TUG​​​​​​​

TUG Collective was formed out of the impulse to transgress the archive (that which is anchored in paradigm, such as texts, notation, documents, letters, photos) by registering and radiating ways of knowing that are part of the repertoire (that which is embodied, improvised, co-experienced). The point was, and still is, not to elevate the repertoire at the expense of the archive, but to vividly braid them together by triangulating creativity, critique, and citizenship.

 

Our creativity neither originates from, nor terminates with, material, but rather emerges out of our foundational gesture of calling upon the methodology of improvisation in our work. We believe that there is a great deal of value inherent in the way that improvisation presents itself as a non-hierarchical (ideally), process-oriented practice, that claims no victories and is rooted in a ‘listening’ self.’ Wood, sound, paint, image, and the like might work their way in, but their purpose is to orbit around one another as a continuum of tissues that connect the embodied, improvised, and co-experienced with the tactility of cultural meaning that they engender. 

 

Critique suggests an all-seeing power that purports to know the world just by looking down at it. Our reading, however, oscillates between the urgent call for tapping into the re/search imagination and for tethering it together with what is actually going on in various contact zones. By exploring how a spot, a stain, or a smudge matters for people living among it, within it, and against it, we catalyze our attention to other lines of desire, and shift out of the paradigm in which difference has no power and into one where difference fosters a kind of critical plurality.

 

Plurality is at the heart of our work. So, too, is concerned citizenship. We approach disparate moments and geographic locations as sites of contestation, collaboration and transformation. We look for cracks in the pavement, open up gaps in the order of things, and provide a platform through which individuals can appear to one another, in joint action, thereby moving and illuminating their own agency.

 

The projects that we do as TUG Collective rely upon a confederacy of components and tactics that are neither linear, nor two-dimensional, nor spelled-out, but are rather entangled in an open-score that is tactile, performative, and empathic. Where ideas and relationships come into being by virtue of all of us doing what we are doing together. Where elements are stacked—happening simultaneously—or unfolding over the course of a few hours, days, weeks, or months. Where uncertainty is a necessary component of exploration.