In March 2024, two of our Young Trustees, Mich Rossiter and Bruna Borges, were invited to speak at the Architectural Association as part of Self Organised: New Models for Learning, a student-led lecture series exploring alternative and collaborative approaches to education and practice.
The session they contributed to, titled ‘Failures of Collaboration’, invited emerging and established collectives to reflect on the challenges of working together. Rather than framing failure as something to avoid, the conversation embraced it as generative, focusing on friction, intersectionality, and the value of the incomplete.
The organisers described it as ‘shifting focus toward the imperfect, incomplete, and intersectional, we want to encourage a deeper discussion of collaborative methodologies and ways of navigating friction. We hope to start a dialogue between a variety of emerging and established collectives.’
Mich and Bruna shared insights from within the Young Trustees, reflecting on our methodologies for working collectively across diverse workstreams, and how these evolve through trust, transparency, and shared authorship. The discussion also touched on the invisible labour behind collaborative work and the necessity of making space for disagreement and care in group dynamics.
The lecture series was initiated by AA students Abi Wigglesworth, Leela Keshav, and Sharvaree Shevade, co-organised with Francesco Zuddas, Francesca Dell’Agio, and Rory Sherlock, and supported by Manijeh Verghese alongside our very own Young Trustee Harriet Jennings.
We’re proud to have contributed to such an honest and thoughtful discussion about the complexities of collaboration.