Crisis & Care: flyers #01-#06

Abstract

[WALKABOUT: click file NAVIGATION EXHIBIT] Preparation and modular diary for the Artistic Research Week (ARW) at KHiO, week 4, January. The flyer series aims at maturing the configuration of a collaborative situation—distributed in two sessions (#15 and #8)—and materials proposed for a professional interaction on crisis & care, in the framework of ARW: Hospitality, Vulnerability, Vitality. Topic advanced by Camille Norment.

The purpose was to see if it was possible to develop a perception of agency amongst the participants, myself included, based on input that was neither completely predictable nor entirely random. First by inquiring into extremes—counterposing victimhood and excellence—to see how the topics in the group would surface in this tensional field. A tensional and hybrid field.

It is further queried as the moral doxa—assumption, opinion or tacit norms—counterposed to ethics: the latter being tied to an epistemic obligation to critical thinking, knowledge and research. How the moral doxa subscribes to reactive positions, before inquiry (rather than the reverse). The foundations of ethics possibly being: a) that learning outcomes are transposable; b) criticality.

In the context of the Zoom conference: the gallery of real-time videos we are watching that we do accept as placeholders (with “voting-rights”, as it were, or the right of voice). This is an example of transposition: without this aesthetic-epistemic operation, we would not have a platform for reaching anything conclusive. Yet it is a collaborative platform: ranging from budgets to research.

Then to criticality. One flyer is devoted to inquire on an outcome from one of the projects we were going to interact on in ARW (session #8); to determine a mode of engaging with the project, from a position of professional respect and artistic trust, without being considered as partisan to the work, but rather in a position to discuss it and hatch new repertoires in it from within.

The possibility to engage on indigenous terms, without turning to mimetic complicity. Here the development of agency relating to the work as it is—and not an instance of existing cultural and discursive stereotypes—is instantiated by the activity of flyer-production, turned out to be a key to address difficulties I could not seem to manage in a more leisurely research project.

Working to dislodge the art in the art—as a basic communicative act—combines the developing agency and random-processing in specific ways, that may be linked to the obligation to the art work which is not ideal, or related to what it should address or resolve, but its material existence. The art in the art released from the work, on condition of a work of hatching disordered systems.

Keys to the flyers: #01 homo sacer; #02 existential excellence; #03 ethics and moral doxa; #04 contingencies of the artistic material; #05 cleaning the slate between projects; #06 communication as an aesthetico-epistemic operation.

AWR sessions: #15 Crisis and Care. Panel. Participants: Bojana Cvejic, Petrine Evinje, Mette Edvardsen, Bjørn Blikstad, Linda Gathu and Theodor Barth. #8 TRANSPOSITIONS—JAR, Mette Edvardsen and modular diaries. Participants: Mette Edvardsen and Theodor Barth.

NB! the flyers are intended as THEORY PROTOTYPES that are informed by interaction before, during and after.