The majority of artists at ISCP worked in object-based materials such as sculpture and painting. Aside from showcasing work and having conversations during open studio, artists also had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with each other and each other’s works. I met Francisco Montoya Cazarez, a young Mexican artist from Germany, and later developed a collaborative project with him.

Moore St. Market Project:

The basic concept for this new project was to utilize the distance between art and communities to push the collaborative relationship between artists and communities into a more extreme and challenging position. Through constant negotiation and communication, the proposed project would attempt to relinquish the role of artists to the targeted community, meaning that the role of the artist was given up to a certain degree during the artistic process. Our agency as artists would lie in giving the community agency, and our thinking would lie in how to allow the thoughts of the community to become the main body of the project. We did not even provide the community with models of thinking, and passed our right of creation to the community. We wanted to transform the notion of ‘art as community interference’ into ‘community as art interference.’ Moreover, instead of placing a piece of artwork in a public space, we would rather create work that is a part of the space and a part of the community.

During our meetings with the members at the Moore Market, Francisco and I asked them to think about what kind of ‘artwork’ they wanted to have if we could execute the necessary tasks to make the ‘artwork’ happen for them. This process of communication was long, since Francisco and I were outsiders and it took time to gain the members’ trust. Furthermore, art was something unfamiliar to these people, and for them, it was difficult to think about personal needs through art. In the end, there were six market members that agreed to participate in our project. They designed two workshops as artworks and named these works themselves, as Francisco and I took the role of art professionals who execute their needs in making their work become reality.