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Cycles Within Cycles: Six Years of MOBIUS Fellowships
Launched in January 2014, the MOBIUS Fellowship Program concluded in January 2020 after almost fifty fellowships and institutional partnerships. The program was based on customized fellowship periods that fostered collegial sharing and caring, research, unexpected encounters, and experimental projects. Join FCINY’s Director of Programs Ilari Laamanen as he looks back on the six years of MOBIUS and reflects on the principles behind it.
Why not together?
The core of the MOBIUS Fellowship Program was transparent collaboration: joining forces and sharing resources not out of necessity but out of genuine professional interest and a desire to experiment. It is well known that innovative action emerges from unlikely combinations of unorthodox thinking and a mixing of disciplines. In truth, it also requires a large dose of fearless attitude and an ability to dream.
The whole foundation of MOBIUS was laid on slow processes. Contrary to popular opinion, slow does not mean lazy or unproductive. Rather, it is the antidote to the methodologies of today that tend to strive for fine-tuned efficiency and maximum exposure. Instead of competitiveness, the program has cultivated a modality based on open dialogue and honesty. Most importantly, it has been developed to narrow the gap between people working inside and outside the institutional context.
In order to rethink methodologies, it is imperative to take time to dive deep into the systems and structures that produce, distribute, display, and maintain different modes of knowledge. If we cannot find the time and determination to reflect on and actively reshape outdated operating models, the only remaining option is simply to react to and try to survive in a system that continues to accelerate. In many ways the logic of big corporations steers decision-making in the art worlds, too. The biggest players continue to balloon out, when they could be sharing their resources more generously with up-and-coming organizations and collectives, thus ensuring the vitality of the whole field, instead of focusing on shortsighted gains.
Initiating completely new collaborations between curators and organizations, and allowing the freedom to work creatively across disciplines and institutional contexts, have been the most fruitful and rewarding aspects of the program. It has been equally exciting to join forces with so many established and renowned organizations, as it has with some of the most uncompromising and forward-looking ones. It is hugely important to continue to open the doors of institutions to new and at times conflicting ideas that cause friction and challenge the status quo. Not simply to keep up with the times but to be a part of positive change as well.
Experts with beginners’ minds
Trust has been the connective tissue linking all the fellowships carried out under the program. All the parties involved, albeit in their own distinct processes, have been moving steadily towards a shared goal, an abstract final frontier, with no interest in controlling or forcing the process. Not even when those processes have headed in unpredictable, sideways directions, since they are, in all honesty, the reason the program was started to begin with. The idea has not been to treat creativity and experimentation as intellectual concepts but to actually question the default ways that collaborative processes are perhaps typically guided, to cultivate a more adventurous approach, and to test things out in practice.
Trial and error, and especially failure, can sound like harsh words but they are always an intimate part of any artistic work. As perfection does not exist in this world, why continue to strive for it? And why, to continue the theme, are we so attached to form and structure? Even to the point that many creative practices come across as standardized, calculated, and cold. In my humble understanding of it, art is supposed to be the component of culture that constantly challenges many of the existing modes of operation, not only by exposing them, but also by actively creating and sharing tools for and pathways towards different kinds of being in the world.
The art of listening can be a good place to start a new partnership. Dismantling unrealistic expectations is another. It has been important to begin all the collaborations in the flesh. It has been fulfilling, and also necessary, to discuss hopes, fears, worries, dreams, and goals openly, in order to set the right tone for, and to find a mutual understanding of, the direction the collaboration is to take. The general guidelines for the program were laid down to be flexible, so that participants could have safe and supportive conditions for inspiration to emerge. As we know, inspiration comes without warning and can depart just as unexpectedly. This is not a game of control and coercion, and so I want to highlight the importance of providing enough time. With time comes patience. When we are patient, we also begin to relax.
Ripple effects
The developments that took place within the program have been as much internal as they have been external. While it is important to celebrate the myriad public manifestations produced in the context of MOBIUS –– ranging from dance choreographies, sound sculptures, and critical symposia to experiential architecture tours and planetarium films –– most of the breakthroughs or insights have been experienced by the program’s participants when they were immersed in collaborative practices. Silent knowledge such as this is radically important and has the potential to impact institutional structures from within. Providing the conditions for this type of open-ended, yet gently guided professional development continues to be important in this day and age, as it will be in the future.
But it has never been just the individuals and institutions who benefit. It has also been the diverse publics: all those who are interested, who are participating, or are just curious. I believe that the joy of unconditional sharing and working together across organizational, curatorial, and many other contexts continues to live on in the work of the people who have been involved with the program. Since the goal was never simply set as getting from point A to point B to begin with, the current closure cannot really be considered final. The good that has been done will continue to circulate and spread.
A sincere thank you to all the participants, partners, publics, and supporters of MOBIUS.
