Reflection is deemed an unwarrantable luxury at a time when cultural practitioners are pressured to swing from one project to the next to secure funding and legitimacy for their work. Reflection is an immaterial by-step that does’nt deliver a determinable product, event or concrete document. As such reflection is ‘rationalised’ out of the artistic process. But how, without a critical pause, can artists expect to develop new conceptual imaginings outside of the market demands of profit and security? Art — especially art made through a process of artistic collaboration — involves incidents. Some planned, many unforeseen. There is clearly a need to take a pause and examine the changes that are taking place, the way one’s hypotheses and way of working are being influenced, contested and strengthened in the process of interacting and sharing different practices.

AlmostReal stage 3 explores how a culture of reflection could be accomodated between practice and research. Several different artists and cultural workers from across Europe collaborate together to develop a platform in time and space to understand what happens‘in the making of’ which could inspire new avenues of reseach. Together with contemporary dance platform ‘alkantara’, stage 3 is creating deliberate instances of reflection before, during and after the shared and yet often imperceptible processes of practice and research in artistic collaboration.