Co-creative Networks | practices for essential collaboration

Through dialogical practices based on listening to the participants’ life histories – inspired by the approach of the German poet, writer, and scientist Wolfgang Von Goethe when observing natural phenomena – the workshop offers a path of experiences to make visible the delicate and profound aspects that underpin the collaborative and co-creative processes.

Collaboration is the practice that allows us to see the luminous aspect of transition. If, on the one hand, old systems based on scarcity and control decay, generating violence and destruction, on the other, new patterns emerge vigorously producing life and abundance. Those who practice collaboration benefit from positive aspects of the transition and, at the same time, contribute to its occurrence.

However, to collaborate is much more complex than to cooperate (when both parties just coordinate actions and exchanges for mutual benefit). To collaborate is to co-create: creating the world together and creating oneself in relation to the other. Participating in the realization of the other without giving up one’s own realization. A consciousness focused simultaneously on the individual and on the communal, both inside and outside.

For the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘real understanding always has a cost on identity’. Collaboration requires understanding the reasons, individual and collective, for doing what one wishes to do together. Collaborating challenges each creator-entrepreneur-activist to understand the way her or his partner sees the world. However, for that to be possible, it is necessary to observe one’s own outlook, to unravel one’s own reasons and to ‘betray’ one’s own convictions. Only then it is possible to overcome conflicts and to see and support new possibilities.

4 and 5 November - Amsterdam

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