As I wandered through the Darwin Botanical Gardens on one of my regular visits. I came across the Crescentia cujete, commonly known as the Calabash Tree. A tree I have observed in the gardens many times before but on this visit, it gave me a visual representation of my practice. The Calabash has significant overlapping long thin branches that seems to swirl around and through each other. The tree also produces spherical fruits that grown straight from the trunk and branches in an ad hoc manner.  

All the projects I undertake are part of the same ‘tree’ of knowledge, my knowledge, my practice. Using similar processes for, collaboration, development and sharing. The final form often being the only clear difference between projects for me. That is why Entangled Collaboration is so focused on the creative collective practices of expressing different participants knowings collectively. We can separate the knowings into their individual forms – or projects – in order to problematised entangled collaboration and in turn begin to explore how best to capture knowledge ecologies through mapping – while also always understanding they are inherently entangled and infesting each other.

“To become relative, to mend relations, tracing back (and forward) our different geographies, cultures, privileges, and positions, opening up our worlds, wounds, languages, cultivating a project of justice, liberation, to interrupt the grabbing of lands and territories, the enclosure of the fixed identities, borders, classes, genders, sexes, histories, diplomas. After all, is it not why we meet in the first place? (Pomarico with Kahakalau and Morales Strauss, 2021, p. 231) The role I play as the facilitator/curator/producer/custodian of entangled collaborative practices is ambiguous, it is both an intuitive and skilful trade requiring subtle acknowledgment of individual and collective, human and material, situated and constructed, whilst also offering provocation, inspiration and insights into potential configurations. Configurations that build depth of entangled collaboration, while also in my context creating deeper ways of seeing, learning and assembling collective knowings for radical futures.

 “By practicing encounters and being part of self-organized spaces, perhaps the most important part of the work, almost more important than what people are called to do, is to ‘hold space’: to set intentions together, preparing a container that is inviting and accessible, co-creating a protocol of respect and accountability, in which trust can be built and maintained. Trust is often the most fragile dimension—readily under-mined by mistakes, misunderstandings, assumptions, and internalized forms of separation—yet one that with care and attention and time does solidify and grow, and can be actively restored in the wake of disruption.” (Pomarico with Kahakalau and Morales Strauss, 2021, p. 233)