Research Catalogue

Dr Mangion developed a performative methodology drawn from trans-disciplinary and experimental pedagogic art practice. 
This led to the identification of relational, psychoanalytic and ontological dynamics within performative experience. 
This method of participatory and inter-subjective exchange serves to question single authorship and ‘self’ as a unified and preordained category. 

This project aims to expand understandings of a performative paradigm of practice-led research. It does this by drawing from psychoanalytic and ontological perspectives on subjectivity to find out how, and to what extent a performative ontological experience may be possible in and through participatory art. It proceeds by analysing art historical models of post conceptual and dematerialised practice and critical literature linking performativity, relational-psychoanalytic theory and methods of performative ontology. From this, the research works through trans-disciplinary arts practice as a substantive site of enquiry. One of the driving aims of this project is to investigate performative ontology in and through artistic inquiry. Two research questions drive this research. Firstly, what is a performative ontology as art practice? Secondly, how may a participatory art practice reveal the performative ontological experiences of subject-object relations? To investigate these key questions, the research engages participatory and inter- subjective exchange in and through artworks as its principle practice-based methodology. The research process and its outcomes, works with a series of experimental workshop, performative enactments and cross media installations.

The research proposes that performativity is connected to iterative practices, which both authorise and negate subjects and their performances. The project investigates performativity as durational, by which the present gesture, enacted by the subject is always an iteration or repetition of preceding events. It is the assertion of this project that practice-led research, within performative modes of practice, need to enable the multi-variant voice emanating from participatory exchange. This enablement may then open to a more comprehensive articulation of a performative research culture, realised through enactments.