Victoria Hunter


research

research expositions (collaborated)

  • Situated Knowledge, Transmissions of Practice and Parasitic Endeavors (2018) author(s): Helen Palmer, Victoria Hunter, Jessica Foley, Karolina Kucia published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
    This paper presents an exchange between four practitioners from distinct disciplines of site dance, philosophy, experimental writing and pedagogy. It presents responses to provocations that position these practices as containers of Situated Knowledge, it interrogates the transmission and reception of practical knowledge, and employs the notion of ‘parasitic endeavor’ as a lens through which to facilitate discussion of of how disciplinary specific practices and emerging knowledges might traverse from one discipline to another and how this knowledge might be articulated and communicated to wider audiences. Informed by Bennett’s notions of ‘vibrant matter’ (2010), Barad’s conception of agency and intra-action (2003), transversality (Guattari, 1964 and Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012) and J.J. Gibson’s theory of affordances (1986) the paper explores how embodied knowledges become activated and mobilised through human-material-world intra-actions and how interdisciplinary engagements facilitate the articulation of such knowledges. The notion of parasitic endeavor employed here alludes to a temporal process in which theoretical paradigms from one discipline are employed within or applied in another for a required period of time to facilitate the articulation of complex intra-active and diffractive human-nonhuman entanglements. This paper seeks to show how distinct practices transmit knowledges beyond disciplinary boundaries. Each respondent will offer a ‘score’ to provoke and support intra-active practice. The score frames a set of instructions, rules or constraints for fellow authors to explore and reflect on their experiences in relation to their own, customary modes of ‘doing’ practice and research. For publication, each contributor will present a response to one or more of these scores, drawing on their own disciplinary methods and working practices to consider how the specificities of their discipline engage creatively with these alternate actions and actors. In this scenario the notion of ‘parasitic endeavor’ is positioned as prodigious and facilitatory; we move through and beyond disciplinary silos, borrow and compare, creating new theoretical and disciplinary entanglements, through which new/augmented modes of thinking/doing might emerge.
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comments

Exposition: We Reap What We Sow, embodiment and urban allotment gardening. Part 1: autumn- late winter, October- January. (29/01/2020) by Polly Hudson
Victoria Hunter 24/05/2021 at 09:56

This is an edited version of the peer review comment, which the author has used as an aid when finalising their exposition:

 

This is an excellent photo essay / reflection on embodiment and gardening and I believe it fits with the publication’s remit.

 

The exposition skilfully combines subjective reflection with broader theoretical / PaR ideas from the fields of somatic practice and environmental dance. The relationship between the activity of allotment gardening, somatic wellbeing and physicalized response to the world and its materials is well managed and the gradual sense of progression through the year and through the growth cycles of both human and nonhuman is excellent.

 

I think that those engaged with studies into autobiography, and autoethnography in performance / somatic movement ideas will find this of interest. The photographs are beautiful and capture something of the human-nonhuman exchange between body and site.

 

Whilst the article does not employ an overtly academic or theoretically dense mode of expression, the writing and reflection is nevertheless well informedand draws on a broad range of material to inform the reflection on the experiences gathered here. It will have broader appeal to those interested in creative writing, photography and somatic work and writing more broadly.

 

Relationships between the authors embodied movement practice and teaching and how this informs her engagement with the allotment space and vice versa are articulated and demonstrated clearly through the diary format prose.Methods employed are sound and the experimental nature of theoretical / personal and anecdotal writing works well and brings a new approach to combining these elements.

 

The design is beautiful and very engaging – it is simple to navigate and has a sense of rhythm that reflects the organic / cyclical nature of the growing cycles described.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed this article and really engaged with the images, ideas and propositions presented. The organic arrangement of materials, images and ideas reflected the type of human-world relationship proposed and the complexity of these types of relationships was made more poignant through the combination of reflection, reverie, poetic construction and reflection on life more generally.I enjoyed being offered a glimpse into the multi layered existence of another practitioner and to witness the ebb and flow of professional, academic, somatic and personal ‘materials’ woven throughout this text and its beautiful images.

 


Exposition: Building Material Conversations (16/08/2017) by Scott Andrew Elliott
Victoria Hunter 23/01/2019 at 11:05

This is a very interesting and engaging account of a creative intervention into built space informed by ideas and themes of new materialist practice and theory. The submission provides a very pragmatic and informative overview of the the project's key concerns, methods and practices and usefully presents some of the resulting materials (such as creative writing assemblages) that help to illustrate how the researchers investigated both the key research concerns and specific modes of presenting emerging research materials in a format that offers real insight for other researchers / artists and offers useful examples / approaches for others to employ. I thoroughly enjoyed the balance of reflective writing, theoretical exploration, practical description, illustrations and images that helped to convey a sense of the complexity and many layered, multi-faceted nature of the research project.


Exposition: Movement Intervention within British Post-War Architecture (01/01/2014) by Jaimie Henthorn
Victoria Hunter 04/06/2014 at 13:30

This is a very interesting and engaging exposition of a site-based creative process. The artist's engagement with Husserl and Adorno's theories, in particular notions of intersubjectivity and 'pairing' help to articulate the creative approach and inform the reading of the performance work. The artist's knowledge of architectural practice is usefully employed to inform the development of the practice-based research that questions and interrogates body-architecture relationships and explores the emerging findings through movement and dance. The artist's reflection on the work is critically informed and some interesting insights are presented, the visual material and performance footage presented helps to create a clear picture of the work and situates the reader / viewer well within a particular performance / research 'world'. I enjoyed reviewing this work and welcome this type of discursive documentation as a valuable record of site-specific dance / movement practice that clearly explicates  a particular practice-based approach.