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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:
In Singapore, depression is experienced as a penumbra that cannot be accounted for. My ethnography approaches the postcolonial city politico-ethically, affectively, sensorially, multi-modally—through people, stories, images, gestures, artmaking, sensory textures, buildings-as-companions.
Paper long abstract:
In Singapore, depression is experienced as a penumbra that cannot be accounted for. Some queer artists evoke "mental illness" as both an engagement and departure from diagnostic categories. These artists, while living with the stigma of queerness and mental illness, build political coalitions out of the affective—and opaque—material of their lives. They engage in healing practices of artmaking that aren't necessarily biomedical in framing and in outcome. Artistic practices create a space for transgressive "worlding" (Stewart 2013) where expressions of urban marginality are allowed but under certain socio-legal regimes. To avoid hypervisibility and stigma, artists engage in a gesture of opacity and express this thought: I want to be seen but I also don't want to expose myself. Centrally, my paper focuses on people's arts of existence and addresses how urban marginality is ethically lived in the everyday. I examine artistic expressivities and practices as localized ways of contending with suffering that try to escape a medicalized framework variably. Art gestures towards affective states. Artmaking involves actions that have a promissory note of healing effect (Lévi-Strauss 1963; Hogan and Pink 2010). Furthermore, there is resonance between the spatial metaphor of marginalization and a focus on the city as such. My ethnography approaches the postcolonial city of Singapore politico-ethically, affectively, sensorially, multi-modally—through people, stories, images, sensory textures, atmospheres, buildings-as-companions. My paper spotlights how my interlocutors provide a model of ethical proximity with their environments in flux—by "speaking nearby" (Minh-ha and Chen 1992) their spatial and architectural forms.
Paper short abstract:
This contribution attends to artist-run spaces in the "crisis city" Athens as hybrid and ever-shifting assemblages of possibility, sites for cultivating allied solidarity, creative resilience, sustainability, and uncommon knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
Through the 2010s, a long decade bounded by the 2008 economic crisis and the 2020 pandemic rupture, the Greek capital of Athens emerged as Europe’s symbolic epicenter of crisis, a critical point of convergence for several interrelated situations unfolding across the region. Within and against these urgent conditions, the city witnessed an exceptional and unprecedented proliferation of artist-run spaces and initiatives: self-managed exhibition and performance spaces, sites devoted to artistic research, community art projects, and kindred initiatives attendant to alternative economies of practice, collaboration, and exchange. Emerging from the shared needs of a small contemporary art scene suspended between a chronic lack of public support and a commercial gallery sector decimated by the 2008 financial crisis, such endeavors are not singular interventions or autonomous bubbles; rather, they form a relational infrastructure of world-making deeply embedded in the broader currents of Athens’ urban development between the crises. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2020 and 2021, this contribution attends to Athenian artist run spaces as hybrid and ever-shifting assemblages of possibility, sites for cultivating allied solidarity, creative resilience, sustainability, and uncommon knowledge.
Paper short abstract:
This artist/anthropologist partnership attends to silent signs that surround us. As coastal dwellers, we are face to face with dramatic ecological degradation; in pursuing this cross disciplinary project, we discover different modes of being together. How might listening to wrack change us?
Paper long abstract:
Wrack, assemblages of grasses, algae, and invertebrates, serve as the primary source of nutrients to beach communities. Wrack floats atop tidal waters, indexing water characteristics, currents, and typologies of debris. Wrack also marks the highwater line, as well as the edge of public beaches in the state of Georgia. As such, wrack is an edge condition, as well as the moving boundary of the commons. Thus the oft overlooked wrack is omnipresent but ephemeral, never looking the same way twice, but always pointing out the conditions. As such, wrack is the voice of the undercommons. Artwork driven by a close study of wrack along the intercoastal waterway as it moves through the American south attends to this voice, shaped as it is by policy, community activisms, property rights, migration patterns, trash, weather and other facets of the hyperobject we call neoliberalism. In this case, a fibers artist and an anthropologist collaborate with the wrack in a series of call and response drawings and writings. This project, taking place over a three month period, will produce a visual exhibit to illustrate and invite stakeholders to attend to the signs that surround us. As coastal dwellers, we are in a state of red alert in terms of ecological degradation; in pursuing this cross disciplinary project, we hope to discover and share with others, a different mode of being together. Wrack, Spanish moss, fire ants, resurrection ferns…these communities are entangled with us in all the ways….how might radical acceptance and embrace change us?