A reflective and critical statement from [cloud] for the festive period on partnership, community, rest, and the radical necessity of mutual respect in contemporary art education and practice.

To work in genuine partnership is to accept that discovery is never solitary. As Co-Director of [cloud], I have come to understand that collaboration is not simply a matter of shared labour, aligned ambition, or organisational efficiency. It is a sustained ethical practice, shaped by attentiveness, patience, disagreement held with care, and a willingness to be changed by another’s thinking. Working alongside Dr Jane Boyer has been central to this understanding. Jane’s intellectual rigour, steadiness, and generosity create the conditions in which ideas are not forced into coherence but allowed to unfold. Our collaboration is grounded in mutual respect rather than consensus, and in appreciation rather than authority. It has taught me that leadership rooted in care does not diminish clarity, but strengthens it.

This partnership models the conditions we seek to create more widely at [cloud] and within the [c]CC Art School. It demonstrates that when power is shared rather than asserted, others are invited to recognise themselves within the work. Participation becomes possible without coercion. Contribution emerges without extraction. Progress occurs without the erasure of difference. These conditions are not accidental. They are the result of deliberate choices about how we work together, how we listen, and how we accommodate one another as thinking, feeling, complex individuals.

At the centre of this work are our [c]’ers. Artists across the world who have chosen to engage with [c]CC Art School not because it promises status, acceleration, or easy answers, but because it offers something rarer. A space where intelligence is assumed, where difference is welcomed, and where learning is understood as a shared responsibility rather than a transaction. Our cohort is not defined by geography, medium, career stage, or institutional affiliation. It is defined by an ethical alignment. A commitment to co-respect over hierarchy, collaboration over competition, and growth that is both individual and relational.

What our [c]’ers demonstrate repeatedly is that when artists are met with genuine respect and meaningful accommodation, they do not withdraw or fragment. They engage. They contribute generously. They challenge one another with care. They develop practices that are strengthened, not diluted, by collective exchange. This matters because the art world has too often positioned accommodation as an exception rather than a foundation, and respect as conditional rather than inherent. At [cloud], accommodation is not an add-on. It is a structural principle. Freedom here is not understood as independence from others, but as the ability to think, speak, pause, and experiment within a network of mutual regard.

This position is grounded in critical traditions that understand creativity and knowledge as relational rather than proprietary. Hannah Arendt argues that meaning emerges through plurality, through acting and appearing together in the world. bell hooks insists that education becomes transformative only when rooted in mutual recognition, care, and a refusal of domination. Paulo Freire rejects the idea of knowledge as something deposited by experts into passive recipients, instead framing learning as a dialogical process shaped by listening and reciprocity. These ideas are not abstract reference points for [cloud]. They are lived commitments enacted through how [c]CC sessions are facilitated, how authority circulates, and how difference is held.

Choosing people first is not a sentimental gesture. It is a demanding one. To collaborate ethically requires humility. To listen attentively requires time. To accommodate difference requires flexibility and responsibility. In a cultural sector shaped by precarity, scarcity, and competition, these commitments can feel counterintuitive. Yet it is precisely because of these conditions that such choices become radical. They refuse the logic that progress must be competitive, that value must be hoarded, or that recognition must be earned through conformity.

The practices that resonate most strongly with the ethos of [c]CC Art School are those that understand collaboration not as a method to be deployed, but as a way of being in the world. The Indian collective Raqs Media Collective have worked collaboratively for decades, producing research-driven installations, texts, and exhibitions through sustained dialogue and shared authorship. Their work demonstrates that thinking together generates forms of knowledge that cannot be reached individually. Ideas deepen when they are tested in relation to others, when they are allowed to remain open, unresolved, and in motion. This approach mirrors the intellectual generosity and curiosity that [c]CC artists bring to one another’s practices.

Assemble, working within the UK context, offer another powerful illustration. Their long-term engagement with the Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust did not position artists as external problem-solvers or aesthetic consultants. Instead, they became participants within a wider ecology of residents, craftspeople, and organisers. Authorship was distributed. Decisions were shared. Listening was central. The work emerged through time, trust, and accountability. This reflects the [c]CC commitment to resisting extractive models of engagement and to valuing process as much as outcome.

Forensic Architecture extend this ethic into contexts of political urgency. Their interdisciplinary practice brings together artists, architects, scientists, technologists, lawyers, and affected communities to co-produce evidence and truth. Collaboration here is not symbolic or decorative. It is structural. Listening is integral. Knowledge is built collectively and with responsibility to those whose lives are implicated. This aligns with the [c]CC understanding that learning is not neutral, and that ethical responsibility is inseparable from creative practice.

The Guerrilla Girls provide a further lesson in collective authorship and shared voice. By working anonymously and cooperatively, they dismantle the mythology of individual genius and redirect attention toward systemic inequality. Their practice demonstrates how collaboration can function as both protection and amplification, particularly for those marginalised by dominant art world structures. It shows how visibility can be redistributed without reproducing hierarchy.

Across these practices, a shared understanding emerges. Egalitarian collaboration demands attentiveness, patience, and ethical responsibility. It resists the extraction of labour, experience, or identity. It rejects the idea that value is bestowed from above or measured solely through visibility and success. Lisa Le Feuvre’s writing on failure helps frame this position. To collaborate is to risk uncertainty, disagreement, and not knowing. It is to accept that learning unfolds through process rather than mastery.

This understanding also shapes how we think about time, labour, and rest. In keeping with the values we articulate here, [cloud] recognises that sustainable creative practice requires pause as well as momentum. For this reason, [cloud] will be formally closed over the holiday period from Tuesday 23rd December 2025 to Monday 5th January 2026. This closure is not an interruption to our work, but an extension of it. Rest, like listening, is a condition of care. It allows space for reflection, renewal, and the continued capacity to engage generously with others.

Our respect for our [c]’ers remains unwavering. Their commitment, curiosity, and willingness to engage deeply with one another continue to shape what [cloud] is becoming. We extend the same care and gratitude to everyone who subscribes to, supports, collaborates with, and follows [cloud] in its many forms. We also hold space for those we have not yet met. [cloud] is not a closed formation or a fixed identity. It is an invitation. An evolving alignment of artists who understand that freedom does not require isolation, and that individual progress is strengthened, not threatened, by collective conditions.

As the year draws to a close, we send our warmest wishes to all who engage with [cloud], however and wherever you are. We hope this period offers rest where it is needed, connection where it is welcomed, and time to acknowledge what has sustained you through the year. We return in January ready to continue this work together, with care, clarity, and renewed commitment.

In a cultural moment marked by exhaustion, fragmentation, and uncertainty, choosing to move forward together while honouring difference remains a powerful act. It insists that art is a social practice. That freedom is inseparable from responsibility. That respect is not optional. And that accommodation is not a limit on ambition, but its foundation.

This is what [cloud] seeks to offer.
This is what our [c]’ers enact.
And this is the collective future we continue to build, together.

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References

Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Assemble with Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust (2011–ongoing). Granby Four Streets. Socially engaged art and architecture project, Liverpool; Turner Prize exhibition, Tate Britain, 2015. © Assemble and Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust. Project documentation accessed via Assemble Studio.

Art Basel (2015). Raqs Media Collective: Coronation Park. Art Basel Online Catalogue.

Forensic Architecture (2019). Triple-Chaser. Video installation and investigative research project, exhibited at the Whitney Biennial 2019 and subsequent international venues. © Forensic Architecture. Documentation accessed via forensic-architecture.org.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Guerrilla Girls (1989). Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum? Offset lithographic poster. © Guerrilla Girls. Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

Le Feuvre, L. (2010). Failure. London: Whitechapel Gallery and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Moten, F. and Harney, S. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions.

Rancière, J. (1991). The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Raqs Media Collective (2015). Coronation Park. Installation, 56th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Giardini, Venice. © Raqs Media Collective. Courtesy the artists and La Biennale di Venezia. Documentation accessed via Google Arts & Culture.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (n.d.). Guerrilla Girls collection entry. New York: The Met Collection Online.