The following compendium is a by-no-means-exhaustive list of accountability practices during the field recording, filming and collaborative phase of a project. These practices are designed to upset, disrupt, and subvert extractivist or exploitative relationships which may otherwise occur during an artistic “exchange”. They have been compiled as result of research, conversations and experience gathered in the field of sound recording for the past 20 years.
*a very useful phrase coined by Sadie Lune
- Introduce yourself, your project, your idea, your goals
- Talk openly about the hierarchies which may be already present
- Map the context of the recording (people, place, time, sociopolitical context)
- Make works which are context specific, and don’t arbitrarily mix contexts
- Name contributors and spell their names correctly
- Don’t record undercover
- You have asked others to share–be likewise ready to share back
- Send collaborators their media
- Respect requests about how media is used
- Speak openly about funding and payment
- Develop processes of accountability to collaborators after the initial recording time is over
- Continue to notify collaborators about the journey and life of a project; how and where it is shown
- Make clear distinctions and have open conversations about whether a person is a collaborator, contributor, or employee.
- Come to a consensus about how a person would like to be attributed
- Offer payment or trade for the giving of content (i.e. sound or image)
- Consider other forms of repayment, collaboration, long term support
- Develop a clear and consistent strategy and system for remembering and documenting
- Be mindful of the tools used in the process of the project and the makers of those tools
- Attribute the people who contributed to the tools that you utilize in your work
- Research the sources of the tools that are used
- Research the sources of the props and other materials used in a collaboration
- Have conversations about what a collaboration consists of and what are the expectations
- Keep up with relationships over time: accountability and interconnectivity
- practice “Radical collaborative” and “correlational narratives” (Katherine Mc Kittrick ed.) Sylvia Winter: On Being Human as Praxis
- Release open source works
- Treat collaboration as skill sharing, so that others go away enriched with certain skills
- Treat each person, object and place as “irreplaceable”
- Aftercare–in what ways can aftercare be performed? (thanks Zey for this contribution!)