Relationship Anarchy Collage Workshop
with MioToat Café Zarah, Beijing, China
Relationship anarchy has been my principle and philosophy for relationships since 2023.
In 2023, I organised a series of 12 craft events for a record label, bar and cultural space named nugget, exploring different materials and crafts. These events made me realize the amazing soothing and heart-opening magic of crafts. And years of expieriences of working with collage made me realize that every random choice you make with elements, colors, texture, lay out, reflects more about you than you know.
I took a long break after Nugget closed in August 2023 due to police pressure. The idea of doing a collage workshop about relationship anarchy started to grow in me. After a smaller experimental workshop, MioTo, an art group who plans pan-art activities and workshops, reached out to me. Together we secured our venue, decided the details and recruited our participants.
In the workshop, we invited participants to learn more about relationship anarchy and reflect personally on that and on their relationships before we encouraged participants to express with collage:
How do I feel in my relationship?
Is my relationship lively?
How my relationships influence each other?
And we read collage together like reading tarots and went on a journey to confirm, understand and communicate our feelings. In the collage we made, we saw death, love, burning out sparkle, root network strangled by one tree, unbalanced scales, fragile triangle, isolation, distance, unconditional vulnerability, fear for stability, obsession of being a savior.
Oops, sounds all quite problematic... We did a little bit too well on what we expected of the workshop. The workshop was successful in helping people learn more about relationship anarchy and their self-perception on emotions and relationships. Most of the participants found it to be an interesting and thought provoking process and felt free to express and discuss and even expose their own vulnerabilities in the space we created. But actually, a few participants in couple did accuse us for negatively influencing their relationship, even if their partner pointed out that they did have those nuanced negative feelings in mind for some time.
Looking back on the workshop, I think in a way it was radical because it really intervened in the relationships between participants, going beyond the usual art healing and becoming more psychotherapeutic. I'm still consistently talking to people about relationship anarchy, but I don't think I'll be repeating this workshop in the same form. As organizers, we took on an overly central role in the workshop and got overwhelmed by a tremendous amount of emotional labor and moral pressure. For this particular topic, we're still exploring more de-centered ways to inspire spontaneity in participants.