We Reap What We Sow, embodiment and urban allotment gardening. Part 1: autumn- late winter, October- January.
(2021)
author(s): Polly Hudson
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research, Birmingham City University
This research investigates the inquiry: how is embodiment illuminated by a relationship with the land, earth, and plants, specifically in the context of an urban allotment gardening practice? It reveals the act of writing from the body, the relationship between a movement practice and gardening, the ancient ritual of growing and nurturing plants, and notions of gardening as a somatic practice.
The research project was carried out over the space of a year, from 2019-2020, and in this exposition the activities and interventions that were carried out during part I of the research are revealed.
The work shared here is part of an on-going long-term project instigated in 2017 ‘And so we Sow’ which looks at the relationship between dance and gardening.
(Not so) Casual Conversations: Experiments in Attunement as Method in Investigative Art Practice
(2019)
author(s): Livia Daza-Paris
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition considers how investigative poetic practices could broaden notions of ‘forensis’ in terms of contemporary art. By developing my concept of ‘poetic forensics’ with attunement as a method that is “palpable and sensory, yet imaginary and uncontained” (Stewart 2011) it admits the nonhuman—trees, rocks, streams, animals—suggesting new relations beyond the human as possible witnesses (Williams 2018). This presents an invitation to think differently about articulations of public truth. The question ‘Who else is witness?' emerges while exploring material intrinsically elusive to testimony on what and who has been disappeared by oppressive geopolitics. Human-rights issues are implicit given the project’s focus on historical erasure and state violence at “the threshold of detectability” (Weizman 2017). It also attends to my family’s experiences as we faced the “political disappearance” of my father Iván Daza, in 1960s Cold War-era Venezuela. The project grapples with validity through methods and lively approaches that decolonize both knowledge (Tuhiwai Smith 1999) and nature (Demos 2016) presenting posthuman challenges to a privileged human onto-epistemological position (Viveiros de Castro 2015).
