CRITICAL CONFABULATIONS – Corresponding Practices and Mappings
(2023)
author(s): Jim Harold, Alex Hale
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition is based on an archaeological survey in the landscapes around Kilmartin Glen, Argyll and Bute, western Scotland, and references digital datasets – archaeological reference points –alongside the acts (enactments) of field walking, photography, drawing and poetry – experiences and representational discourses – to consider how land and landscapes may be read as dynamic palimpsestic and multi-dimensional fields of entanglement.
Digital datasets were used by the survey to garner fruitful material to aid identification and to analyse (subtle) surface archaeological remains in the inhospitable terrain on the hills bordering Kilmartin Glen. By analysing, categorising and archiving such information, through naming and cataloguing, archaeological methodology effectively orders and tames such wildernesses. We, by contrast, are seeking to draw art and archaeological practices into dialogue with one another in order to assert the importance of recording experiences and random acts as a part of field research and, thereby, to both re-vivify and re-wild our encounters with landscape.
Our exposition, and shared practices, intentionally encourage nuances of reading and interpretation that are found at the dialogic intersection between an artist/poet encountering archaeological landscape survey, and an archaeologist experiencing artistic, poetic and linguistic readings of land: reflecting in the process upon contemporary methodologies and underlying theoretical discourses. As such this research sits within the wider contemporary turn towards interdisciplinary practice, and seeks to establish a dialogue across disciplines; between humans and landscapes, practice and matter, that provides emerging approaches and hopes to remind us of the wild experience.
LYCANTHROPUS ERYTHEMATOSUS I – Artistic Research on the Edge. Poetical Investigations on the Margins of Medicine and Mythology
(2019)
author(s): Barbara Macek
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
In this exposition on the peripheries of medicine and art I will enrole the concept of my project "Lycanthropus erythematosus" and the applied strategies of artistic research.
The essence of the work is the proposal of a new thesis concerning the understanding of autoimmune diseases, especially of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE, lupus).
SLE is a rare autoimmune disease characterised by acute and chronic inflammation of various tissues of the body. Its cause and pathogenesis are still unknown.
The work aims at providing new knowledge in regard to these open questions. Its thesis is exposed in different formats resulting from different strategies of artistic research. It proposes to understand autoimmunity as the expression of transformative processes that cause various physical and mental effects in the afflicted organism. This ongoing metamorphosis is driven by a plan: it is about the emerging of a new being – the Lycanthropus erythematosus.
I'm Nobody, Who am I?
(2019)
author(s): Boukje van Gelder
published in: KC Research Portal
Student Number
3169227
Supervisor(s)
Andrew Wright
Title
I'm Nobody, who am I
Research Question
My research question is too long for the form.
Summary
Emily Dickinson's poetry can be hard to understand the first time you read it. How then can the artist communicate an Emily Dickinson poem in a song in a way that an audience grasps the meaning the first time? For that reason, you need to define who you are on stage and what you want to communicate. But what do you communicate on stage when your first sentence is 'I'm Nobody!'? This research turns Nobodies into Somebodies and the other way around by looking at the voices (the characters) that are present in the poems of Emily Dickinson, specifically the poem 'I'm Nobody!'. Who speaks to whom? The research makes a journey from Emily Dickinson to scholars who write about her, composers who make songs on her poems and in the end to the performer who with all these people in her mind communicates the poem and the song to the audience. Finally, the voices in the poem become defined as various characters that can be performed on different settings of 'I'm Nobody!' by Ernst Bacon, Nick Raspa and Lori Laitman. From something vague and ungraspable the poem and its voices become very concrete and close to our own daily lives.
Short Bio
Mezzo soprano Boukje started singing as soon as she could speak. After her Bachelor’s in History at the Utrecht University, she decided that she wanted to explore as much as possible about singing. In 2017 she graduated from the Fontys Conservatory in Tilburg and started her Master's in the Royal Conservatoire. Currently, she studies with Catrin Wyn-Davies. Boukje performed as a soloist in different concerts. She sang, for example, the alto solos in Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Haydn’s Stabat Mater, Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle and she sang the role of Hänsel in the staged opera of Hänsel und Gretel from Humperdinck.