Territorial Art, Design & Architecture
(2022)
author(s): Sergio Montero Bravo
connected to: Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This collaborative and cross-sectoral project addresses places, environments and spaces beyond mere functional urban endeavors. The project explores possibilities that become visible when public space is viewed from perspectives beyond the urban norm. The aim is to restore lost rural relations and to search for ways to leave the anthropocentric narrative. In the past, densification of cities has been considered synonymous with sustainable development, creativity and innovation. However, a one-sided urban focus leads to disarmament of rural habitats, and dissociation from human interdependence with non-human nature. Today, adaptation to global warming is dependent on the survival of the rural. Therefore, this artistic research project is primarily informed by activities in rural environments together with species and ecologies other than human and urban. The goal is to investigate how art, design and architectural interventions can foster oppositional narratives to anthropocentricity. What I present in this exposition are my most recent collaborations and a journey of professional metamorphosis to reach this goal. The result is a series of ongoing projects and processes that demonstrate how I explore places of communality, togetherness and mutual beneficial interdependency between species.
The Eco-Mesh Approach: A Sustainable Methodology for Socio-Culturally Interrogative Artistic Research
(2020)
author(s): Charulatha Mani
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
One of the most striking features of Artistic Research is that apparently disjointed issues including pressing calls to action from social, ethical, political and cultural perspectives can organically unfold, evolve, and shape interdisciplinary academic discourses through the centralised lens of artmaking. It thereby creates a holistic picture of research in a manner that only an artist’s singular perspective can yield. A methodology approach that looks from the enmeshed and messy microcosms of ecologies at interplay to the broader macrocosms of the world, through the lenses of socio-cultural interrogation and ethical accountability, I argue, presents an sustainable model for a decolonised artistic research ethos to emerge. According in this publication, I offer "an ecomesh approach" to achieving a framework for "socio-culturally interrogative artistic research" with music and culture as my two key modes of inquiry. As a female native culture bearer of South Indian Classical music now also active within the sphere of Western academia, I feel that I have an ethical responsibility towards the ways in which culturally contingent aspects of my music and culture are represented in and communicated to the world (both in education and artmaking). I leverage my insider/outsider position to problematise aspects of power, belonging, and ownership in global ecologies of dissemination and reception of material and material labour.