Welcome back dear readers! It’s been a while. We’ve been moving our studio to a new address (Linker Rottekade 5A) and our email as well (mail@extrapractice.nl). A Big Launch is still coming (June 1 ✏️) and meanwhile an archive of our newsletters is in the making (newsletter.extrapractice.space). So we'd better pick up the groove again. It’s Gijs here, with an extra long one for y’all full of treats 🪺:
ARCHETYPECASTING
On leading without
leaders Feb 14 🏹 It feels like day one of working at the new studio. The walls are white, the floor is wood, we made our first attempt at a desk setup and over our big table we hung a beautiful lamp that Jack found in a container. I’m sitting at a desk assigned to me by drawing lots and I've just set up my second screen. There’s no one else in yet, but old grandpa jazz blowing gently from the speakers fills the space with a cozy warmth. And then you find yourself in a beautiful studio, at a beautiful desk, with a beautiful river view and a beautiful pear. And then I find my mind wandering to a memory of a completely different space. The SeminarA sunny Friday afternoon in November. I step into the elevator of the Marriott hotel, in the NYC-aspiring Millennium Tower right across Rotterdam Central, and I'm launched to the 23rd floor. There are no rooms here, just a bar and many carpeted glass-walled spaces. This is a conference floor. One with a great view of Rotterdam, but I don't have much time to enjoy it because the seminar is starting. A woman sits in front of a flip-over with a big marker. The first sheet says something like: Welcome to Leadership in Teams. A friend I know from philosophy studies, Duuk, must think that I enjoy taking a dip into unfamiliar waters. He was following a leadership training program for his work and could invite someone to join for one seminar. So he reached out to the arty and cheap one of the friend group, who usually dwells in a ground-level studio space filled with found and self-made furniture on an almost finished floor from leftover parquet planks. (We also have a bar though, at least the DJ-booth/radio-storage/pull-out-reception unit has proven to function as one.)
The Tavern But Leadership? We’re a group of friends. We share a space. Yes there are some things we do together, there’s some structure, like monthly meetings and a collective bank account, but we don’t even earn money together! (so far) We each have some responsibilities – towel laundry and kitchen cleaning, instagram and meeting notes, plant-watering and sound setup – some more explicit than others. There's no leader though. It’s a different person every time, and no one decides for others, right? All the team dynamics from the seminar presumed a hierarchy, a relationship between a leader and the rest. Not us. We’re all equals. While listening to the seminar and staring at the city deep below, I felt a doubt creep up. Sure it was comfortable to think that we as an arty collective are simply too subversive and utopian to fit within ‘corporate frameworks’ like a leadership seminar. Of course institutions haven’t caught up yet with new ways of doing things, a kind of collectivity where all individuals shine. Of course it must come from creative types, who value their expression and are able to come up with convivial ways of ‘working and learning together’. It’s definitely part of the truth, as you, reader of our newsletter, must have a good sense of, but I also felt there was something I was missing. |
