GEMMA RABIONET BOADELLA
Artist / Speaker / Teacher / Author / Astrology Consultant
Finding Rebis: Using Collaborative Practice to Gestate a ‘Third Mind’
Gemma Rabionet Boadella is an artist, speaker, teacher, author and consultant in astrology. Her artistic practice is in the fields of drawing, illustration, painting and costume design. She holds a Master’s degree in Design from the University of Lincoln (UK) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Art Therapy from the University of Girona. She started studying astrology in 2005 and she is qualified with a Certificate and Diploma in psychological astrology (MISPA) and is a certified facilitator of the Lunation Cycles astrological coaching program (Matriz de Lunaciones). She works as a consultant in astrology and teaches at Cosmograma (Spain). She is the author of the book Los Planetas. She is also a practitioner of transcultural shamanism.
Carlos Ruiz Brussain is an artist and a lecturer. His practice is in the fields of drawing, illustration, concept art and painting. He lectures in illustration, creative methodologies and creative techniques at ERAM Escola Universitaria-University of Girona (Spain). He is a PhD candidate at the University of Northampton. He holds a Master’s degree in Design from the University of Lincoln (UK) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Art Therapy from the University of Girona. Since 2012 he studies creative writing at Escuela de Escritura Ateneu Barcelonés. He is a member of the following associations: APIC (Associació Professional d’I·lustradors de Catalunya); the Teaching Innovation Network: Play and Learning (University of Girona); the research group Play and New Technologies Applied to Teaching Innovation (ERAM – University of Girona); ARAS (the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism); and the Drawing Research Network. He is a board member of Monad: Journal of Transformative Practice. He is a practitioner of transcultural shamanism.
B.Dharma is a hermaphrodite that has created hundreds of drawings, exquisite corpses, and poems. S/he is a psychoid that manifests when the artistic union of the aforementioned artists occurs. Her/His purposes are entirely unknown.
Finding Rebis: Using Collaborative Practice to Gestate a ‘Third Mind’
Many artists have used collaborative approaches as a creative methodology to make artefacts; among other things, with the pretension of experimenting and obtaining unexpected results or simply to enjoy a communal experience. Concepts like ‘objective chance’ were forged by Surrealists to describe overwhelming coincidences that happened after using cooperative games that favour random and unforeseen results. Additionally, these creative methods reinforced psychic bonds between the participants. According to André Breton, the artworks produced using these procedures were characterised by the style of a ‘collective authority’. Similarly, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs refer to the psychic phenomenon that manifests during shared artistic sessions as ‘the third mind’: a superior and unseen collaborator that shows when two minds work together.
This paper examines the use of collaborative strategies in creative practice.
After reviewing a number of previous modes of shared artistic creation, we will discuss our own cooperative experiments.
During the last five years, we have trialled a number of collective artistic techniques (such as Exquisite Corpse, collage, cut-ups, scrapbooks, and collaborative drawings) and we have eventually developed our own creative methodology of joint practice to condense the difference of our polarities in single images and creative projects (complexio oppositorum).
Drawing from play theory to explain the game mechanics we utilise, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow to describe the motivational aspects involved in this approach, and Jungian psychology to discuss our understanding of the transcendent function and how we use active imagination as a method that involves the tension of opposites, which is channelled by means of collaborative artistic practice. We will argue that this dynamic confrontation of conflicting principles (Mysterium Coniunctionis) ultimately gave birth to a ‘third mind’ named R. B. Dharma.