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- Convenors:
-
Cathy Greenhalgh
(Independent)
Luke James Leo Kernan (University of Victoria)
Lucietta Williams (University of the West of England)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 10 University Square (UQ), 01/005
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In an era of geopolitical uncertainty, eco-anxiety, and 'Covidian' life, art practice fosters connection, hope, and well-being. This panel highlights transformative assemblage, bricolage, collage, montage, and multimodal configurations focusing on 'undercommons' and creative research methodologies.
Long Abstract:
In an era of geopolitical uncertainty, eco-anxiety, and 'Covidian' life (Levine, de Staal, 2021), art practice fosters connection, hope and well-being. These pressing circumstances have altered artistic citizenship and praxis (Elliot, Silverman, Bowman, 2016). Morton asks how in an 'age of mass extinction' can we understand that 'all art is ecological' (2021) and poised to redress these concerns. This panel highlights assemblage, bricolage, collage, montage, and multimodal configurations as transformative modes (Drag, 2020; Baldacci, Bertozzi, 2018), through a focus on 'undercommons' (Stefano, Moten, 2013, 2021; Shukaitis, 2017) and creative research methodology, which may reduce these crises and their 'toxic colonial footprints' (Loveless, 2019). Within these creative-critical spaces, the 'undercommons' arises against the 'commons' as a frictional counterpoint and tension that mobilizes hidden voices and inequities highlighted during the pandemic. Out of a need to address plurality, adopt a 'migratory aesthetics' (Bal, 2008), and produce amidst material and financial precarity, some practitioners have turned to creative methods, traditionally positioned as transgressive of boundaries. We are interested in forms of radical participation, poiesis, and meaning-making that enhance intersectional identity, expand communication across divides, and encourage resilience and resistance. Perhaps "precarious" forms of inquiry and narrative bricolage can reveal historiography and new aesthetics, creatively use juxtaposition to address rupture and crisis, and subsequently fuel enchantment and wonder (Levi-Strauss, 1962). This may provoke an anthropological, 'mindful' attention economy that questions neoliberal norms (Doran, 2018).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Collage technique offers a re-imagining of worlds. Applied to the notion of the commons, it offers a visual challenge to prevailing controlling images which perpetuate ideas of prejudice constructed by dominant groups (Hill Collins, 2021) and acts as an active medium of speculation and revelation.
Paper long abstract:
Collage has had an enduring role in the fields of art, text, film, literature and imagined space and most recently in architecture and town planning. When applied in the context of the commons, it operates both as an important visual challenge to prevailing controlling images which perpetuate ideas of prejudice constructed by dominant groups and institutions (Hill Collins, 2021) and as an active medium of revelation demonstrating the potential for transformation. It catalyses 'generative ideation and harnesses the potential for connecting art and life' (Bellanger, Urton, 2014).
In my current work, walking the city as an artist (and 'flaneuse'), I capture photography and video to create collages that function to subtly focus on 'the psychological experiences of the city and reveal forgotten, discarded, or marginalised aspects of the urban environment' (Lyons, 2017). The aim is to subvert visual forms of everyday daily life, and make identities and behaviours visible through a "collage eye". These are the commons and uncommons (Moten et al, 2021) normally hidden. Applied in these contexts, utilising a collage approach 'can allow even an untrained maker to reach something profound without the barrier of technique (Campany, 2021). This paper will trace a long practice in photo collage work (both analogue and digital) that responds visually to place and demonstrates that reconstructing and re-presenting these images in collage constitutes an active medium of speculation and revelation.
Paper short abstract:
Covid Collage Chronicles is a visual anthropology 'ars-combinatoria' chronicle and diary of the Covid 19 pandemic consisting of 350 collages. I argue that such border aesthetic and undercommons practices fuel radical collaboration and imaginative ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
Maximiliano Gioni suggests 'Collage is a dirty medium, infected as it is by waste. It appropriates residues and leftovers, trafficking with what is deemed valueless...for collage feeds off the pollution of visual culture'. Collage does appear as an 'art of crisis that has entertained a deep relationship with trauma and violence. There is something...guttural and visceral that immediately connects it with rupture and intervention....Collage has resurfaced at this 'time of collective panic and social change'(2007).
This paper draws on maps notions from Mieke Bal's 'migratory aesthetics'(2011); 'imaginative ethnography' as put forward by Pandian (2019), Loveless (2019), Elliott and Culhane, (2017), Taussig, (2011, 2021); attention economy (Doran, 2017); artistic citizenship and the commons / undercommons (Elliott et al, 2017, Stefano and Moten 2013); and 'border aesthetics' (Sandro and Nielson, 2013, Mignolo, 2000, Sholette, 2017). I point to my and others' use of appropriation, disjunction and juxtaposition as resistance tactics, using my project Covid Collage Chronicles. It is a visual anthropology 'ars-combinatoria' chronicle and diary of the Covid 19 pandemic. It consists of 350 images made using collage on ten inch square cake cards. They cover aspects of communication, culture, economy, environment, health, people, politics, protest, and spirit, and personal territory.
Paper short abstract:
This paper assesses results from my arts-based workshops, interviews, and research-creation projects which explore lived experiences of psychosis and sensorial alterities. These participant-led graphic narratives seek to empower Mad artists by harnessing new ethical relations.
Paper long abstract:
The Mad artist as a revolutionary figure is one who—by the necessity of their ostracization—resonates with the ongoing struggle of the undercommons (Harney, Moten 2013; Wilson 2004; Myers 2019). These Mad-identifying subjects are positioned by normative structures as outcasts and curiosities on multiple fronts (and offences)—within the art world, within patient-oriented research, within most forms of psychiatry, and within public discourse. However, the work of the undercommons is dependent upon these outsider visionaries, such that counter-cultural structures and activist collectives seeking equity and alignment with the Mad Pride Movement can offer safe harbour and open doors (radical inclusivity) for these fugitives (Bey 2019). One such space occurs within my doctoral fieldwork. I will survey findings from my arts-based workshops, interviews, and research-creation projects, which all explore lived experiences of psychosis and sensorial alterities. These phenomenological accounts and ethnographic retellings of participant's sensory lifeworlds expose and echo the implications of how autobiographical power (Myers, Ziv 2016), becoming (Biehl, Locke 2017), post-traumatic growth (Ng et al. 2021), and one's world-building efforts (Salazar et al. 2017) can elicit novel results, connections, and systematic changes across health disparities through the arts. The Mad artist's power, whom each participant mediates in their storytelling capacities (and in taking refuge within the matrixial borderspaces of the undercommons), is then situationally evoked through this project's ability to generate graphic narratives and comics that identify and harness new ethical relations (Ettinger 2018) to live by and, perhaps, reconfigure our futures within these havens.