them a dm! Hang around at the end of that class, muster up the courage to say “Hey, would you want to work on a shoot together?” You’ll be surprised at the openness of it all!
‼️🧿Knowing your boundaries
Signed up for every exciting table at Clubfest, now sitting with 15 tabs of applications open, and your entire GCal day blue? Too many commitments can overwhelm you and leave you at the end having fulfilled none. As free as your mind is, you’re still in the limits of a body, and offering to give your energy to everything can make you feel like you have none. Give your heart only to the opportunities that really, really leap out at you.
💭🌅Rethinking your approach to collaboration…
Stop and ponder — what does collaboration mean to you? What is your intention with collaboration? Too many capital-oriented systems have conditioned us, whether we recognize it or not, to treat others as “creators” before humans, and package us into categories to make us more sellable. What if you collaborated with someone as a way of knowing someone’s art intimately, or connecting with the complexities of the human experience they’ve woven into their work? What if you asked a person who’s never crocheted before to complete this piece with you? Finding collaborators can be not only easier, but a transformative experience with broadened horizons.
By Pareesay Afzal
CC Content Writer
Pareesay A. is a Pakistani sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, dabbling in Comparative Literature, English, and Music classes. They are interested in journalism, storytelling, and the power of arts in giving a platform to unsung voices. They can be reached at pa323@cornell.edu.
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