12ø is an Arts Collective based in Stoke Newington, East London. 12ø was founded by Eva Duerden, Jeff Ko, Chloe Miller and Jacob Watmore, all of whom are recent graduates from Central Saint Martins.
Since graduating we have been living and working together, converting our living room into a shared studio. This has given us the opportunity to collectively deal and converse about the issues of post-university life. Whilst doing so we thought that creating a more formal framework would allow us to address these common concerns in a more productive manner.
We aspired to make a space outside of the university, for conversations about current concerns with our practice, situation and the systems that follow after university- life as a practicing artist. Our main concern was that there was no environment to talk about work, and with people who are interested and engaged in a similar dialogue. We found that private views and exhibitions had become merely a social space where nobody would take the time to talk about the work in front of them, let alone their own practice. We were unhappy with the state of passivity that was now surrounding us and wanted to create a space where criticality and practice could exist.
From these concerns we decided that we needed to create the space and situation to talk about such problems and therefore try and resolve them. By running crits, reading groups and discussions we hoped to house some of these concerns and allow for a critical exchange between practicing artists.
We also found that one of our main drives for making work post university was for deadlines, exhibitions, residencies etc and we were no longer focused on experimentation and the development of our practice but with having finished, concise and chiseled portfolios that we could send off to varying opportunities in the free time we have outside of our payed jobs. With this in mind, we set up 3OWORKS3ODAYS (where artists would sign up and submit a work everyday for the month of April, the project concludes with a publication about the process of the project and notions of artistic production). The main objective for this project was to allow space for experimentation and mistakes; we wanted to cut out the rhetoric of competition by not having a selection process and thus exclude the drive to make the ‘best work’. The only rule was that you had to submit one work each day, in any medium or form, thus putting the responsibility on the artist, not the curator. To develop their own practices, decisions and criteria for what they consider a work, to commit to giving themselves the time each day to dedicate to their work and practice.
Once 30WORKS30DAYS concludes we are aiming to continue to launch projects with similar intentions, in relation to productivity, criticality and practice. These will take various forms from residencies to alternative forms of exhibition and publications. We are also open to collaboration, if anybody would like to get in touch please contact us on info@12ocollective.com.
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