art production cooperative
The acronym 9a-n is a construct of the number 9 as the highest figure in chinese numerology, as such it can have the meaning endless, the roman word annus, meaning year, the dash for minus, meaning without, and the roman word nomen, meaning name.
This refers to a concept proposed by Michel Foucault, wherein for one year every publication should be made without a reference to the author's name, circumventing the fact that our discourses are initiated by names more than by the means of the work in discourse.
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Picking up this concept, thinking about the time of it being limited to one year and therefore using the acronym 1a-n, work began with gathering all kinds of means needed for production of works of art and went on into making the work of making art an endless cooperative posession itself, then using the acronym 9a-n to describe this process.
The 9a-n art production cooperative now is producing this work of making art without necessarily referencing to the working artists' names, instead, first of all, providing collaborating artists with means for production and giving this precedence over the use of names, further more giving the value of the cooperative share precedence over surplus being made in terms of money or time.
Members of 9a-n art production cooperative reside in Hamburg, Germany and Shanghai, China. Collaborating artists are wherever they are.
What?!
That is a good question, at least better than Why?, which is not a question at all.
The places to go to using the menu gives an insight into progressing as well as in halt projects, their related collaborators and the material those are working on. In the end one will have to attend the physics of what is happening or just stroll through the materials assembled here.
All material found here, in exhibitions and in distributions is licensed under the Artistic License 2.0, which might seem a bit cumbersome on first glance, since it is designed as a software license, but if the look gets closer to what is actually happening all around, it makes a lot of sense.