From Michael EDDY’s personal statement at the collective online platform www.tuanjiespace.com (tuanjie means ‘to unite’ in Chinese):

For a number of years I have been exploring the division between working as an individual artist and in collaboration with others; this means neither fixating on either being a collective or an individual, nor on discarding these terms and their conventional opposition. What I like about working with others is that it leads to places, rhythms and discussions I may otherwise not have attempted; but working with others can be frustrating when I find myself waiting to act, or prioritizing rational communication. A collaboration can form a primary public space for experimentation, there can be fights with good friends, there can be autonomy; but I appreciate curiosity as much as strategy. Collective work can also complicate how authorship is assigned; but I am not certain what value or lack authorship represents in itself, aside from its being constructed.

I am not so fond of geniuses; but am I inspired by networkers? The individual is free to choose; but they are composed of fragments of others, and who can say when we are affected by an intense personal view of another that this is not a social phenomenon? Should this be interpreted as rhetoric? In other words, I am interested in how we make decisions, and how they are made for us, and what happens next, after that.

It’s perhaps a pity or perhaps amazing how one can feel so akin to another in abstractions and yet not have reached those moments in concrete relation. Such ‘concreteness’ is perhaps the void in relation anyhow, what we never would have wanted, or just inasmuch as we are unable to define ‘affect’. This is also perhaps the very same attraction to the idea of ‘collaboration’, or maybe even —— ‘collectivity’.