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.

First some Thoughts spurred by our move. On having a space with friends, leadership vs horizontality, bands, archetypes and earthly delights, which all leads into:
Contributions of the Archetypes that possess each of us when we obsess.
You can scroll down for News 🌍 and
Our Events 🎈 on Apr 24 (taxes!💰) and Apr 26 (pomodoro! 🍅)

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.

A 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.)

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.

Mid-pandemic. I remember chatting about the communes Jenny Odell writes about in How To Do Nothing, when XP still was an online reading room. An attempt to escape the structures of society, only to see new structures emerge. Power hierarchies along lines familiar to Society outside – men/women, extravert/introvert, white/non-white – but now under the guise of horizontality.

It seems to be a recurring issue in subversive and activist circles at least since Jo Freeman in 1970 called it The Tyranny of Structurelessness: "the idea [of a structureless group] becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others." It also sounds like the dreams of the internet, and any new ‘level playing field’ built on top like instagram, NFTs, web3. Not the handmade web though, right? We just sit on a bench together. Or do some sit more in the middle?

Meanwhile in the Millennium Tower. The seminar introduced several types of unhelpful team dynamics:

dependence, when the Rest awaits direction from the Leader (symptom: gossip)
us-them, when the Leader mobilises the Rest through a common enemy (symptom: arrogance)
isolation, when the Rest communicates only through the Leader (symptom: reinventing the wheel)

We were asked to relate it to our own experiences. The problem: I actually started to recognise some of the dynamics. For instance when I lose grip of my controlling side and stay over-involved with someone else’s task so they keep checking with me (dependence). Or when I retreat to fix something myself (isolation). Or the very fact that I even thought XP (us) exempt from leadership dynamics (them).

Early December. We were going to move studio. As friends it had always been relatively smooth to get things done, have meetings and set dates and all. But planning a last minute move – from goodbye party to hosting new tenants to transferring contracts to buying paint, renting vans, laying floors, all over a winter holiday period that was super busy for some and rather empty for others – was a different challenge.

How to make decisions when not everyone is there? When some feel passionate and others unsure? How to divide tasks fairly when some are packed and others free? When some are impatient and others careful? How to make sure the new space feels like it’s everyone’s? When for some commitment looks like taking initiative while for others it shows in leniency? When some keep talking while others leave space?

Maybe this whole move just had to bring out our different tendencies and assumptions on collaboration. Does it even work if we're so different? We never really work together, and maybe there's a reason for that.

“It’s easy to act like a well-functioning team, but there are no good teams that did not go through conflict.”

The seminar continued. “When tensions come to the surface, two things can happen.” First option: the sudden scare may remind everyone of the roles they played in the well-functioning team. Back to work, quick fix, danger averted. Symptom: taboos.

Maybe because we’re friends, it feels more scary to touch possible conflicts. There’s a friendship and a vibe at stake here. I don't want to kill the mood, or worse, escalate a cozy end-of-year dinner into a cliché Christmas family drama. By wanting to talk about feels and needs.

The second way is through. It’s work. Sharing discomfort (uncomfortable) and desires (needy, pathetic), listening to others (even worse) and having to negotiate to agree on new rhythms (corporate). Don't we just lose intrinsic motivation when we have to do things ‘for the studio’? I thought we were different.

Maybe because we’re friends, things had to come out. We know each other too well for politeness to effectively mask, and we care a little too much to perform over signs of unhappiness.

And perhaps because we’re friends, it had to land well. Of course we understood, of course we want to work with our differences. Of course we couldn't always have known just from guessing.

Since January I don’t have neighbours – the bakery below sadly had to close and my upstairs neighbours moved out – so I’ve been hosting the occasional jam. There are drums, bass, guitars, synths, mics, a tambourine and anything anyone brings. Some can play some of those, but it has proven seductive to try out a new instrument. Sometimes a cover, more often something new.

The band-metaphor has been frequenting XP discussions. There’s just this beautiful mystery to it, a model of perfect collaboration: working on something together, each from their own role, own skill, and with their own space for expression, making something that goes beyond what any single person can do. This live feedback-looped temporary sound sculpture where we express and negotiate our desires, listen, respond, flirt, leave room, until another groove catches on.

Like when you’re on a Trip with a troupe and everyone starts to play a particular role – leading, vibing, feeding, resting, sharing, self-exposing – sometimes relieving the rest of the group from the task and sometimes inviting them into the activity.

The jams tick many of Jo Freeman’s principles for democratic (so non-tyrannical) structuring: delegation of roles (the instruments), which each have a certain responsibility (melody, chords), sometimes shared (‘rhythm section'), rotating (roughly every other song), allocated based on ability and interest (do you want or learn to play this instrument?), and informational transparency (everyone hears everything).

There are obvious limits to the metaphor: most things we do together at XP are not live-made sound sculptures (some are > GTBT). And other dynamics can be fruitful too, like the isolation of our newsletter prompt-format, where only the one Leading it knows about the Rest so everyone else is equally surprised when finally reading this (I hope). But still I think there are things we can learn from bands (as I bet any leadership consultant would stress in Teamwork 101). So, step 1: let's take note of what are the natural instruments, grooves, roles, we play.

Many tasks (like writing) take continuous effort to continue – having no distractions, enough water, good room temperature. While other activities practically do themselves; they ‘come naturally’ and don’t seem to need any of those conditions. Could be a wikihole, code debugging, marktplaats browsing. Those rather take effort to stop.

I picture this utopian constellation where each of us would do what comes all too naturally and it coming together into something beautiful, like instruments in a song or parts in a play. What play would emerge if we would typecast ourselves? Is there a band to be made from the weird activities that come naturally to us? These moments when we almost become a parody of ourselves, obsess over a thing where most others would just leave it, this kind of strange feverish fire to not stop until it’s done, until it’s right. As if you’re possessed by the spirit of some mythical creature. As if you embody an Archetype. Like those in a Tarot deck or in our dreams.

So I asked the others to: think of a moment when you’re taken over by a (silly) obsession, find the Archetype that was possessing you in this high-res The Garden of Earthly Delights (a bit like Boschbot does) and give it a name. Enjoy.

ARCHETYPECASTING

The Seminar

The Journey

The Groove

Our Archetypes