Stephanie Smith: You've only been working as Learning Group for a year. Why did you decide to work together, and what do you each bring to the group?

Rikke Luther: We each come from very different places, giving us different methods and possibilities to work so we can use our own backgrounds in new ways. We all have different histories and different languages. This is what we now are expanding through sharing and mixing.

Brett Bloom: Cecilia and Rikke were cofounders of the Copenhagen-based group N55, which I worked with on several occasions. When they were no longer with N55, Rikke wanted to continue working in a group so she contacted Cecilia, Julio, and me and started discussions with us separately. These discussions eventually led to the production of texts, ideas, and work together, as well as a process that continues to develop.

Cecilia Wendt: It started out of a long-term interest in how education becomes part of persons' lives and produces knowledge and language.

SS: As Brett notes, you all have worked (and some of you continue to work) with other artists' groups apart from Learning Group. What do you each find most interesting or satisfying about working collectively? How do you manage group process across distance?

BB: I am currently active with five groups, some more than others. I am constantly challenged by this way of working-a challenge that doesn't come when I sit by myself in a studio making objects. Each group offers a different social ecosystem, personalities, capabilities, and challenges. Some groups work better than others and have all of their energy aligned. Others require a lot more effort to get them to work. Out of all of these groups, only one approaches "collectivity." The rest are nowhere near that and require other descriptors. The group process is quite scattered and not very efficient yet with Learning Group, but it is still young and we are still discovering how to work with each other. We all live in different countries and this creates both a very interesting way of working and some obvious difficulties in keeping communication steady.

CW: There are so many different ways of collaborating. In this case the four of us have gathered around certain issues and situations and worked in relationship to those, but each of one of us works in another way. The problem that we are scattered will become part of the discussion, I hope.

Julio Castro: It is about the creation of strategies and how those are essential in all group work. In this case you have a net of people in different contexts interested in finding common issues to work on and then seeing how they function in each particular context. Some of the ideas and strategies may or may not be related to other issues that are useful to the group where I'm primarily working and at the same time are in this net. You can also work on more aspects of the ideas when others are involved. Our ideas are in an open structure and not as conditioned as they would be if they were the work of a group that had to sustain a style.

I remember the time when we talked about Escuela (or "school", which was a formative concept for our working together). A discussion point that was very shocking for me was that if one of our projects was constructed in Mexico, it would be related to fighting against poverty, but if the same thing were done in Europe, then it would be related to making resistance. I guess this is a main issue for me: doing work in relation to a context, seeing how the work is absorbed and modified by the context, and considering how this interpretation could be radically modified when the context changes.

SS: I'm glad you've decided on a name for the group-I know it's something you've been thinking about for a while now. How did you come to the name Learning Group? I like its focus on process and the suggestion that not only is your work meant to be instructive for others but also that it allows you to continue to stretch and to learn, yourselves

JC: I guess this is part of the job for Learning Group, or for any group or individual. I relate the name more to a sense of commitment and involvement, where one can decide how deeply to get into a project, to bring part of one's knowledge and make it a component of a project.

CW: The collaboration in this case is not an end or form in itself. It has been an attempt to discuss learning as well. This started out with a kind of basic distribution system in order to talk about the activity in our projects in Japan and Mexico: the Learning Poster. We also use a Website where we gather material and thinking; it is called Learning Site, a notion we use for other situations as well.

SS: Are there specific aspects of your prior work that have informed this new endeavor? For instance, Rikke and Cecilia, the sustainable ethos and do-it-yourself sensibility of these new projects resonates with your former work with N55, but in terms of design the aesthetic is much warmer, friendlier.

RL: In relation to do-it-yourself it could be called "do-it-ourselves"-the work includes a direct dialogue with other persons in a more specific situation and at the Learning Site. The aesthetics are related to the specific situations we encounter.

CW: The work we did with N55 was part of a situation just as this is part of a situation. From that perspective our attitude or interests have not changed, just our conditions.

BB: The sensibilities of Learning Group are informed by all our prior work and the special situation that is created by our working together. It will necessarily be different from N55, Temporary Services, or Tercercinquento. We really want our explorations to be both visually engaging and also have a real, even if tiny, impact on the local contexts within which they work. There is so little concern with how this work circulates in an art context. We all have played that game and don't need to repeat it with this work. There is a great freedom in this aspect for me.

JC: In my case, after making a project in the outskirts of Monterrey (a city in northern Mexico) and seeing how people can be a part of the process and also its receivers, it was important to see how more symbolic the shape could be and how relevant it was to explore other dynamics outside of the institutional way of doing things. One can simultaneously rethink authorship, leading a project, and the directions in which one can speculate about how a work can be when released from the expectations conditioned by the institutionalism of the art world. It is really relevant to see how the ideas and preconceptions disappear when you let the work go on its own and let the context be a part of the process. You can then say that the work is "alive." You can recover elements and bring them into the institution but must always think about the ethics of what you are connected to in the different worlds.