The possibilities of water: Materiality, poetics and collaboration

Each new collaboration is a new country: no matter how familiar the partners might be, no matter how literate each is in their own professional area, they enter the zone of the unknown. The processes and patterns of meeting, making, debating, shaping, discussing, disputing and finally realising the project all happen on ground no one in the collaboration has ever before trodden; or, at least, haven’t trodden in quite that way. This paper discusses a collaboration in which the participants decided to take the ‘zone of the unknown’, both by adopting a framework they’d not previously used, and by stepping blindly into possibility, hoping/assuming that a project and a process would reveal themselves.