the archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Melina Scheuermann
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exhibition emerged from my artistic research residency Performing/Archiving ‘Object Lesson’ which I realized in January and February of 2024 in Porto. I departed from the proposal to take up archival documents of my study within the history of education as performative scores and triggers for artistic engagement. In particular, I studied two picture book series of the pedagogical object lesson method (Pt. lições de coisas, Germ. Anschauungsunterricht) that circulated across Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The picture books are traversed by several intersecting discriminations based, amongst others, on gender, race, sex and class.
Through the artistic engagement I reflected on the epistemological, political and ethical implications of archiving and the writing of history and developed an artistic-archival methodology that includes performative, visual, visual-material and textual modes of research. This methodology aims to promote situated, embodied and affective knowledges and is inscribed into feminist and decolonial struggles.
The archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive is an exhibition of the artistic interventions produced as much as the structure of an archive. The exhibition/archive serves as a platform for upcoming workshops that I will promote to practice the artistic-archival methodology that I developed in a collective setting.
I borrow the concept of unlearning from decolonial and postcolonial theory where it is discussed as a practice that challenges the value-based, hegemonic apparatus of knowledge production from the inside. There is a slight irony, seemingly a paradox in name of this archive: The archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive. Unlearning something while repeating, practicing, constructing it? The idea is not repetition, unless it is always considered repetition in variance and in motion, never settled, never fixed. Its name speaks to my attempt to unlearn archiving and archival research while being implied and meshed within.
Sonic Peripheries: Middling With/In the Event
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Petra Klusmeyer
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition showcases select parts of the doctoral dissertation from which it derives its title. To access the full thesis, follow the link to Leiden University Scholarly Publications (http://hdl.handle.net/1887/77342). The purpose of this exposition is to present a non-linear reading experience featuring a range of materials, including artifacts from a course of research events (see/visit Online Addendum) and individual experimental chapters (see/click, e.g., Experimenting Sound/Non-Sound).
About the research and dissertation
The research explores what and how sound does in certain art practices; it lends an ear to so-called ‘material-discursive’ events that come into expression as in/determined sonic occurrences through aesthetic practices. Likewise, the research done in and through the arts attunes to the vibrational immanence that underlies all experience. This view considers the sonic as a vibrational force and an affective, affirmative, albeit paradoxical event: oscillating between matter and matter-mattering, intuited as intensive force and apprehended as ‘aesthetic figure’ through sensation. This ambiguity or sense of betweenness is felt throughout the thesis and lies at the heart of the inquiry, which asks, among other questions: How do the material conditions of a sonic artwork-performance (the content) and the ensuing sensations (the form of expression) co-emerge; how are they produced in one another?
The dissertation has three main objectives. Firstly, it describes sonic art practice as experimental research and makes a case for curating such practices as a form of research; it positions this type of research as a contribution to new forms of knowledge and provides a resource for future research-creations and (reform of) evaluation practices. Secondly, it brings together philosophy and art to elaborate a genuine manner of working with sonic matter (mattering); it conceptualizes and materializes novel ways of thinking, and creates a case for writing itself as practice and curating/producing art as theory; that is, it seeks to practice what it theorizes and vice versa. Thirdly, it advocates a certain transformation of self that lets us side-step ourselves, intervene and invent possible worlds or future fabulations. Practicing a process-oriented exploration complexifies as it advances; it creates resonances between theory and practice, between audience and sound art, between the written thesis – inclusive of presented artifacts – and the reader. It wants not to reduce but foster awareness of the ongoing complexity of life.