I have been conducting desk based research with regards to both methods and content.
CONTENT:
I have decided to focus my project on studio left-overs and hot-desking environments. I am interested in the relic, surviving residue, scourings, slops, crumbs, dregs and excesses. Equally, what is this space that we call the studio?
I am curious about this as collecting is a form of making—is the hot-desking studio, often seen as a soul-less entity, actively archiving? Is it calling for the studio culture, activity and usage it has been starved from? This subject also relates to our contemporary culture of trash and treasures, normative notions of worth, sustainability and waste, non-places and the digital of today that ‘refuses’ its thing-ness. These interests stem from the need to understand belonging within the university spaces and ways of enhancing feelings of community and studio culture.
I started reading some articles about belonging by bell hooks and Sister Corita Kent’s Immaculate Heart’s College 10 tules, as well as other hot-desking learning environments (https://thelongandshort.org/spaces/hot-desks-stockholms-school-without-walls). In some of the these the spatial element is crucial (ex rule 1: Find a space and trust it for a while).
I was also thinking, as seen in some of the phrasing above, of the material as agent. I remember a colleague saying to me when teaching children ‘the space is the teacher’. What does the studio and its leftovers do? To understand more about this, I started reading theories that center other than human perspectives such as Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) and the book Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennet.
Coming from a studio practice that engages with the physical, and to which the notion of the studio is central, I would find the hot-desking studio as a limitation. I landed on Gislaine Leung’s book Bosses, in which she attempts to acknowledge limitations as potential resources. She writes:
The negotiation of limits in my work is about trying to undo a certain dialectic of value, trying to understand the thing I have or don’t have as a resource, trying to understand the situation I’m in as a resource...But those limits, those dependencies could be turned around to become a resource for making artwork in another way, in a way that you don’t know what it’s going to do. And I constantly have to decide to maintain this turn. […] This practice isn’t something that’s done. It’s a maintenance act, it’s something I maintain in myself against something else. It has to have that relational framework, it’s idiosyncratic and subjective.
Her words are hopeful and embrace challenge and uncertainty. I was particularly intrigued by her use of the word ‘maintenance’ which led me to read the maintenance manifesto by Mierle Laderman Ukeles. (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://queensmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Ukeles-Manifesto-for-Maintenance-Art-1969.pdf)
It made me think about who is doing the maintenance, what is the maintenance done, and what is it set against. It also made me think of writing a manifesto as a method, or as an intervention.
METHODS:
I am also deeply intrigued by processes that engage with oblique strategies towards knowledge—that in themselves challenge notions of ‘value’ and have often seen as less. In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennet writes:
What method could possibly be appropriate for the task of speaking a word for vibrant matter? How to describe without thereby erasing the independence of things? How to acknowledge the obscure but ubiquitous intensity of impersonal affect? What seems to be needed is a. certain willingness to appear naive or foolish, to affirm what Adorno called his “clownish traits.” This entails, in my case, a willingness to theorize events (a blackout, a meal, an imprisonment in chains, an ex perience of litter) as encounters between ontologically diverse actants, some human, some not, though all thoroughly material
I find it telling that she has chosen to use the words clownish, naive, and foolish.
In the past, I have worked with research methods that celebrate the personal, the fictional and the absurd, such as narrativity, poetic writing and cut and paste methods. Through my reading, I have a growing interest in autoethnography and collective autoethnography (CAE). It is interesting to see Bennett acknowledge the ‘I’
In addition, it is clear to me that new materialism is hardly new, and object ontology is deeply engrained in –ancient and contemporary– indigenous Maori, Native American communities among others, yet Eurocentric literature has often excluded such from academic conversations. In The New Materialisms and Indigenous Theories of Non-Human Agency: Making the Case for Respectful Anti-Colonial Engagement by Jerry Lee Rosiek, Jimmy Snyder, and Scott L. Pratt, I found the following quote, which is very close to OOO:
In the moral universe all activities, events, and entities are related, and consequently it does not matter what kind of existence an entity enjoys, for the responsibility is always there for it to participate in the continuing creation of reality. (Deloria, 1999b, p. 47) as found in The New Materialisms and Indigenous Theories of Non-Human Agency: Making the Case for Respectful Anti-Colonial Engagement by Jerry Lee Rosiek, Jimmy Snyder, and Scott L. Pratt
But how do objects and spaces talk?
In Indigenous cosmologies, the actual landscape does often have the capacity to name itself and uses the human beings to enact the self-naming. In this way of understanding reality, the human mind is a conduit for the consciousness of the land to be expressed in language. Yup’ik scholar A. Oscar Kawagley (2003) explained how the Yup’ik language clearly shows “the elements of nature naming and defining themselves” (p. 2) Marker (2018)
It seems from the above quote that the human beings ‘enacting’ are relevant to the context–they need to be entangled in the ecosystem. Hence, maybe it would be worth thinking a) what humans could be used by the studio to talk? b) what is their relationship to the space, c) maybe it would be worth thinking of myself as researcher, and my relationship to the space as well as the selected participants.
Janelle Baker, a Metis scholar says: “[A] researcher needs to be sensitive to, and participate in, systems of respect and reciprocity belonging to the people, ancestors, and sentient landscape of the place in which they are doing research” (p. 110).
Which sent me back to Gislene Leung’s writing:
If you think about financial autonomy as a way of being supported, you can also think of other things as support. What I’m describing are not limits but life, other forms of life that are not your art-industrial life. I have dependents, friends, family, outside the parameter of my artist identity.
This made me wonder, how do I find support and reciprocity within my teaching context? And how can I practice respectful anti-colonial research? By being interviewed for another ARP project, I mentioned that my teaching team is a nook of goodness, and a group where I feel safe and supported. I also feel like maybe it would be better to work with colleagues as our relationships are ones of reciprocity, and asking them to partake in this project might allow to deepen relationships and further conversations. It might also mean that it is maintenance: of a peer-to-peer network. In addition, it also feels like a safe space in which I can trial working with anti-colonial practices with respect. However, as I am doing this for the first time, it might also be a place where I am able to fail without affecting the student body.
I believe how I’ve internalized that system and how you have internalized the system can be changed, but you need a lot of help to do that. It’s not something I could have got to on my own, it’s a product of community and history and luck and conversations like this. If I was off by myself I wouldn’t have got there. There’s a projection in competitive society that everyone else can run to it and keep up. But if intimacy occurs there’s a moment when that competitiveness disappears into a moment of solidarity.
—-8 ways:::: finding further inspiration by non-verbal and mapmaking to multi-media aspects of interviews.
-write more about::::role playing / interviews
why why why is my data collection moment also an intervention:
gislaine leung:
By reflecting on the reading I have done, I feel that my chosen subject matter and research methods of interested are deeply related and hence, relevant to this project. Firstly, by centering implicit approaches to knowledge that celebrate the personal and lived experience, these aforementioned methods validate diverse knowledges: they welcome difference and refuse ‘didactic’ and ‘all-knowing’ authorship. In addition, due to their intimate, playful and / or narrative nature, the research process becomes accessible, lively, collaborative: CAE and Indigenous processes are by nature collective sense-making activities. If research is made by a multitude of voices it might also be understood or be relevant to a multitude of audiences? (This is an assumption). Challenging individual authorship they highlight the entangled process that knowledges arise from and assign worth and provide space for messy intra-actions.
-because I am ‘intervneing’ in the way my colleagues see the studio spaces, what they are and what they can do.
-to move away of the lens of the distanced.
-Hannah Arendt’s conception of storytelling as an activity which reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it (Arendt, 1973)
Hannah Arendt (1973) Men in Dark Times
-Storytelling prioritises communication