Drawing practices as an interface for transnational collaboration: An expanded studio between Durban and Antwerp

Abstract

This article explores how collective digital drawing can function as a minimal interface for building and sustaining transnational collaboration. It traces the development of a partnership between the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and the University of Kwazulu-Natal, initiated through a short-term international project and later structurally anchored through recurring mobility and exchange frameworks. Central to this collaboration is FRAMED a low-threshold, open-source platform for real-time collective drawing, designed to operate reliably under unequal infrastructural conditions. Over a multi-year period, drawing was deployed not primarily to produce images, but to rehearse collaboration: a shared performative act through which trust, shared authorship, and institutional alignment gradually emerged. While the drawings formed the outward manifestation of the exchange, the project generated what this article terms an ‘infrastructural studio’ beneath it, composed of protocols, facilitation routines, technical care, and recurring forms of coordination that continued to function beyond moments of active platform use. The article examines the methodological, pedagogical, and infrastructural dimensions of this practice across diverse artistic and educational contexts, including public festivals, community-based workshops, off-grid environments, and large-scale transnational drawing sessions such as Poetry Africa, the Artfluence Human Rights Festival, AfrikaBurn, and the Royal Academy Drawing Marathon. Situated within frameworks of the nomadic subject, relational aesthetics, and critical approaches to infrastructure, the analysis argues that technological sophistication is not the primary driver of sustainable collaboration. Instead, autonomy, maintainability, and the ethics of shared traces prove more consequential than feature-rich systems. The article concludes by demonstrating how collective digital drawing enabled curricular integration and by outlining the transferability of lightweight, adaptable setups across educational, community-based, and off-grid environments.