Mapping Collaborators Dance. An Artistic Research Inquiry into the Decolonial Potentialities of the Surrealist Archive

Collaborators Dance is a large-scale hand-drawn experimental mapping of collaborative constellations loosely associated with surrealism. The research is inspired by the spirit of solidarity pervading this historical movement, leading to many of its protagonists deliberately crossing some of the big categories of difference they inherited from colonial modernity, such as race, nationality, gender and class, as well as professional categories such as artists, academics and activists. The map seeks to offer an image for this kind of intersectional collaboration. Instead of celebrating the genius of individual artists, it addresses the question who had to work with whom for their work to take up radically transformative potentials. In addition to providing insight into the main considerations, questions and intentions driving the artistic research process that informed the drawing of the map, the article provides an example for the way in which the map can be read from some distance and from up close, as an image and as a text. The latter approach is performed via an engagement with a section of the map that is dedicated to the friendship between two poets, Léon-Gontran Damas and Robert Desnos, who are respectively considered to be key figures in avant-garde and Négritude history. The specific qualities of artistic research and of experimental cartography in engaging with this archive are discussed on that basis.