On Reverie, Collaboration, and Recovery

This is a meditation on reverie and collaboration in the context of recovery: recovery from substance misuse, but also in its much broader sense, recovering the connection between thinking and feeling. It highlights tensions that can be encountered when feeling constrained by perceptions of disciplinary norms, as well as the rewards of working through thought processes in connection with visual expression. Several narrative moments of my own journey are presented, emphasizing the depth of time it can take to realize ways of becoming writers, artists, anthropologists, people. Coming to know is a long-term commitment, with previous experiences feeding into present and future collaborations. A desire to combine anthropological and artistic thinking and imagination is expressed, and images and words are brought together to ask how this desire can infuse research with and into recovery. At the heart of the essay I recount an arts and health project, Wonderland: the art of becoming human in which trust and vulnerability, together with solidarity and gratitude, helped with the digestion of experiences of addiction and recovery. Reverie and collaboration are conceptualized less as a set of techniques and more as a call to disciplines to intersect at crucial points, or, inspired by intimations of "things in themselves," to suspend categorical boundaries

Does the world draw?

Drawing can be explained in at least two ways: exemplifying trace, an inherent capacity or collection of characteristics in an individual (Nancy 2013) e.g. Rembrandt's drawing versus Van Gogh's drawing, the drawing of a particular thing in the world by a particular individual; or as an open-ended, improvisatory movement through the world that marks a line (Ingold, 2011). This may be physical, metaphysical, virtual or real. This participatory artlab set out to create a collision between these different approaches to drawing and to use this experience to open a debate about drawing and anthropology. The 90 minute workshop offered participants points of access into different aspects of drawing which include: collaborative, ephemeral, imagistic and relational. It also opened into a discussion on the implications of these experiences for an ontology of creativity and for the practices of art/anthropology

Your thought will find the contours.

Our aim in this presentation is to report on research we have been doing around drawing and filming. As associates of Knowing from Inside, we are interested in discovering in what sense drawing and filming can be considered experiential ways of 'knowing from inside'. As with the sewing and framing (the seminar theme), drawing and filming have sometimes been opposed to one another - if to draw is to join, then to film, by its characteristic framing action, is to separate, to un-join.But they can also be seen as resting on a dialectic between two contrary movements of joining/separating

Desenhar com uma câmera? Filme etnográfico e antropologia transformadora

O desenho tem emergido como um foco recente de atenção antropológica. Escritores como Ingold e Taussig defenderam sua importância como um tipo especial de prática de conhecimento, ligando-o a uma reimaginação mais ampla do próprio projeto antropológico. Em respaldo a sua abordagem, está uma oposição entre o lápis e a câmera, entre “fazer” e “tirar”, entre modos de inquirição restritiva e produtiva. Este artigo desafia tal suposição, argumentando que tais elementos no desenho e na realização de filmes existem em uma relação dialética, em vez de polarizada. Destacam-se insights particulares desdobrados de um diálogo entre antropologias escritas e baseadas em filmes, relacionando-os a debates amplos no interior da disciplina – por exemplo, debates sobre modos de conhecer, sobre a prática qualificada [skilled practice], a improvisação e a imaginação, e a antropologia como um tipo de prática de fazer imagens. Tradução do texto "Drawing with a camera? Ethnographic film and transformative anthropology", de Anna Grimshaw e Amanda Ravetz, feita por Tatiana Lotierzo e Luís Felipe Kojima Hirano

Validation beyond the gallery: how do artists working outside of the gallery system receive validation of their practice?

This report presents results of research investigating how artists operating mainly outside of the gallery, gain traction and visibility within their chosen idiom and field. Through interviews with producers, commissioners and artists, the researchers sought views on current routes to validation and asked opinions on whether existing structures enable, or impede, artists’ visibility and externally-affirmed success. The findings reveal an ad-hoc and informal approach to validation in the field. The commissioners, producers and artists interviewed agreed that the responsibility for seeking and maintaining validation falls largely to artists. While this was accepted as the norm, the majority of artists perceive a lack of support structures to help those operating outside the gallery system achieve and maintain external validation. Artists working outside of galleries are not a homogenous group. Practices, terminology and attitudes differ. The majority put high value on selfdirection and “learning on the job”. Whilst there is fluidity between gallery and non-gallery contexts, most artists differentiate between their own value systems and those of galleries. Many believe that public gallery commissions command higher status than the majority of “community” commissions; several experience “second-class citizenship” in the mainstream art world, finding their practices side-lined when positioned in gallery and museum education contexts; most do not view gallery validation as a good fit for their values and practices. The report points to specific gaps in the ways these artists are currently validated, including a lack of critical writing, art reviews, mentoring, website exposure, commitment by organizations to artists as opposed to commitment to fixed term projects, and lack of funding streams for those working outside galleries. The report concludes that the difference in values and ways of working between this field and gallery culture, demands a new and different structure of validation, one based on in-depth consultation with artists, participants, producers and commissioners

Seeing the wood for the trees: Social Science 3.0 and the role of visual thinking

© 2016 ICCR Foundation. Social Science is increasingly called on to address “grand challenges”, “wicked problems”, “societal dilemmas” and similar problematiques. Examples include climate change, the war on drugs and urban poverty. It is now widely agreed that the disciplinary structure of academic science, with its journals, curricula, peer communities, etc., is not well suited to such trans-disciplinary, ill-bounded, controversial issues, but the ways forward are not yet clear or accepted by the mainstream. The concept of a next generation paradigm of “Science 3.0” has emerged through work on sustainability systems analysis, and for this multiple channels for learning, thinking and communications are essential. Visual thinking in its many forms (from technical representation or mapping, to photography or video, to design or illustration, to fine art) can bring to the table tacit and “felt” knowledge, creative experience and links from analysis with synthesis. This paper first sketches the contours of a Social Science 3.0, and then demonstrates with examples how visual thinking can combine with rational argument, or extend beyond it to other forms of experience

Black gold: trustworthiness in artistic research (seen from the sidelines of arts and health)

Rigour plays a central role in contemporary research culture. But how appropriate a concept is it to think, perform, and make judgements with on what is trustworthy and excellent in artistic research and its neighbouring field of arts and health? The historical meanings of rigour suggest severity and rigidity: straight lines, austere habits, privations. As a word, rigour has a mixed ancestry – French, Latin, Middle English. Some of its earliest uses coincide with a feudal system of government in Europe, with rigge [verb] meaning to plough a straight line in a narrow strip, and rig [verb] to provide a straight ridge to a house. Rig [noun] a derivation of ridge, was used in England five hundred years ago of human and animal backbones, perhaps reflecting everyday physical burdens. Rigours [noun] conveyed the meting out of un-cautioned punishments and cruelty. While the temperament of rigour might be appropriate for research that follows pre-set norms and standards of repeatability, its use to judge what is trustworthy in artistic research is questionable. Though artistic researchers need to understand the rigour concept, by contrast, artistic research as a kind of ‘thinking through making’ (Ravetz, 2011, 159; Ingold, 2013, 6), places value on improvisation, chance encounter, unforeseen admixture and the in- and outward- folding of process, affect and material. Once it is accepted that poiesis is part of the research process (Ingold, 2013; Haraway, 2016), it becomes apparent that artistic research cannot easily accommodate straight backed rigour

Sipping Water: Reverie and Improvisation

In 2011, Amanda Ravetz, Anne Douglas, and Kathleen Coussens worked with improvisation in the context of an experimental drawing process. Following workshops with artists Marina Abramović and Bronwyn Platten, the author wrote a score that involved sipping water slowly and drawing over an eight-week period. Drawing, performed for its own sake, produced a space of reverie. Interviews with participants and reflective notes made after work with the score suggest that beyond allowing us to focus on our bodily awareness, the experiment also brought to light ambivalent feelings about our prior training and existing skills. Interpreting these feelings as failure and loss, the paper draw links between reverie, illusion, and disillusionment and Gary Peters’ “ironic model” of improvisation (The Philosophy of Improvisation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. 94-6). However, where Peters avoids accounts of improvisation that focus on relationships between improvisors, the paper argues that reverie opens up a richly paradoxical space between improvisor and improvisor, as well as between improvisor and improvised, producing (shared) moments of rupture in which failure itself can signal new beginnings