Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Elizabeth Hallam
(University of Oxford)
Ray Lucas (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Utopias and Temporalities
- Location:
- Elizabeth Fry 1.34
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 4 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores experimental and creative ways of doing anthropology and of producing anthropological knowledge, as means to develop more flexible and responsive modes of research in contemporary shifting material settings. We will focus on investigations of spaces, including built environments.
Long Abstract:
This panel invites papers to explore experimental and creative ways of doing anthropology and of producing anthropological knowledge, as means to develop more flexible and responsive modes of research in contemporary shifting material settings. The panel's focus is the investigation of dynamic spaces, including built environments. With reference wider developments in experimental anthropology (see Schneider and Wright, 2013, 2017), we take as a starting point a collaborative project: Hallam's mixed-media 'Rooms Experiment: a fast installation' at the Anatomy Rooms, Marischal College Aberdeen (2017) which included the 'Bird Staircase (after Walter Murch)' sound installation by Lucas. This comprised video projections and audio recordings that manipulated and interpreted sensory responses to a building, part of which had been vacated and locked for years.
Recent initiatives such as Taussig's (2011) and Causey's (2017) drawings in anthropology, Elliot & Culhane's imaginative methodologies (2017), and work on the 'Knowing from the Inside' project (Ingold) indicate growing interest in innovative research and exhibitions made possible through alternative practices.
How might we come to know places by combining anthropological and art practices, as well as approaches from further disciplines? Sensory engagement with spaces can be examined through provocations such as urban walking (Careri, 2002), soundscape installations (Augoyard & Torgue, 2006), or drawing and inscriptive practice (Lucas, 2019). How might fresh methodological and theoretical insights be gained through such work? Papers are invited to consider, through experimental modes of anthropology, how spaces - in rapidly changing contexts and environments - come to be produced and known.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 4 September, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
How do mixed-media installations work as experimental explorations of material spaces, in time? This presentation considers this question with reference to current debates and practices in anthropology, art, and museum exhibiting.
Paper long abstract:
How do mixed-media installations work as experimental explorations of material spaces, in time? This presentation considers this question with reference to current debates and practices in anthropology, art, and museum exhibiting.
Retrospective analysis and partial re-display of a collaborative project, 'Rooms experiment: a fast installation', curated by Hallam at a vacated school of anatomy in northern Scotland, provides a focus for discussion of installations as productive in developing a flexible and responsive way of doing anthropology. With a DIY ethos, this experiment was designed and carried out as a site-specific work concerned with the ongoing life of rooms that had been locked and left 'unused' for years.
The installation developed as a spatially distributed series of digital projections, sketches, and sound recordings that captured and manipulated spaces assumed to be dormant or 'empty'. By examining material, visual, and auditory traces of human and non-human activity (e.g. of plants and birds), the four-day project revealed and interpreted dynamic, not static, spaces. Aspects of inaccessible rooms were made visible and audible, enlarged and amplified through the installation that attended to texture, light, colour, temperature, mood and sensation. Here were growth and resilience as well as decomposition and disintegration.
Drawing on strategies of surrealists, contemporary artists, and curators, the paper asks how method and theory might be developed through installation practice as an experimental mode of anthropology - in this instance it enabled investigation of material, sensory and temporal dimensions of spaces that are changing/moving even though seemingly suspended or 'out of action'.
Paper short abstract:
Body architecture explorations includes three recent AUB Architecture research-practice projects: an experimental sensing of the moving body; a series of environmental audits, and thirdly an installation questioning the visitor's identity. All travelled via a mythical, ecological and rhythmic line.
Paper long abstract:
An anthropological fan and gate-crasher, brings architecture design, and its associated creativity, to work across and with the social sciences. Three recent research projects by AUB Architecture are reflected upon, to explore the relationship of the body, to a wider social environment. The first, is a research project, with Zaha Hadid Architects, emerging from the a 1980s performance, to the use in 2017 of sensors to record the body, in the AUB Gallery's ZHA exhibition. The resultant data was used to make 'the line', drawn by Ariadne, the choreographer (1993, Indra Kagis McEwan). The second project was working with the RNLI to environmentally audit places of drowning. It follows the endangered body in space, overlapping with a number of social and mental ecologies revealed at the sites. The third questioned the quasi-national, and personal, identity using an installed, designed and pre-fabricated journey line in the British Pavilion, Venice as part of the 2018 Architectural Biennale (Daedalus-the maker architect). A series of methodologies were applied: from the choreographic; such as the use of somatic practice, to the architectural; for example the use of psycho-geographic and physical models. They also referenced Rhythmanalysis (1992, Lefebvre) and The Three Ecologies (1989, Guattari). The approaches move between the choreographic body (Ariadne), and the fabrication of the architectural line (Daedalus). The research approach seeks to incorporate the social. These investigations & methodologies focus around mutability and identity, from where there is an attempt to develop a projection into the circular future of the UN sustainability goals.
Paper short abstract:
Coastal authorities build boundary marks to delimit the abstract line of the coast in order to regulate it. I have been walking and collecting synthetic and natural fibers along this coast to literaly weave a thread that challenges that representation with a concrete material line that can be felt.
Paper long abstract:
This research through making tries to challenge the way we undertsand and represent the 'Costa Blanca', in Southern Mediterranean Spain, a territory that has undergone major urbanization for tourism in the space of just sixty years. Planning authorities at national and regional levels try to control the forces of urbanization through the delimitation of the line of the coast. In the map, they draw an abstract line and, in the site, they build reinforced concrete boundary marks every few tens of meters. Together, these devices are meant to fix that rich shifting boundary where water, land and air meet. Thus, beachgoers, environmentalists, housing developers and leisure businesses negotiate this strip of line through the tools of surveying and counting. Placed in the hyphen between anthropology and architecture, as an endeavour in research-creation, I am searching for alternative ways to understand this space. I find a useful tool in the techniques of weaving, where counting is also important but becomes a sort of narrative device. I have been walking along many of the four hundred kilometres of this coast gathering synthetic and natural fibers with which I am weaving a thread. Kots give a reference of a lived scale and labels orientate the 'walker' with natural and built landmarks. When passing your fingers along this thread the line is felt through its materials. This way, enjoyment, that has transformed this boundary between earth and sea, is understood as an active experience and not only as a consumer good.
Paper short abstract:
The paper describes an audio-visual workshop and the exhibition of the output. Exploring physical, social and environmental vulnerabilities, we present the collaboration with a young person developing resilient strategies of contestation and protection.
Paper long abstract:
The paper reconstructs the proceedings of an audio-visual workshop in a public school in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. By using a participatory research design that cuts across ethnography, pedagogy and arts, the aim was to apprehend inequalities and vulnerabilities the attendants confront in their everyday life. The school is close to the biggest landfill and one of the most polluted rivers of Argentina. The surrounding neighbourhoods are facing extreme poverty and multiple forms of violence that infiltrate daily behaviour. Here, the participants were asked to write about a trajectory or journey to use as an inspiration to make short films or produce art installations. At the end of the workshop, the groups exhibited and showed their outputs at a "science-fair" on the Campus of the University of San Martín, Buenos Aires.
We propose to focus on one of the short-films that tells the dream of becoming a Taekwondo-instructor for disabled people. Over the core of the workshop the young filmmaker, who chose to use Taekwondo as a way to empower peers to be able to contest and protect themselves from threats of physical violence, he himself was facing several deceptions outside of school, including facing life-threatening home invasions.
The process of producing audio-visuals and the participatory research design allowed us to access barely accessible stories and were able to create safe spaces in which deceptions have been expressed, reflected and coped.
Paper short abstract:
Our paper shows how everyday practices in which entities such as an aquarium are involved, are intrinsically part of what constitutes children's lived space in the hospital. Doing ethnography by carefully untangling the doings of and around such a 'thing' offers ways to research built environments.
Paper long abstract:
Since the turn of the 21st century we see a shift towards integrating into research 'the view of the child' to understand and inform the design of built care environments. Researchers started to explore children's perspectives on and affective relationships with the built hospital environment. People experience the environment, however, from within - that is, as part of it. This way of thinking about space has recently been advanced by posthuman or socio-material approaches. Through notions such as 'encounter' or 'gathering' these approaches direct attention to how human and other-than-human entities mutually constitute each other in and through everyday practices.
To present these everyday practices with and of children in the hospital we first draw on Schatzki's (2002) practice theory and Gibson's (1979) theory of affordances. Then we further clarify our way of thinking by turning as empirical focus to a 'thing' to research children's lived space in the hospital. Our case study presents an aquarium as a gathering node to understand children's everyday practices in a pediatric cancer-care ward and as an entry point to analyse the relocation of this ward to a new building.
Our aim is to show how mundane practices in which entities such as an aquarium are involved, are intrinsically part of what constitutes children's lived space in a pediatric hospital. Doing ethnography by carefully untangling these everyday practices asserts, we argue, something that may go unnoticed in the dominant discourse surrounding the design of care environments.
Paper short abstract:
Designated for observation, relation and knowledge-creation, Safe Places operate as labs. They are heterotopias where all those present have the opportunity to experiment basic facts of social and natural sciences, and then use them to co-create and perform common experiences and narratives.
Paper long abstract:
This paper follows the action research and the theoretical inference of performative processes in '27 ways to be born' and 'IF', co-created by scientists, artists, and the audiences in Copenhagen and Naples, based on the author's original idea and conception. In both cases the main aim was to create a heterotopic lab, which we will inhabit with our half-real, half-imaginary selves and build new, parallel or future societies and environments (Grant, 2017).
The epistemology proposed is based on a fusion of compatible methods in social and natural sciences, transferable to artistic research (Alvesson and Sköldeberg, 2000), too. Safe Places are both real and imaginary spaces, newly developed on each and every occasion by the temporary community which inhabits the playing area. The participants become co-creators, choosing from wide varieties of gender, lifespan, race, physical and psychological features to play the game in the experience. A series of objects or interactive installations are placed in the common playing area, which inevitably set the basic cues and rules by the way they can be operated. They set the topics and the sensorial experiences, too. The participants are free to choose at each stage their level of activity. Documentation of the process outlined the knowledge production on the set topics, on performative epistemologies and artistic research, too.
Safe Places will be examined here as reflective hybrid fields on the intersection of: participatory observation, action research, Actor Network Theory (Latour, 1990), experience and experiment design, dialogical art, relational art, gamification and sortition (Hennig, 2017).