Paper short abstract:

This lab addresses artistic practice as an explorative ethnographic method. It invites the audience to draw designs informed by the South Indian kolam as a means to be grasped by its rhythm and hereby understand embodied aspects of the practice.

Paper long abstract:

The idea of labs brings forth art as practice, as ongoing performative explorations evolving in interactions between people, places, objects and memories. The proposed collaborative drawing workshop aims to elucidate how explorative participation, emphasized in certain forms of contemporary art practice as well as ethnographic fieldwork, can sensitize the researcher. Through a heightened awareness, it can provide further abilities to grasp and convey experiential knowledge, and it may enhance the capacity to understand notions of aesthetics through social (Bourriaud 2002, MacDougall 2006) and political (Rancière 2004) frameworks.

Anna Laine has studied the kolam practice in South India, transposed it into various materials and employed it in a participatory art project in collaboration with Tamil refugees in London as well as in workshops for students in anthropology and material culture (at Goldsmiths and UCL). In Tallinn, kolam migrates into yet another space and invites you to explore new forms and additional meanings in relation to anthropologies of art.