Gathering: Language-based Artistic Research
Society of Artistic Research Conference 2022
Weimar, Germany
Friday 1 July 2022
14.30 - 15.50 CET
Hörsaal A (Lecture Theatre A),
Bauhaus-Universität, Marienstraße 13 c, 99423 Weimar
In July we will be in Weimar, Germany, introducing the activities of the Special Interest Group of Language-based Artistic Research as part of the Society of Artistic Research Conference 2022.
Join us for this first in-person meeting since 2019, where we continue to explore the questions: How is language-based artistic research? How to enable connections and affinities between researchers? How to establish shared frames of reference? Since 2019, this Language-based Artistic Research Special Interest Group has evolved through various activities including Practice Sharing (2020), a gathering of over 70 online examples of language-based practices from diverse fields such as visual arts, performance, film, theatre, music, choreography and literature; and Affinities and Urgencies (2021/22), two online events that comprised sessions facilitated by different groups or individuals identifying constellations of interest and focus within this expanding field of research practice. This live and in-person session during the SAR conference continues along these lines moving towards a more distributed organisation of the Special Interest Group. We will share recent activities, introduce ‘thematic nodes’ and engage with a wider community of artistic researchers, including a second call for ‘Practice Sharing’.
With introductions to emergent thematic nodes in proposed running order of presentation:
A_Collective_”I”
Daisy Hildyard | Katrin Hahner | Rosie Heinrich| Sepideh Karami
Collective writing in public space
Initiated by Lena Séraphin with Emma Cocker | Andrea Coyotzi Borja| Cordula Daus | Vidha Saumya
The un|common ground
Regina Dürig | Marinos Koutsomichalis | Phoenix Savage,| Anna T
Articulating Solitudes
Steve Dutton | Adelheid Mers
Words as Matter
Mariana Renthel | Anouk Hoogendoorn
Writing as research as writing
Marjolijn van den Berg | Nirav Christophe | Daniela Moosmann | Ninke Overbeek
Unspeakable Dialogues: Narratives for the Anthropocene
Rachel Armstrong | Breg Horemans | Rolf Hughes | Virginia Tassinari
This event is part of the Society of Artistic Research conference, and you will need to register for the conference to attend this event. For conference registration/booking details see https://sar2022.uni-weimar.de/
The full conference programme can be viewed here - https://sar2022.uni-weimar.de/programme
During the conference we will also be announcing a call for the second edition of ‘Practice Sharing’. See first edition of Practice Sharing here - https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/835089/1021562
The Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) in Language-based Artistic Research was founded and is co-organised by Emma Cocker (UK), Alexander Damianisch (AT), Cordula Daus (DE/AT), and Lena Séraphin (FI). This Special Interest Group was inaugurated in the context of the Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019, within the frame of Convocation, a three-day gathering of expanded language-based practices. Since 2019, this SAR SIG has – through a variety of different formats and forms – connected over 300 artistic researchers interested in language-based practices.
A_Collective_”I”
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Daisy Hildyard | Katrin Hahner | Rosie Heinrich| Sepideh Karami
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Drawing inspiration from and propelled by studies into the entanglements between new scientific research that challenges the concept of the bounded “individual”, the collapse of dominant orders and categorisations, and the hospicing of modernity/coloniality, this research project explores (visual / textual / polyvocal) expressions of the dissolution and abolition of the concept of the “individual”.
Lynn Margulis once said: in the arithmetic of life, one is always many. Marisol de la Cadena uses the phrasing: human… but not only. That we are multispecies symbiotic assemblages requires an unlearning of habitual grammars of thinking. Replete with excesses, extending beyond skin, fur, bark: binaries like “inside” / “outside” are troubled. Selves are plural, uncontained, decentered, and polyvocal. On the other hand, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of “plural I” highlights the political aspect of the individual as standing out, taking position and responsibility: an “I” that can potentially stand for many without reducing it to the crowd.
Rooting into the foundations of modernity’s grammars that shape ways of relating, and pressing into language’s inherent evolution, this research project aims to advance a necessary unlearning in ways of relating to the world, ourselves as human-bodyings, and language itself. It attempts to do this through expanded reading/writing/listening/making practices (eg. developing notational scores; claying with words and voices): interrupting, disorienting and seeking openings that gesture towards other ways of relating and worlding.
Conversation-led, collaborative, decentralised, plurally shaped: the practice reflects the research, engaging fully with the phenomenon of being more-than one. With initial conversations among Daisy Hildyard, Katrin Hahner, Rosie Heinrich and Sepideh Karami, as this collective emerges it hopes to connect with potential (un)known voices through conversations, searching into what is not included in the singular narrative of colonial modernity.
Contact: rosie.a.heinrich@gmail
Collective writing in public space
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Initiated by Lena Séraphin with Emma Cocker | Andrea Coyotzi Borja| Cordula Daus | Vidha Saumya.
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What other ways for perceiving and reimagining public space emerge in and through language? In turn, how does writing in a public space shape and inform the emergent possibilities of language, alongside the felt sense of subjectivity for both writers and readers? How are shared spaces constructed in/by/with text? What worlds become “opened up by the words”, by “the space of the text”?
Inspired by the writings of Georges Perec - and his book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris that acknowledges overlooked phenomena in a Parisian square in 1974 - this ongoing enquiry engages with different public spaces as ever-changing phenomena, writing and rewriting site and situatedness through the lens of different prompts and scores. In one sense, the project explores ways for intervening in, disrupting or unsettling the homogeneity of civic consumerism and the commercialisation of urban common space, as well as operating as a countertext to the commodification of our bodily selves, through the gentle act of focused attention and through languaging the space otherwise. Collective writing in public space invites a multitude of intertwining writerly perspectives through observational writing underpinned by bodily awareness, perception and sensations, moving away from solitary writing towards collective and multilingual writing. Writing is understood in a broad sense, extending beyond alphabets into the interweaving of movements, presences and actions in public space, posing questions on how we communicate and have an impact on each other when traversing public sites. Through the writing and reading of texts generated in touch with public space, this enquiry redefines the solitary act of writing, introducing collective live-writing in public space as an artistic-literary genre.
Contact: lena.seraphin@uniarts.fi
The un|common ground
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Regina Dürig | Marinos Koutsomichalis | Phoenix Savage,| Anna T.
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How to carefully catch the words | τι λατσά που μαζευτήκαμε εδώ να παίξουμε | black on crisp white | su quella tristeza transcendente | ka ji ni kutukutu | eu estou aqui para vocês | das Gleißen des Gefieders, der Gedanken, der Geduld | emi ti ji ni kutukutu, mo ti mohun ipin ko’pin
Our individual research areas overlap in decolonial, non-western, and off-center language-informed/language-driven and poetic practices. How do languages embed, implement, and help establish colonial regimes and how may these be challenged and resisted through language? How can we use language to creatively articulate decolonial concerns? Can language become some kind of sanctuary? A hiding place wherein borderland and non-dominant (micro-)cultures may dwell and thrive? How can non-western languages and off-center references set out new directions for artistic research and practices? What happens when such off-centered – strictly non-western, non-dominant, queer or feminist – local points of reference intersect and inform one another? What is the relationship between language (embodied, oral, and written) and community-forming, ununderstandability, untranslatability, and opacity? We reflect on these and other questions against the backdrop of our research practices and poetic/literary projects.
Contact: Marinos Koutsomichalis <marinos@marinoskoutsomichalis.com>
Articulating Solitudes
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Adelheid Mers | Steve Dutton
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The inquiry focuses on the relationship of language based practices and the construction, withholding and disturbance of meaning making, as it proceeds through personal artistic explorations - articulating solitudes. Thus far this is being explored through the practice of considering language as something becoming image and vice versa in and through Dutton’s artistic practice and through the application of Mers’ Diagrammatic Instruments which are the construct at the center, and quite literally the 'middle term' of her artistic practice of Performative Diagrammatics - articulating solitudes together. What develops, amongst other things, is an ongoing dialogue around the nature of intention, interpretation, when to speak and when to be silent, and the work of art as finding its form by perpetually performing itself. Discourses that intersect with our inquiry are Aesthetics and Epistemology, Cognitive Linguistics, Philosophy of Language, Performance Philosophy, and New Materialist Philosophy, along with ecological inquiries across social justice, gender and organization studies. We are interested in curating, facilitation, dramaturgy and performance. Others are welcome and the focus of the group is flexible and expansive. Please email us, including ‘Articulating Solitudes’ in the subject line.
Contact: adelheidmers@gmail.com, duttonstudio@gmail.com
Words as Matter
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Mariana Renthel | Anouk Hoogendoorn
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Words as Matter - alchemical operations on words would like to become a constant conversation and exploration open to whomever would like to join and co-explore: namely implementing actions that trigger exploration in the simple, yet interesting realm of using words as matter(ial). Understanding that through word quality recognition one could give place to so-called “alchemical operations'' such as the possibility of flexibility in shape and etymology of words by: dissection, merging, malleability, trans-lingua and in-betweens. In that sense, speculations are also welcome as a strategy to be used mainly, while inhabiting the creation process.
The affinities between perception, writing as graphism or drawing and the opportunities to implement those operations on wording could further on understanding and poetic capabilities as an artistic practice, methodologies or strategies.
Contacts:
mariana.renthel@udea.edu.co or marianrenthel@gmail.com
anoukhoogendoorn@hotmail.com or info@anoukhoogendoorn.com
Writing as research as writing
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Marjolijn van den Berg | Nirav Christophe | Daniela Moosmann | Ninke Overbeek
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We are a research group within the Professorship Performative Processes of HKU Utrecht University of the Art. We explore the ways in which both artistic research and artistic practice can be disseminated in and through writing.
The production processes of writing and researching have become more and more intertwined; the research and the work exist in dialogue with each other.
The researchgroup works along five lines of inquiry:
* Creative writing techniques being used as a method of artistic research;
* Alternative writing techniques in BA-, MA- and PhD-thesises in Higher Art Education;
* Knowledge on writing processes informing artistic research methologies;
* Writing practice and artistic research seen as collective and co-creative activities;
* Research and writing pedagogies in Higher Art Education.
Where they all meet is the idea of writing as research as writing.
Key words: Peer writing, Polyphony, Ficto/critical Strategies, Enquiry through writing; Creative Writing Pedagogies, Co-creation, Dissemination of Artistic Research.
More on the research can be seen in here and here
We would like to actively invite people to join us in our research, by adding to our collective writing sessions. For example, we would like to invite you to add your own voices and bodies to the text shown in the collaborative writing video: tinyurl.com/4x35ds37
Contact: marjolijn.vandenberg@hku.nl
Unspeakable Dialogues: Narratives for the Anthropocene
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Rachel Armstrong | Breg Horemans | Rolf Hughes | Virginia Tassinari
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Recognising that many disciplines do not understand each other and are therefore incapable of genuine or meaningful dialogues (and therefore potential innovation), we define Unspeakable Dialogues as the absence of common understanding between disciplines. This is not simply a lack of (academic) language, but (with art, design and architecture offering artistic, performative and embodied ways of expanding our nodes of understanding) concerns rather an expansion of literacy. Unspeakable Dialogues accordingly develops a set of knowledge instruments that that help us reconceive research from a post Anthropocene perspective. It prepares us for holding new conversations about how we live, communicate and creatively engage our world, and so alter the impact of human development towards a life-promoting culture. The interdisciplinary research arising from such dialogues will involve an expanded notion of dialogue as the site not merely for consensual interpretation (by setting contested concepts against each other and exploring the ‘third’ – hermeneutic – space that results, as in the established, but still under-explored, genre of the philosophical dialogue), but also as a methodological frame, or disciplinary interface, for confronting viewpoints, disciplinary logics and values that have been neglected by modern science and Western-centric, anthropocentric models of knowledge. It facilitates new insights into the challenges of interdisciplinary research by incorporating hitherto repressed ways of knowing (sensory, bodily, spiritual, experiential, emotional, tacit, ineffable, but also non-human or “more-than human” forms of knowing). It explores a more performative, embodied idea of unspeakable dialogues by questioning the current Western-centric epistemological paradigm, engaging in new forms of experimental knowledge creation, able to embrace relationality and care, through artistic and design research.
Contact: rolf.hughes@kuleuven.be
