Author(s): Silva, Carolina
Date: 2024
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/96929
Origin: Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa
Subject(s): collaborative art youth; youth; contemporary art museum; proto-performance; experimentation; museum education; memory
Duchamp & Sons are the Whitechapel Gallery youth collective, a group of young people aged 15–24 that meet regularly to develop collaborative art projects. I worked with them as a participant researcher in the six-month project De/construct (2013–14), co-developed with architect Nick Wood (United Kingdom) and artist Steven Morgana (United Kingdom). In this visual essay, I present my diagrammatic drawings of their encounters, including research, discussion, experimenta tion and decision-making moments. The latter create visual cartographies of the youth collective’s encounters and speak to their performativity. I use a selection of Duchamp & Sons tweets, which are posted by a different member of the group in each session, to create a timeline of the project. My reflections on collaborative art projects and the pedagogies that come together in these practices draw on notions of experimentation and proto-performance, emphasizing the processes rather than the outcome, in this case, an exhibition presented at the Gallery.
