Crafting Material Bodies – exploring co-creative costume processes
(2025)
author(s): Charlotte Østergaard
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition is the submitted PhD thesis for the doctoral degree in artistic research in Perfroming Art at Malmö Theatre Academy, Lund University December 2024. This artistic research was carried out between 2020 and 2024 and financially supported by Malmö Theatre Academy, Lund University, Sweden.
Main supervisor: Sofia Pantouvaki
Second supervisor: Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk
The exposition is in three parts:
FRAMEWORKS – contextualization the artistic research including description of the artistic method in the research.
PROJECTS – containing descriptions and analysis of the three artistic projects "AweAre – a movement quintet", "Community Walk" and "Conversation Costume".
CONCLUSION
Abstract:
At the heart of this research are relational encounters between people and textile materials. As the title, Crafting Material Bodies, indicates, the research explores how human bodies are crafted by material bodies (costume) and vice versa. In the research textile materials and people are my co-creators and as co-creators they are invited to relate to, affect and become affected by other human bodies and more-than-human materials. As the subtitle, exploring co-creative costume processes, indicate the main quest is to explore how we (humans) co-create with textile and costume materials and to explore how textile and costume materials become equal co-creating partners.
In the artistic projects I invite fellow artists like performers and designers to explore specific connecting costumes (that connect two or more people) with me. As co-creators I invite them to engage, respond, inform, influence and/or interrupt our costume explorations in ways that matter to them and to critically reflect on our explorations. In the projects I study how listening become instances of relational acts between humans and more-than humans that evoke curious embodied and conversational dialogues Such dialogues are invitations to listen with the textile and costume materials, with (human) bodies, to share embodied experiences, to co-create and to elaborate on the various creative perspectives. During the artistic projects I act as more than an observing designer/researcher. I am the host that have crafted the connecting costumes in collaboration with the textile materials and as host I also actively take part in exploring what the costumes evoke and provoke. The goal is to explore how being a participating host affects the explorative costume situations.
The research has four focal themes – crafting, listening, hosting and co-creating – which are explored though three artistic projects. The artistic project AweAre, a movement quintet, explores the act of listening, Community Walk explores the act of hosting and Conversation Costume explores the act of co-creating, while all three projects explore different aspects of crafting. As the themes are entangled, all three projects contain aspects of the four themes.
With this research I suggest that it is critical that in co-creative situations we cultivate our listening abilities with human and more-than-human others, and I argue that textile and costume materials is a medium that enable us to do so. With this research my ambition is to formulate ideas on co-creative methods that value material-discursive listening and where the hosting attitude is orientated towards communal doings. The aim is that listenings and communal hostings become tools for designers to gain a deeper understanding of how costume affects performers, and the boarder scope is that the research contributes to discussions on how teams can collaborate with humans and more-than-humans in more generous and inclusive manners. One example is that we acknowledge that our different disciplinary perspectives are creative possibilities in our common doing and that we recognise that how we share and exchange our differences has an impact on how we flourish co-creatively with our human and more-than-human co-creators.
ISBN: 978-91-88409-39-3
Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency - Open House: A Portrait of Collecting
(2023)
author(s): Lauren O'Neal
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
“Open House: A Portrait of Collecting,” a curatorial project held at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in 2015, is part of my doctoral research on “Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency.” The "Open House" exhibition was initially about collecting and caring for objects, a traditional function of museums. Curating with a choreographic mindset encouraged me to address other questions, including how objects and collections foster emotional connections. My initial question for the project, “How to do things with objects?” soon became “How do objects arrange spaces of relation between people and ideas?” Themes include community, memory, identity, taxonomy, preservation, accumulation, value, story, exchange, and display.
[This exposition corresponds to Section Five: Arranging Spaces of Relation(s): What Can Objects Do? in the printed dissertation.]
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.
Colonial hospitality: rethinking curatorial and artistic responsibility
(2016)
author(s): Danny Butt, Local Time
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The recent enthusiasm for gestures of hospitality in contemporary art promises relief from the individualising forces of neoliberal capitalism and the professionalised hierarchies of the art world. Yet, Jacques Derrida describes the gesture of hospitality as paradoxically asserting a kind of sovereignty that underwrites the 'right to host', returning hospitality to the conditionality of the authorising institution. In settler-colonial territories, these institutionally underwritten gestures always sit uneasily atop indigenous sovereignties that have not been ceded, requiring the positive gestures of hospitality to remain open to their structuring fissures. This paper considers figurations of hospitality and responsibility in works by Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Raqs Media Collective in reading the art collective Local Time’s research-driven practice that seeks to reconcile indigenous self-determination and settler gestures of hospitality.