Participatory Art and Participant Observation: Exploring Social Relationships through Interdisciplinary Practices (original) (raw)
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2015
This paper concerns participative practices that draw from both art and anthropology. Through an interdisciplinary perspective, it presents creative overlaps and possible exchanges between the respective knowledge fields. The particular setting is an intervention in a suburban London shopping centre that was part of an exploration of migration and diasporic existence. The event was organised by the author in collaboration with an artist and a refugee centre who have a background in the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka. It investigated Tamil relationships with the British environment, and challenged the lack of Tamil visibility. While this kind of interdisciplinary methods provide inviting challenges, the researcher often has to adapt to institutional claims of particular expertise at the stage of research disseminating. However, this paper suggests that maintained interactions between two disciplines, which both are directed towards qualitative social encounters and their performative eff...
Ethnography at its edges: Bringing in contemporary art
How might the making of art offer approaches and procedures for anthropologists who seek to incorporate contemporary art into their own fieldwork and scholarship? Recent anthropological inquiries into contemporary art have generated a range of results, including artworks made by anthropologists and by artists who engage with anthropological theories, scholarly concepts of artworks not as illustrations of questions already answered but as ways of changing how questions emerge in the first place, and aesthetics of fieldwork centered on curiosity, wonder, and curatorial disposition. The making of contemporary artworks thus indicates a set of theories and methods for anthropologically observing the world. [contemporary art, art and anthropology, art installation]
The Routledge International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research; pp 115-125 (2016), 2016
Remembering is a realization of belonging, even a social obligation (Assmann, 2008: 114) Can we learn to listen? Or to allow silence to speak to us? Can we visualize the space among us and inhabit it with our memories? These are among the questions raised by, and embedded in, my recent participatory art project 'lo scarto', which evolved through the relational dynamics within the group. It was informed by the Reciprocal Maieutics Approach (RMA Dolci, 1973), a pedagogic process based on collective exploration of individuals' experience and intuition. This enabled intersubjective exchange, the activation of history and memories, and the construction of a narrative related to the current intercultural process taking place in Italy. My creative process is here discussed as research as art practice, in relation to socially engaged and dialogic art, and communicative memory, to act as an interface in an intercultural society. Research As Art Practice In Context As an artist and a researcher, my creative process can be defined as 'Research As Art Practice'. According to Busch (2009) contemporary art is often characterised by an explicit recourse to philosophical or sociological theories, and scientific research and process that "critically analyses both the commodity aspect of artworks and their purely aesthetic impact, as well as the power structures of the art world" (Busch 2009: 1) resulting in interdisciplinary and socially engaged artistic research. My ongoing investigation into the 'interchange' (Cologni, 2004) of artist and audience/participant, based on the co-functioning of self and other (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), and the perceptual, psychological and social dynamics within it, is manifested in participatory and collaborative events, sculptures, drawings and workshops. The live encounter in the form of dialogue is central to the construction of meaning. In particular in my production platform Rockfluid ii my approach was also in-disciplinary "not only a matter of going besides the disciplines but of breaking them" (Baronian, Rancière and Rosello 2008: 2). I have recently focused on processes of memorization in the present and in relation to space/place, through for example 'Spa(e)cious' and 'lo scarto' discussed below. Research as art practice is a natural development from the art practice as research paradigm that emerged in the 1990s, defined as the context where the produced artworks also produced (often critical) knowledge (Busch, 2009), of which my piece Diagrammi (Venice Biennale, 1999, Cologni 2000) is an example. The art research debate grew and intertwined with movements in contemporary art, allowing research in the arts and an evolution of the relationship between theory and practice (Busch, 2009; Sullivan, 2005). These are interwoven in research as art practice, which through different manifestations acts through many registers, and has a wider impact in society because it talks to-while engaging with-different audiences to share the transformation taking place from ideas to artworks, from raw matter to specific constructs, from subjective needs to shared meaningful actions. My artistic research within the Anti Ocularcentric Discourse (Cologni, 2004; Jay, 1993), a critique of the vision-centered western cultural context, is filtered through my own experience as a transnational artist within a now rapidly changing multi-ethnic European continent (Risse, 2004; Checkel and Katzenstein, 2009). The Council of Europe issued the following statement about
The Routledge international handbook of intercultural arts research
The Routledge International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research; pp 115-125 (2016), 2016
Remembering is a realization of belonging, even a social obligation (Assmann, 2008: 114) Can we learn to listen? Or to allow silence to speak to us? Can we visualize the space among us and inhabit it with our memories? These are among the questions raised by, and embedded in, my recent participatory art project 'lo scarto', which evolved through the relational dynamics within the group. It was informed by the Reciprocal Maieutics Approach (RMA Dolci, 1973), a pedagogic process based on collective exploration of individuals' experience and intuition. This enabled intersubjective exchange, the activation of history and memories, and the construction of a narrative related to the current intercultural process taking place in Italy. My creative process is here discussed as research as art practice, in relation to socially engaged and dialogic art, and communicative memory, to act as an interface in an intercultural society. Research As Art Practice In Context As an artist and a researcher, my creative process can be defined as 'Research As Art Practice'. According to Busch (2009) contemporary art is often characterised by an explicit recourse to philosophical or sociological theories, and scientific research and process that "critically analyses both the commodity aspect of artworks and their purely aesthetic impact, as well as the power structures of the art world" (Busch 2009: 1) resulting in interdisciplinary and socially engaged artistic research. My ongoing investigation into the 'interchange' (Cologni, 2004) of artist and audience/participant, based on the co-functioning of self and other (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), and the perceptual, psychological and social dynamics within it, is manifested in participatory and collaborative events, sculptures, drawings and workshops. The live encounter in the form of dialogue is central to the construction of meaning. In particular in my production platform Rockfluid ii my approach was also in-disciplinary "not only a matter of going besides the disciplines but of breaking them" (Baronian, Rancière and Rosello 2008: 2). I have recently focused on processes of memorization in the present and in relation to space/place, through for example 'Spa(e)cious' and 'lo scarto' discussed below. Research as art practice is a natural development from the art practice as research paradigm that emerged in the 1990s, defined as the context where the produced artworks also produced (often critical) knowledge (Busch, 2009), of which my piece Diagrammi (Venice Biennale, 1999, Cologni 2000) is an example. The art research debate grew and intertwined with movements in contemporary art, allowing research in the arts and an evolution of the relationship between theory and practice (Busch, 2009; Sullivan, 2005). These are interwoven in research as art practice, which through different manifestations acts through many registers, and has a wider impact in society because it talks to-while engaging with-different audiences to share the transformation taking place from ideas to artworks, from raw matter to specific constructs, from subjective needs to shared meaningful actions. My artistic research within the Anti Ocularcentric Discourse (Cologni, 2004; Jay, 1993), a critique of the vision-centered western cultural context, is filtered through my own experience as a transnational artist within a now rapidly changing multi-ethnic European continent (Risse, 2004; Checkel and Katzenstein, 2009). The Council of Europe issued the following statement about
Making Matrice: Intersubjectivity in Ethnography and Art
Collaborative Anthropologies, 2014
Through collaborative research design and creative process, artists, activists, and researchers often seek to give voice to underrepresented communities, to gain a better mutual understanding of common experiences or to call attention to issues of public interest. Artists and ethnographers work together to probe topics of common concern or to devise projects that bring people together to stage events or develop community artworks. 1 Fewer collaborative projects involving the arts focus on more intimate topics and situations; and those that do rarely have the production of art as their primary goal. 2 In this article we develop an intersubjective narrative (McCleary and Viotti 2009) about one such project that resulted in the making of Matrice, an installation composed of latex, burlap, and oil paint on canvas panels. In addition to the intersubjectivity of written word and audience, the Matrice narrative itself embodies dual related intersubjectivities (Mc-Cleary and Viotti 2009; Stolorow 2013)-a reconstructed conversation between the authors as well as the physical interaction between Susan as artist and the presence of Juliann in the form of a plaster belly cast. Juliann's exploration of her experience of maternity motivated Susan's artwork, itself informed by her skills as an ethnographer as well as an artist. The contours of our collaboration derive from two traditional mises en scène: that of fi gure drawing and portrait painting, which involves an artist and a model, and that of the researcher engaged in fi eld
Moving Bodies: An Anthropological Approach to Performance Art (Contents and Introduction)
Constantly resisting time and space, performance is an art that historically spotlights the artist within a certain spatial and temporal frame (the here-and-now), in relation to an audience and a specific political, social and cultural context. By allowing the artist to be its first spectator and searching for a simultaneous exchange between performer and spectator, performance art proposes conditions of socialisation that challenge normative structures of power and spectatorship. Starting from an understanding of the artists as researchers working perceptually, reflexively and also qualitatively, this thesis explores the field of performance art and focuses on their relation to the artwork as intimate, subjective, and transformative. The core of my ethnographic fieldwork was developed between October and December 2014 within the frame of two international festivals based in Northern Italy (Turin and Venice) dedicated to the practice of performance art — torinoPERFORMANCEART and the Venice International Performance Art Week. A highly ethnographic, reflexive and subjective approach is combined with a diversified theoretical frame of reference. Phenomenology and embodiment as points of philosophical departure provide the necessary threshold to overcome the dualistic Cartesian subject widely questioned in performance art: a holistic approach to performance as a series of dialogical, relational, and transformative processes thus allows for deeper investigation on its practice and alternative understandings of its documentation. Contemporary art theories further expand the discussion of performance and tackle some of its critical points and enduring ambivalences. Intending to make a contribution to the already existing efforts of those anthropologists working at the crossroads between art and anthropology, as well as to welcome fruitful dialogues with the artists it engages, the attempt is to trespass fixed positions and binary pathways of thought by exploring the potentials of experience, its continuities and transformations that creatively involve and intersect ethnographies and artistic researches.
Making the unfamiliar personal: Arts-based ethnographies as public engaged ethnographies
Qualitative Research Journal
I present the installation Geographies of the Imagination, an arts-based ethnography about long-term exile, as a form of public ethnography that unveils the acquisition and transmission of ethnographic knowledge as interactive, emergent, and creative. I will show how the methods of collaboration and art making created bodily forms of knowledge among the participants and the audience at the exhibition of the installation that have the potential for stimulating new thinking. The use of these methods advanced the acquisition of ethnographic knowledge, and heightened the development of empathy among the participants and the researcher. Furthermore, the public exhibition of this installation allowed the participants to exercise social justice, and created a setting for socially experiencing embodied knowledge
Introduction: Art, Encounters, Geography
This thesis empirically investigates three participatory artworks in London, focusing specifically on the encounters and relations they created. Drawing from the geographies of art, geographies of materiality and new materialism, social geographies of encounter, and art theory and history, this thesis argues for a wider understanding of the encounter in Geography, subsequently applying this to the case study artworks. A cultural geography of encounter, it is suggested, is to attend to the complexities of making, mediating, and material relationships involved in participatory art. The first empirical chapter follows a 'nomadic sculpture' around the borough of Tower Hamlets and investigates the type of connectivity and encounters it generated between participants. The second empirical chapter looks at a series of art workshops and investigates the emergence of a collaborative atmosphere that developed within and around the group of participants. The third empirical chapter critically engages with the socio-political relations of creative labour in the production of a socially engaged art project. The fourth empirical chapter draws from the previous case study artwork, but focuses on how gallery assistants played a mediating role between the public and the exhibition. It then turns to the materiality of the exhibition and how this mediated a particular more-than-human public. The concluding chapter draws from across each of the case study artworks identifying and discussing three particular understandings of 'relations' that emerged. Categorised as 'makings', 'mediations' and 'materialities', it uses these as a framework to tie the case studies together and subsequently suggests them as methodological and conceptual tools for future geographical research on artworks that focus on creating encounters and relations.