Lanaken Collaborative Workshop

Research question

Can a work be truly collective, or does every collaboration become a negotiation between individual authors?

Lanaken Collaborative Workshop investigates what happens when composers with different languages and methods attempt to build a common creative process without dividing responsibilities in advance.

Working hypothesis

The research begins with the idea that the most interesting co-creation emerges when decisions start to influence one another until it becomes difficult to identify where one voice ends and another begins.

The aim is to observe which tools, working dynamics and conditions make this shift possible.

Method

The work will develop through joint creative sessions, improvisation, exchange of materials, critical listening and collective review.

There is no predetermined aesthetic hierarchy or compulsory final form. The methodology will respond to the tensions and possibilities that emerge during the process.

Particular attention will be paid to:

• decision-making;
• the distribution or dissolution of authorship;
• aesthetic conflict;
• translation between different musical languages;
• trust;
• relinquishing control;
• transforming other people’s materials;
• the emergence of solutions that cannot clearly be attributed to one person.

Outcome

The outcome may be a joint work, several studies, shared materials or a documented working method.

The final production is only one measure of success: an essential part of the project is understanding the conditions that enable — or prevent — truly shared creation.

Documentation

The process will be documented through working notes, audio and video recordings, intermediate materials and participants’ reflections.

This material will make it possible to trace how particular decisions emerged, changed or disappeared during the collaboration.

Connections

Lanaken Collaborative Workshop extends a line of enquiry present in other projects by Héctor Muñoz: the relationship between authorship, process and outcome.

While Late Sessions Project reduces control to observe the relationship between performer and instrument, and Fish Factory explores the distance between imagination, body and technology, Lanaken brings the question into a collective setting:

what happens to a work’s identity when control no longer belongs to one person?