In hindsight, the nature of this residency can be regarded rather as an artist-researcher residency, since it emerged, in fact, out of a research project on artist residencies that I was involved in at the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film (IPF) at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).
This research project was initially being undertaken in a non-academic context and was eventually aborted, and so the decision by the IPF to take it further required repurposing it, so to speak, to the art school environment of ZHdK. The new proposal was titled ‘Artist residencies and/as pedagogy’, greatly inspired by ongoing research in anthropology on the relevance of practice in processes of making knowledge – explored for example in the work of Tim Ingold and his edited volume Knowing from the Inside (2022) and Trevor Marchand’s Making Knowledge (2010). This was around the autumn of 2022.
I conceptualised the project as an international exchange and saw the potential of realising an artist residency not only at the institutions I had on board as collaborators – Coventry University/UK, Amsterdam University of the Arts/NL, Universidade Nova de Lisboa/PT and K3 Zentrum Zentrum für Choreographie/DE – but also locally at ZHdK. This motivated me to enter into a dialogue with Prof Patrick Müller, co-director of the MA Transdisciplinary Studies in the Arts and with Prof Florian Dombois, head of the Research Focus Transdisciplinarity.
Our dialogue evolved into a seminar and a series of monthly labs we titled ‘Matters of collectivity through embodied practices’, which I developed in collaboration with transdisciplinary artist and researcher Eirini Sourgiadaki. As part of my artist-researcher residency, I could use the atelier of the MA Transdisciplinary Studies and the Windtunnel – a room run and curated by the team Research Focus Transdisciplinarity – both located at Toni Areal in Zurich.
Following an unsuccessful fundraising process, the international exchange couldn’t be realised. I wrote a report where I articulate the rationale for the investigation, and present the literature I interacted with as well as the research plan. The report is available here. The seminar, the monthly labs and the residency did take place between September 2023 and May 2024 and this exposition is dedicated to the process and the outcomes of the interactions with students of the MA Transdisciplinary Studies in the Arts.
Marisa