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- Convenors:
-
Sophie Lembcke
(University of Bayreuth)
Valerie Gruber (University of Bayreuth)
Dandara Maia (University of Bayreuth)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Linguistic and visual (de)colonialisms
- Location:
- Room 1015
- Sessions:
- Thursday 9 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
The Workgroup "Artistic Research" based at BIGSAS Bayreuth explores the methods of artistic research, with a focus on visual, performance, and practice based arts. This panel discusses artistic practices which contribute valuable knowledge to pressing matters or envisage societal transformation.
Long Abstract:
Based on the premise that knowledge is neither universal nor single, artistic research bridges the gap between arts and science. It articulates different modes of relating, reflecting and representing in order to reconfigure epistemological hierarchies and contribute to visual decolonialisms. This panel welcomes artists and researchers engaging with artistic practices which contribute valuable knowledge to pressing matters or envisage societal transformation.
We specifically invite contributors who connect Europe, Africa and its diasporas, translate pasts into futures, and deal with the following topics:
- Artistic research as agent of change and social transformation
- Art production as collaborative and decolonial research
- Entangling epistemologies within artistic co-production of knowledge
The panelists will give insights into idiosyncratic and creative ways of activating and translating bodily, tacit and habitual knowledges, which are generally overlooked by academic approaches. By discussing the potentialities and limitations of artistic research methodologies, the panel will enrich the debate on the situatedness of knowledge and everyday racism in societies marked by colonization and enslavement.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 9 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This presentation gives insight into an approach to participatory research-creation developed with artists and community actors from both shores of the Black Atlantic. Thereby, video performances provide a fruitful means to bring academic, artistic and bodily knowledges into dialogue.
Paper long abstract:
Logocentric approaches to knowledge production can hardly address traumatic experiences such as the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. Video performances are a fruitful way to explore and exchange such embodied knowledges and collective memories, passing them on to future generations. This presentation gives insight into a participatory research-creation process developed with Afro-diasporic artists and community actors from Brazil, Colombia and Mozambique. We will show fragments of transdisciplinary video performances produced during the Covid-19 pandemic. They provide a means for personal and collective reflection and transcontinental collaboration at the intersection of artistic research and socially engaged art. This approach offers an important opportunity to connect diverse actors from both shores of “The Black Atlantic” (Gilroy, 1993). We will discuss the shifting roles between academic researchers and co-creators of knowledge from different socio-spatial contexts and artistic fields such as music, dance and poetry. Thereby, we will gauge the possibilities and limitations of transformation emerging from a co-creation of artistic/academic knowledges based on communal practices, joint reflections and mutual learning.
Paper short abstract:
This communication relates the experience of the collaboration between a Malian photographer and a French ethnologist in Mali. It focuses on the specificity of art photography, and its common ground with ethnology.
Paper long abstract:
In 2019, a French ethnologist working on the notion of cultural capital in Segu teamed up a Malian photographer in order to see the town through his eyes. Neither of them had experienced such a collaboration before, and neither of them published the photographs that resulted from the experiment. Far for being a failure, this first experience was the beginning of a continued dialogue between them on the practice of art photography and the common grounds between their fields. In what ways can an artistic perspective of photography enrich both the work of the photographer and of the ethnologist?
In the first part, we look back at the beginning of our collaboration to understand how our different points of view as photographer and ethologist permuted in the work we created. In the second part, we explore the difference between the images the photographer took for our project and his work as an art photographer. The photographer explains his artistic work, and analyses the difference between what he calls art and documentary photography on the basis of two photos he took in the same place. In the third part, I link his analysis to the use of documentary photography in ethnology. We propose to encompass these dualities to look at some common ground: the work on attention to details, and the exploration of the imperceptible. We anticipate that this discussion will open new paths of collaboration that we have yet to explore.
Paper short abstract:
Opportunities in the amphibious in-between of the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal, are manifold and always emergent. In this paper I trace an artistic-research practice seeking to mimetically inquire the deltaic ambivalence and emergence and to employ reassemblage to go beyond stable (mis)representation.
Paper long abstract:
Opportunities in the amphibious in-between of the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal, are manifold abd always emergent and require constant attunement and skillful improvisation by delta dwellers.
Tracing an artistic-research practice that seeks to mimetically inquire the deltaic ambivalence and emergence, in this paper, I will draw on three (collective) audiovisual works. Thereby, I will show how my practice with split-screen videos, audiovisual installations and collages/comics tries to intervene into and go beyond common stable (mis)representations of deltaic life and matter. Through the principle of reassemblage, frictions emerge between images or between images and sound or text and open up a space for sensuality, imagination and multivocality.
The split-screen video 'Deux Horizons' (2019/20) juxtaposes two minimally edited scenes from land and water. It follows the history of salinisation of matter and aquatisation of life and inquires two (initially) dichotomous social, semiotic or material horizons and their eventual interrelations, attunements and re-makings.
For the installation 'Bidonmondes' (2020), six audio-visual loops contrast global extractivism and its situated appropriations. It reconfigures on the one hand, the imagery and sound around re-uses of palm oil plastic canisters in the delta and on the other hand, the canisters' inherited sound such as logging or palm oil industry advertisement.
Finally, I will draw on ongoing work around photo collages and comic drawings in cooperation with Pamplumus, a Senegalese visual artist, and trace translations from text to drawing as well as the reassemblage of existing visual aspects of deltaic life via mixed media approaches.