GRACIELA KASEP

 A collaborator is being sought…

The practice of Marianna Dellekamp (Mexico, 1968) has shifted across different terrains. While part of her work is identified with photographic imagery and the multiple ways to capture it, the realm of three-dimensionality has gained special importance for her in recent years. Her works result from meticulous research processes and propose alternate ways to discuss the contemporary subject. The most present form is one that fosters contexts or situations for long-term collective participation and reflection.

The Library of the Earth relates to the process of creating and accumulating books. It is a piece that, since its inception in 2008 and up to the present, has been shown in different exhibition contexts: from the corner that saw its birth in the artist's studio to museums, galleries, fairs, bookstores, and other events related to the publishing field. The work maintains a vitality of its own today and has adapted to each space that has housed it, validating itself on one side as an artistic object and on the other as a collection with editorial value.

This work has been shaped by the continuous and systematic collection of soil from various places around the world, whose collection was driven by open calls through social media. Dellekamp thus promoted collective participation to contribute the soil that would be integrated into various acrylic boxes, with shapes similar to those of a book. On the spine are the details of provenance. The soil contained in each volume thus becomes a kind of text that, thanks to its origin, defines edges and readings of the piece with different political, religious, social, and sentimental weights.

One of the incentives to activate participation was to invite collaborators to create and expand the project but, above all, to be co-authors by creating their own book. "The collective sense and the idea that the piece is realized through the intervention of different people are vital for its understanding," explains Dellekamp. From the first call, she asked to send soil, thus granting entire freedom of choice to each potential collaborator, provided that the organic material came from a personally significant place.

The call resonated. As she received different contributions, she initiated a process of recording, classifying, and rearranging the material. During this, the soils began to acquire a distinct identity within the project, in addition to their physical properties, defined by how the soil had been packed and sent by the collaborator. Marianna received material by mail, through personal delivery or from hand to hand, until it arrived at her studio. The containers were also diverse: plastic bags, envelopes, boxes, and jars, among others.

The process culminated in the formation of a library. The volumes that make it up are accumulations of information and personal experiences that never cease to be part of a collectivity: "Each book is a kind of cartographic treaty, a biographical trace, and an object filled with aesthetic elements and both formal and poetic games."

Every library contains books by various authors, in this case, different author-collaborators. Some volumes coincide in theme or, rather, provenance. This holds significance within the piece, as it represents the possibility of having different approaches to the same topic within a single collection. This accumulation has gained its own life throughout its development; however, it started from some limits of action for the collaborators, as the calls established guidelines to generate a system that would initiate and optimize the production process of the work. In this collaborative context, of expanded authorship, the artist acted as coordinator: her intention was diluted in the will of the collaborators. In the end, they decided what content to send. Dellekamp's individual action was to generate enthusiasm for collective participation.

During the formation of the library, the response of the collaborators reinforced the structure or social order promoted by the calls, and each book became a record of individual action within the collectivity dictated by the process of the piece.

Soils that are not soil

 The collaborations marked the project’s path. The first call requested soil from a place that held special significance for the collaborator; it also allowed for the possibility of contributing from a place where the person was passing through. The idea and image of soil soon transformed into organic matter or simply matter, as some of the contributions included remnants of shells, seeds, flowers, and leaves, and even personal or official documents. The content gave identity to each volume. In this way, the piece dictated where to move, and it was inevitable that it would touch on places not contemplated at the beginning.

Below, I mention some of these books that were inserted into the project from another conceptual premise, stating the opening of the production process and, above all, generating a log of the piece itself composed of memory, history, and individual findings. For example, there is an old postcard from Hawaii that belonged to the deceased grandmother of the collaborator, intervened with soil from the site; or a book-atlas with different stones collected over twenty years of travels by the same person. There are also books that reveal the coexistence of organic matter and waste, such as a book that contains a piece of Styrofoam eroded by the sea or another that mixes sand and litter, which the collaborator found during a walk on the beach.

I cannot fail to mention a book that, lacking soil, contains a customs request, received by the artist to announce the arrival of a package from Rosh Pina (one of the oldest Zionist settlements in Israel). The document explains that soil is not a lawful import product and therefore would not be delivered. Isn’t this fact itself a point of reflection on the concept of the piece?

The Library of the Earth is an open-process work that, as we have seen, generated closeness with the collaborators from the beginning. The artist's interest in working on such works lies in the possibility of provoking interaction between individuals and shaping another way to permeate society, to work in community.

Collaborative art is largely inherited from the 1960s, when a new way of understanding the situation of the artwork assumed social forms that fostered encounters between artistic product and everyday life. The distance between the creator-producer of the work and the audience transformed, thus opening a new dimension for collective experiences. The existence of a collaborator in a creative process, as happens with the Library, leads me to think about the difference in roles between a viewer in front of a completed work, in which they have not participated, and a collaborator who, although not necessarily a viewer of the final work, has a different understanding of it as they were a part of its creation. Collaborative art generates a social dimension from collective participation, instead of the individual activation that only entails observing a completed work. In the case of the Library of the Earth, the collaborator has helped to form it; the spectator contemplates it.

Creating a genealogy of collaborative art leads us to review some ideas surrounding the relationship of the author with their work and the audience in recent decades. Even today, some sectors consider that the artist only produces and exhibits their work, while the audience observes and evaluates what is on display. This entails a traditional principle of authorship. As Claire Bishop suggests, artistic events that have adopted a critical stance towards traditional authorship have aimed at provoking participants, engaging them in a more active way. Subsequent movements in the history of art that adopted a non-authorial principle embraced the possibility of collective creativity. Collaborative processes created new spaces occupied by artistic production, aligned with its context and temporality. A work positions itself within a context that establishes different relationships, including those that convert the consumer into a producer. The individual not only consumes the artistic object but also produces it.

In light of the above and thanks to the calls, the Library activated the public to promote their participation and generate a "physical" relationship during the process. Participants somehow appropriated the work, integrating a network that builds the meaning and understanding of it. Collaboration opens the possibility to redirect or reconstruct the meaning that the author may have intended initially. Some participants were never spectators of the process or the work on display, but that does not mean they were not part of this network of appropriation.

One of the aspirations of collective participation is to configure active subjects within symbolic experiences, generating actions within the social and political environment. As we have seen, a collaboration process relinquishes part of the authorial power to shape a new social model. The open and collaborative process closes the possibility of having a preconceived formal outcome. Part of the value of a work of this type is that it does not know where or how it will conclude, as is the case with the Library of the Earth.

Another premise of art generated from collaborative processes is to create a meeting point for the participating collectivity. Today, the meeting of the artist with their collaborators or audience can also occur through interaction in virtual spaces. The sense of participation, of creating a social event to generate the Library, originated from social media. The work has facilitated encounters between people who, by virtue of their collaboration with the earth or organic matter, manifested their physical presence in this encounter despite the different origins. Through calls via email, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, it was possible to establish a network with the following characteristics: 61% of the participants are acquaintances of the artist, she met 11% through the project, and had no physical contact with the remaining 28%. It is worth mentioning that another medium used was the traditional flyer, small papers that were distributed in various spaces to seek collaborators through another type of approach.

The process of openness to what happens, to chance, or change remains in force. It will be difficult for the artist to determine when and why this Library should conclude, a library that, like all, needs to remain alive, capable of continuing to grow, either to be consulted or merely observed.

Mexico, 2013