Welcome to the xs collective
Artist Collective as Experimental Lab
“I always insist that to act politically is to act as part of ‘us’, to act from the position of a ‘we’. I would not want to advocate or glorify a person who acts purely from an individual point of view.”
– Chantal Mouffe.
The Politics of Excess
Our planet and its fragile biosphere are in serious trouble due to anthropogenic excess
(global warming, population, consumption and development being the big four).
The sheer scale of human excess will require a collective global response for our survival. For this we need a new global political model, one that is able to cooperate to regulate against excess, to synthesise capitalism, socialism and democracy, but this time for the collective good. The current capitalist system that awards superiority to the individual over the collective and rewards values like competition, selfishness, greed, power and status has resulted in 1% of people being excessively wealthy and able therefore to subvert democracy (this plutocracy was the target of the Occupy movement recently).
Where arts practice is concerned, the xs collective is suggesting cultural change – a move towards post-autonomy and collective practice away from the individual and the ego-cult that surrounds it. There have been and currently are many hundreds of artist collectives, cooperatives, collaborative and curatorial groups that are underplayed by writers and critics and by the arts industry itself (note the plethora of biennales, triennales and blockbusters featuring individuals funded to celebrity status by competing nations).
