Rethinking urban movement through the frame of radical psychiatry
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Dora Ramljak
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023; BA Photography
Research is the ground for exploring the world. My research paper serves as a guide in the sensorial and caring experience of the world around us as. Written in stages in which patients enter and experience the sensory room, the transition from history to the future opens space for discussion and implementation of observed practices in individual realities.
The beginning chapters introduce radical movements in psychiatry while outlining the historical formation of disability as a social issue. Discussion around illness and disability is observed trough political and philosophical frame. Historical examples provide insight into how the space of the institution itself can re-shape into a progressing form, how the discussion about institutionalised people is de-stigmatised once the closed system of a hospital or an asylum opens to its surrounding environment, and how this can affect the position of healthcare, psychiatry specifically, on the level of a state.
The chapters bring forward current knowledge around body memory and studies around sensory treatments in institutionalized settings. In this chapters, the body is not solely observed in the setting of a hospital or asylum, but brought in the context of perceiving the body as a social and cultural object.
Short poetic digressions are moments of personal reflection, automatic writing that reminds me of moments when I saw the necessity to provide alternative models of care.
The paper contains interviews and transcriptions of conversations I had with my commissioners. Through conversations with medical workers and artists, I reflected upon the current state of care provisions, ranging from institutional care to self-care. The dialogues show sensibility and understanding that a shift in healthcare towards the re-humanization of the ill is needed.
Written in-between moments of working with materials in the workshop settings, research has acted as
Fair Games
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Thomas Robert Moore
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The authors of Defragmentation: Curating Contemporary Music (Darmstäder Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, 2018) all by (un)spoken agreement appeared to take for granted that nothing in new music curation can be taken for granted. In other words, all aspects of any given event were fair game. They suggested that not only could the choice in pieces, soloists, conductors, and ensembles be (re)tooled, but even site-specific aspects, roles of the musicians and audience, and even value regimes could be instrumentalized to fit the artistic need of the curator. Dorthee Richter, by way of introducing the bundle, proposed that curation should be a ‘practice that is deeply involved in the politics of display, politics of site, politics of transfer and translation, and regimes of visibility’. If we understand politics as, ‘the total complex of relations between people living in society’ (Merriam-Webster), then Richter suggests that every thinkable way people relate can, and perhaps should, be considered. Curators should reflect on how relationships in our world are displayed, the interplay involved on site (e.g. the history of specific concert venues), the participation (or lack thereof) of an audience, the participant’s ability to understand, enjoy, and be entertained (or not), and even the audience’s and presenter’s perceived position in society and how that interplays in concert.
We, a performer-researcher, a culture-sociologist, and a musicologist, will rearticulate this premise, applying Boris Groys’ philosophy of care to examine curatorial practices. We will question the curator’s central role and probe any shifts in power between festival directors, receptive venues, and performing ensembles. And finally, drawing on Pascal Gielen’s previous research into fine arts curation and Jennifer Walshe’s piece splendor_solis.wav (2022), we will delve into the influence ‘flying’ curators have on artistic, social, and financial stability of individual musicians and ensembles.