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ADDS DONNA is a Chicago-based collective of artists who collaboratively learn, experiment, and generate artwork and exhibitions together under one name.  I wanted to interview ADDS DONNA because I was intrigued by the way these artists with active independent practices code-switched to work collaboratively under the header of an artist collective.  They explain on their website that they are an “experimental institution comprehending an exhibition space, an artist collective, and an on-going study group program.”  I wanted to ask: how can an artist collective be an institution?  How do multiple brains converge onto one track to create unified artworks?  And how do these events/artworks they describe actually come into fruition and what do they look like?

Interviewing ADDS DONNA was the first prototype in the development of my action interview process.  I wanted to ask them some questions about their practice, and I wanted to incorporate art making into the informal conversation.  To achieve this, my idea was to capitalize on the ways an artist’s sketchbook functions: scribbled ideas, small drawings and captured images, idea-locating reminders in case your mind later wanders and forgets.  I chose this as a medium because I wanted to break away from the formalized published language I had come across when researching the group.  A sketchbook is informal by nature, it doesn’t often get seen in the same way as polished completed artwork, and it contains ideas both good and bad.  I liked the idea of trying to get at this informality, especially when considering my position, coming in as an outsider to this close-knit collective in a way that engendered comfort and trust by using a communicative method many artists are comfortable with: making objects with their hands. 

So, in advance of our meetings, I created a sketchbook with removable pages.  Some of the pages I left blank, and others I collaged, drew, or outlined some ideas halfway to provide something the artists could respond to, instead of only being confronted with a blank canvas.  I invited the artists to two in-person interview sessions, and set up an expansive table filled with a variety of art supplies: pens, markers, stencils, glue, old magazines for collage work, and explained my ideas for how I thought we could talk informally about ADDS DONNA while collaboratively filling in some sketchbook pages.   In the process, we mainly used collage and drawing to talk though the process of collective art-making while acting it out live, setting up a situation for improvisation, finding questions and answers though material interaction.

The action interview outcome was then our collaborative sketchbook we decided to call Fluxbook.  I selected and ordered the pages that had struck up the most (quantitatively and qualitatively) amount of conversation, and ordered them with accompanying bulleted main points I learned through the conversation.  This selection and ordering of the pages I chose is intended to synthesize the main threads so I could retell the experience to others – through a combination of images and language mediation.