Ancestry – after DNA test – considered through Drawing
(2024)
author(s): Mike Croft
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
To the extent that this research is artistic, it involves the mediums of drawing, drawing towards painting, academic research, academic writing, fiction, and occasional use of video. If artistic research could be an entity with the opacity, so to speak, of such mediums, then it would not be necessary to mention its constituents. However, this is worth stating at the outset because in the author's view the Research Catalogue does have its own mediumistic basis: take the research off the platform and its form and concept alters. The topic of the research is a response to the author's genetic ancestral DNA test provided by i3S (Institute of Investigation and innovation in Health, Porto University). The author is one among a group of participants conducting individual research on the theme of 'Call for Drawing – Genetics and Identity'. This author's activity follows an exposition called 'Ancestry – before DNA test – considered through Drawing', published on the Research Catalogue. The activity concerns the charting of progress of thinking, doing and making up to and including two main pieces of visual-material work, with the expectation that the research will continue to develop.
Distanciation and other: implications of distance in an ancestry DNA project
(2023)
author(s): Mike Croft
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
The exposition focuses on the question of ‘distanciation’ that at-once both distances and furthers one’s understanding of the self through being drawn into a work of text – here taken in a broader sense to include also the visual-material – and geographical and temporal distance. The latter interpretation of distance relates to the artistic research project that contextualises the article, which is in response to a call for drawings on the question of genetics and identity, hosted by i3S (Institute of Investigation and Innovation in Health, Porto University). As part of this author’s response, and as an example that may, through its reading, cause some expansion of one’s notion of self, the novel ‘The Inheritors’ by William Golding is discussed. From the point of view of genetic ancestry, Golding’s novel involves incongruous recognition between a family of Neanderthals and a larger group of Homo sapiens, and a more psychological use of the term ‘other’ for foreignness and one’s negotiation of such initial reaction by oneself. The conjoined question of distanciation and other is considered through reference to a large drawing of the author in progress as part of the ancestry project at the time of writing, and through theoretical reference to the work of Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan and Bracha Ettinger that helps elaborate on distanciation, the psychically interpreted other, and a maternal matrixial idea of pre- and post-natal I and non-I of the self in contiguous relationship not only with psychoanalytical theory, but also with global ancestral mitochondrial DNA.
Observations of: The Observation of Perception, considered through Drawing
(2023)
author(s): Mike Croft
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition provides some indication of the content of an exhibition at Lugar do Desenho – Júlio Resende Foundation between 23 September and 28 October, 2023. Several artistic research projects have been explored by the author through drawing and writing between 2021 and 2023 while resident in Porto, Portugal. The projects have each been hosted by i2ADS (Institute of Art and Design Society) as part of a larger collaborative research project called 'The Observation of Perception', considered through Drawing. Two of the projects, or one project divided into two parts, are specifically a contribution to a genetic ancestry project – ‘Call for drawing – Genetics and Identity’ – hosted by i3S (Institute of Investigation and Innovation of Health), Porto University. The main formatting of all of the projects has been the Research Catalogue, in which the visual works that now comprise the exhibition have previously been placed in a multiple media context as artistic research.
This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything
(2020)
author(s): Stacey Sacks
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything is a documented artistic research project (Doctoral Thesis) in Performative and Mediated Practices, comprising a series of excavations and vivisections of W(w)hiteness through clowning, making and thinging. This work/play traverses the fields of critical whiteness studies, performance and clowning, visual and cultural anthropology and decolonial critique.
This eclectic mash-up of history, memory and trauma unfolds from my original question: as an actor, which bodies is it appropriate for me to inhabit? Via hyper-disciplinary experiments of the impulse and
what it means to be ‘on’ the moment, the research fabricates a series of clowters, performed entanglements of clown and character passing between various continents, temporalities and situated histories.
SQUIRM is the title given to both the final performance essay as well as to the reflective documentation emerging from this research. As experimentations with auto-ethnography and productive discomfort, the performing essays in SQUIRM document, animate and satirise explorations of W(w)hiteness, privilege and colonial logic. At the intersections of histories, they dig through remnants of collective memory, personal genealogy and shame, in the hope of reassembling new, sharper ways of giving and receiving attention.
From inside the body of this performer SQUIRM is about TONGUE-ING, about licking the future into softness by reinvigorating ancient clown practices to poke at whiteness in the current age. It’s about squirming and laughing through the discomfort of privilege in what feels like a crumbling time.
But mostly it’s about feeling great in a beard.
Practices for the future / an Artogrphic approach
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Sebastian Ruiz Bartilson
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Task submission for course Dokumentation, reflektion och kritisk granskning / Documentation, Reflection and Critical Review
Application of Artographic methods towards own and/ or others dance practice.
Project "Practices for the future"