Welcome! (an editorial)1
Artists have always connected with the world around them, both on local and global levels. A relationship to society manifests itself in many forms of artistic practices in public spaces and spheres: "on stage, in studios and theaters, in classrooms, in museums and galleries, on the streets and in communities." (Arts in Society Research Network) 'Socially engaged art', 'community art', 'artistic activism' or 'artist educator' are terms that have become well known. ELIA (European League of Institutions of the Arts) and the AEC working group 'Strengthening Music in Society' are examples of international networks that centralise these relations(hips) to society in and from the context of higher arts education. However, there is also an urgent need for the voices of artistic researchers to be heard with regard to issues in society. How can artistic research(ers) contribute to the social and societal challenges of our time?
This was the initial question with which our Professorship and research chair Artistic Connective Practices, located at Fontys Academy of the Arts Tilburg, The Netherlands, invited a group of international artist-researchers and practitioners to the Connective Symposium. The idea was to bring together artistic researchers with an interest in contributing to society through their research practice: Not only to question, but rather to actively engage in the present, through a dedicated relation to the world. In the context of this three-day symposium, we sought to address the notion of 'artistic connectivity' as an approach to artistic research in relation to society, and to collectively and collaboratively explore the socio-economic and ecological issues of our time. Our aim was to map the field; explore, collect and discuss approaches with which artistic researchers relate to connectivity. On a broader level we aimed to position and contextualize the importance of artistic research and to place its relation to society on the agenda in our discourse and to build a professional research network for further explorations and collaborations.
The areas of research in themselves could be diverse and multi-facetted, as long as they were bound by the central concept of connectivity; topics for proposals could include, but were not restricted to:
- artistic connectivity as a concept to think and work with in the context of artistic research in society
- sustainability in artistic research: What remains in societal contexts after the artists or artistic researchers are gone and the research is finished?
- impact of (art and) artistic research: What kind of 'impact' can we speak of, and what kind of impact 'should' artistic research have: on the arts and artistic practice, on the sciences and on society? How can impact be conceptualised and assessed in ways that do justice to the disciplines in which the work is done?
- artistic research in contexts of socially-engaged art
- artistic research in contexts of public space
- artistic research in relation to: social-societal local agendas; multiple, recent and persistent crises; or the ideology of commoning, as a set of alternative approaches to economy, cooperation and distribution
- artistic work and research as making socially engaged imaginary propositions
We designed the three-day event as a combination of laboratories, performances, forums, shared practices and interactive or participatory workshops, in order to facilitate a collective and constant exchange, an ongoing conversation/dialogue and a co-creatively doing-thinking-together over the course of three days. The co-creative aspect included the preparation: from the very beginning, it was important for us as organisors that this work would not happen in the common mode of "proposal accepted, see you at the event, good luck with the preparation." Rather we assisted the participants with their contributions, discussed the content and form of their session in one or two online conversations, and exchanged thoughts about possible locations in and around our institution. We started with an entirely open character: The form and length of each of the sessions was the subject of discussion with the contributors, not restricted to a fixed amount of time but rather discussed and negotiated. We made a clear choice for tailor-made sessions, with the aim of giving everyone the time they needed in order to facilitate the session in the form it needed.2
As the images spread on this page show, we made use of one central space (which the participants configured in a variety of ways) in which most of the sessions took place, and at the same time used spaces across the entire building of the Academy of the Arts, including spaces outside, in the inner courtyard and in a nearby park. Two researchers from the professorship Artistic Connective Practices documented the symposium, in text and images: Xenia Tsompanidou and Juriaan Achthoven. They processed their documentation into a joint exposition in this publication.
The idea of community and thinking-together was crucial in the design of the symposium. From the outset it was clear that there would be no parallel sessions and no keynote speeches: everyone would go through all sessions together, being together in the same spaces and experiencing the same sessions, contantly deepening the dialogue over the period of three days. This included having dinner together at a local, intercultural place in west Tilburg, "Broodje Aap & Linke Soep". At this place, "newcomers" to the city and country share time to learn the Dutch language, cook and eat food together (often from the countries and cultures where the cooks originate).
The concept of artistic connectivity3
In order to provide a basic sense of the conceptual framework, as a shared lens on the contributions of the symposium and this publication, I introduce the notion of artistic connectivity in greater detail. In our thinking, Artistic Connective Practices are:
Just as the development of the research theme of Artistic Connective Practices was community-driven and -developed (Hathaway 2020, 3), the conceptual core shares this collective and collaborative spirit. Naturally, the notion of "doing it together" is crucial and central to the work of the group that developed the concept through a collective and collaborative work and research process: the Connective Intra-Activiteam, consisting of Danae Theodoridou, Jan Staes, Heleen de Hoon, Juriaan Achthoven and myself.
The work of geographer and educator Martin John Haigh has been important for launching our work on connective practices. Haigh discusses connective practices as "affective educational strategies that invite learners to build an emotional and conative connection beyond their individual selves and their immediate social circle. They aim to build participatory consciousness rather than on-looker consciousness […]." (Haigh 2017, 6). Haigh closely links the concept of connective practices to education, environmental change and sustainability, and furthermore aims to make the learner aware and ready to engage with the aforementioned subjects. Haigh pleads for more individual commitment and a better "concerted will to do what is necessary to change human social behaviour and so change the situation." (Haigh 2017, 7) He argues for a notion of selflessness and acting for the welfare for all as a central component of connective practices.
Haigh mentions three sources for the concept of connective practices in relation to sustainability education: deep ecology pedagogy, social sculpture and invitational education. While I cannot go into further detail here with all three, the origin of Joseph Beuys's social sculpture is essential and proximate to our context in the arts: social sculpture "reflects [Beuys'] belief that art has the power to transform society. This would be achieved by engaging society through participation, so transforming society by releasing the creativity of the people" (Haigh 2017, 11). Nowadays, Shelley Sax, a former student of Beuys, continues to use and develop Beuys' ideas on connective practice.4
This was one of the fundamental questions we asked ourselves when we started discussing, exploring and conceptualising the idea of Artistic Connective Practices. We shaped this conceptualisation in the form of three "conceptual clouds": the artistic, connectivity and practices. These clouds, an idea partly borrowed from the concept of word clouds, consist of a network of interrelated elements that, as a collective, network or panorama, offer a way of framing, understanding, mapping and imagining the term in question – without defining it in clear-cut terms: as tapestries to think and work with. Essentially, what we are aiming to do with the conceptual clouds is to keep the concept of Artistic Connective Practices open, fluid and flexible, while at the same time being precise enough to actually work with.
Methodologically speaking, we have chosen a two-fold approach: In the first phase of our thinking-together we discussed the terminology of the three "clouds", as well as practices and works from the perspective of Artistic Connective Practices. In the second phase, we continued these discussions and framings-in-progress through "Connective Conversations": we invited guest artists and discussed their work through the notion of artistic connectivity.5 A similar approach guided the Connective Symposium, where practitioners and researchers from the international field shared their work and exchanged through the common thread of artistic connectivity. In this exposition, I focus on the clouds of the artistic and of connectivity.
A set of interconnected ideas, a concept to think and work with, rather than a thing, genre or field in itself; in order to enable and support artist-researcher-educators in being engaged and ethical in their work and the world.
Obviously, it is not and cannot be our intention to define the artistic. Our intention in the conceptual cloud of the artistic is rather to frame a panorama of elements we find compelling and necessary to think with, in order to think the artistic together with the connective. Because, even if it is not definitive and defining, it is necessary to be specific about what artistic practices - and artistic research practices - have to offer with respect to connectivity, and to the contexts in which our work takes place. In this sense, the idea as I see it is far more humble and relates to framing the area in which we work, to understand what our work and research is about - in short, about what "artistic" means in the context of the work we are pursuing. The conceptual cloud is not about a fixed and solid idea of what the artistic is, but what we regard as important elements when we talk about and think through it.
The other conceptual cloud to be discussed is the one that gives the professorship the most distinct part of its name: Connectivity. It would be too easy to think of connectivity as simply being about connecting or making links. It is more complex, first of all, but it is also very much about what such connections actually entail, what it means to connect, and what kinds of qualities, complexities or urgencies this might create - why it matters. It is therefore important to resist the temptation to work with a too general or generic notion of connecting such as "we connect" - as if everyone knows what this means. As Haigh already made clear, connective practices are not just meant as "practices to/that connect," but rather seen as practices with clear values, and an agenda of learning, positive change and sustainability.
In the following sections, I sketch a few general observations, notions, remarks and considerations regarding connectivity.For a more thorough elaboration of the cloud's elements see, In Good Company. Think We Must. A first look at the term "connective" reveals its origin in linguistics, as a logical term that connects different grammatical instances or linguistic units (or, if-then, and, not). The connective thus implies two agents that come together - they connect. The focus in this understanding is on individuality, on two distinct entities and their interaction - it's me, it's you, and we connect. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines connectivity as "the quality, state, or capability of being connective or connected."7 Regardless of the obvious question of what being connective or connected could mean, and what therefore the quality or kind of (the) connection actually is or can be, it is notable that the connective refers back to itself, and shifts attention from the agents or units that are connected to the "third term/entity" that connects these agents; the relation and connection emerges from within, intra-actively.
As a point of departure, we regard the arts and the artistic as works and processes characterised "by the use of imagination suggesting a certain type of aesthetics: work that relates to the creation of visual, embodied, sensorial, imaginative forms of approaching the world and each other" (Danae Theodoridou). Artists are trained in the creation of such forms and in shaping, organising or facilitating the processes that lead to artistic work, whether they are individual or collective. This particularly concerns the creation of alternatives, rather than confirming what is already there: within daily life, one often acts, thinks and feels in a more rational and logocentric manner. In an artistic context or situation one can experience "something else", that is not reasonable, moral or logical. Other things may appear, may become present, may become possible, in the indeterminable space of aesthetic experience (Juriaan Achthoven).
For Danae Theodoridou, this signals an important shift from the notion of "collaboration" to "commoning":
I see ‘collaboration’ as a term that implies different agents putting together their distinct skills in order to create something. ‘Commoning’ (closely related to ‘commons’) means to intervene, question, interfere, and engage with others, mobilising a way of working between many. ‘Commoning’ in this sense puts the idea of plurality at work for the creation of a third space of unbelonging and disowning that does not belong to anyone and goes far beyond the summation of individual skills, striving for pluralised and differential processes of communicating, working, imagining, and experimenting that makes the production of common practices, imaginings, and actions possible (Danae Theodoridou).
Juriaan Achthoven sees the concept of connectivity in strong relation to social norms and as a fundamentally un-capitalistic notion:
Connectivity pertains to issues, concerns and questions with regards to social norms. In other words: Connectivity focuses on the way we interact and exchange among each other from an ethical perspective. What kinds of structures are traceable in day-to-day encounters? What kinds of values are dominant in our way of being together? Hans Achterhuis points to a degradation of human relations because of neoliberal policy: 'human relations have degraded because the entire world is being reduced to a market … [there is an] increase of social inequality, exclusion of citizens who cannot keep up with the market’s competition, a decrease of political power of communities and paradoxically an increase of [sic] surveillance and control' (Achterhuis 2010, 296, translation Juriaan Achthoven).
The notion of connectivity can also be read from the perspective of arts education and ideas on collective learning: "learning can be understood as an exchange between the individual and the environment, as a shared activity in which learners develop their thinking together, in a community - and society" (Jan Staes). This thought from Jan Staes resonates with Stefano Harney's notion of "study", as a practice of "getting together with others and determining what needs to be learned together, and spending time with that material, spending time with each other, without any objective, without any end-point, without any sense that we will never escape a feeling that we are permanently immature, premature, without credit […]" (Harney 2011b, n.p.).
These aspects of the imaginative, the speculative and open alternatives play an important role for us. Within the realm that these terms open, performance curator Lara Staal's notion of "making propositions" or "making proposals" is essential: the arts and artistic practices are not only able to "ask questions about" or to "expose" what concerns us. The arts can also make proposals, create alternatives, opportunities, and worlds that are "not-yet but should-be" (Haraway 2018, n.p.). Art is not there to solve problems, but to suggest alternatives, to construct speculative alternatives. As philosopher Isabelle Stengers puts it: "we who are selected, trained and paid to think, imagine, envisage and propose" (Stengers 2018, 106).
Evidently, we understand the artistic as an open concept, which can involve education as artistic as well. The creation of imaginaries and alternatives as part of artistic practice can be crucial to practices of arts education as well, just as the habit of looking critically at the world and taking a position through an artistic utterance or experience.
To summarise this tapestry of thoughts, connectivity in our understanding is a concept that embraces ethical values, approaches to sharing, shared experiences and commoning/commonness. Connectivity can therefore challenge dominant and rather "neoliberal" ways of being together, such as exchange (of whatever kind) for economic reasons rather than that driven by interest and curiosity, or in simple terms: the understanding of connectivity as "networking." When we also take the artistic into account, artistic connectivity can offer an approach by the arts that questions, bends, provokes and opensup such dominant modes, and offers an alternative value system - and an alternative practice of/with such values.
Finally, our understanding of the artistic includes a close relation to technical knowledge and craft/craftmanship, and therefore also to the Greek "techne." We are reluctant to see the artistic as a quality that can be present in any type of activity, where anything can be seen as artistic and therefore art would lose its particular characteristics, the complexity of its processes or the specific skills that artists are trained in. Lara Staal's comment that we as artists "are trained in the imaginary" (Staal 2021 during Connective Conversation) is telling here, as it concerns the training Philosopher Henk Oosterling relates to when he describes artists as professionals who "have learned to listen to their medium [such as sound, paint, images, data, light, bodies or language]; they are sensitive to what their medium asks of them. They relate critically and sensibly [or sense-able] to their medium" (Oosterling 2013, n.p., my translation).6 And through this specific sensitivity, artists are able to work and create with their media, rooted in training, repetition and practice.
As in the work of the Connective Intra-Activiteam, the Connective Conversations and the symposium, this publication is a continuation of our thinking together, collaboratively. Although the various contributions have been written individually by the participants in the symposium, I have experienced the process since our joint time in Tilburg as one of togetherness, always filled with collaborative intention and spirit.
This publication is an attempt to share the experiences from the symposium with the broader artistic research community, and to contribute to the body of artistic research work that is socially engaged. The time between the symposium and publication has been quite long — a little less than 1,5 years. Time hasn't stood still, and the expositions reflect this. They are not fixed versions of the sessions, but aim to reflect on the sessions and think beyond them. We strived to emphasise the diversity of the participants, their backgrounds, the kinds of sessions they offered during the symposium and their approaches to creating artistic research expositions. The contributions have different lengths, complexities and layouts. It is a conscious choice to opt for pluriformity, acknowledging the different backgrounds, disciplines, approaches, and cultures from where the contributors come. However, almost all of the expositions, within their diversity, share several elements, albeit in different balances:
- reports of and reflections on the participants' projects
- descriptions of the workshops, interactive sessions and their setup during the symposium
- contextualisations of their work in the broader artistic and societal context
- reflections on the relation between their work and artistic connectivity
As the approach to the symposium itself was explorative and collaboratively-collectively searching, so were most of the sessions. We have tried to preserve this explorative nature in this publication, and not transform the open and explorative contributions into finished, polished and conclusive expositions. In this sense, this publication is potentially many things: in part, it is a documentation of the symposium, in part reflections on and proceedings of it. It is also an explorative contribution to our emerging and unfolding discourse on artistic connectivity, — unfinished, fluid and moving, as the conceptual clouds are — and thus a springboard for our future work.
In order to get an overview of the various contributions and sessions during the symposium in Tilburg, it is best to start with Xenia Tsompanidou's and Juriaan Achthoven's exposition. They collect documentation and their own reflections on the three days in Tilburg, and offer an excellent impression of what actually happened during the symposium — including the participant contributions that were not been developed into expositions for this publication.
Lizzie Lloyd & Katy Beinart explore the notion of "transfer". They wonder: "How, through the lens of transfer, can we better understand the ongoing impact of a work of socially engaged art on its creators, participants, and audiences?" Based on their collaborative project Acts of Transfer, which involves revisiting and reactivating socially engaged works from the recent past, Lizzie and Katy reflect on their session at the symposium — part presentation, part workshop. While going through the exposition, you might feel a sense of doubt: what part of this belongs to the project Acts of Transfer, and what part is about the contribution at the symposium? This "in-between"-quality is intended, and personally, I love to be shuffled back and forth while wandering through the exposition.
Işıl Eğrikavuk presents her research project The Other Garden, a collaborative initiative with students at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Through the project, Isil offers a critical view on (German) academia and how this institution in particular struggles to act with care and an attitude of inclusivity. In the garden (a real garden!) the group grows "immigrant-plants", "non-native" to Germany. The initiative includes a variety of activities and events, such as cooking and eating together, as well as research-oriented activities such as lectures on topics of ecology and inclusivity.
Also related to notions of being inclusive/exclusive, Eleni Killiopoulou offers an introduction to, and reflection on her participatory experiment KYTTAPO. Eleni uses the biological entity of the cell as a metaphor for exploring leading, following, and absence of hierarchy, all guided by the seemingly counterintuitive notion of the leader being the most vulnerable person in a group. A blindfolded participant was positioned inside a hula-hoop, which was then collectively controlled by a group of participants, "to move the most vulnerable person" in their middle. Participants are directly engaged in the action as co-creators, while Eleni perceives her role as that of an initiator. The exposition finishes with a brief reflection on the final fruitful and challenging discussions in Tilburg, on aspects of leadership, ethics, the risk of violence, and care.
Walmeri Ribeiro shares the workshop score of "Porous Body", a part of her larger Sensitive Territories project in Brazil, which is concerned with the impacts of climate change and contemporary ways of living. "Porous Body" is an exercise we carried out in practice during the symposium: on wandering and presence, or rather co-presence: of our bodies, the trees and other plants and non-living objects in a park near the Academy of the Arts in Tilburg.
Jessica Renfro offers one of the most extensive expositions in this publication. She presents her digital interactive game project We Called it Earth, in which a group of players has to collectively and collaboratively control an avatar in an online world. The project seeks to address collective authorship in a world of crisis and climate change. Besides the reflection on her own work, Jessica also reflects on Liana Psarologaki's and Amanda Hodgkinson's "The House of Seasonal Cleaning" and Reyhaneh Mirjahani's "Experiment on Agency #7". Finally, Jessica proposes that the agenda of artistic connective practices "might include a new form of aesthetic literacy revolving around procedure", and, on the basis of this, that the notion of artistic connectivity extends beyond the mere "fact of connection" towards the "act of connection".
In her exposition "Dialogues: a hybrid art project", Elisavet Kalpaxi reflects on her collaborative project with the same title, Dialogues, from the perspective of connectivity. The project focuses on artists’ connectivity through art, byinstigating a dialogue between eight independent artists. The artists exchanged artworks in pairs and installed and experience them in their personal spaces for a period of 10 days. During that period, live-streaming sessions allowed audiences to observe the work in space. Elisavet elaborates on the ritual of setting up these livestreams under surprising conditions of generosity, responsibility, and empathy — all coming from the desire to connect.
Marike Hoekstra presents her research project Making Place for Children's Studios, in which she explores the practice of creating artist studio spaces for children in "Gastatelier de Vindplaats", a studio situated in an elementary school in Amsterdam. Regarding the notion of "studio", Marike follows South African visual artist William Kentridge who sees the studio as an essential concept and place for practice in artistic practice (see the conceptual cloud of the artistic above). Against neoliberal notions of children who "need to be educated" or (maybe worse) need to be entertained, Marike is interested in spaces of participation, shared agency and equality.
During the symposium, Reyhaneh Mirjahani carried out her "Experiment on Agency #7" with us: an intriguing exercise in which we as participants (first individually, then in small groups) were confronted with a series of dilemmas in highly complex political or societal situations. These were presented as challenging questions on making choices, in which all choices seem to result in "losing"; on themes of censorship, freedom of speech or diversity. Reyhaneh asks: "How can a participatory installation create a space in which to question and explore the politics around the (im)possibility of agency?"
Finally, Chrystalleni Loizidou addresses a "systemic crisis to childhood", based on her life and work on Cyprus. Her work is concerned with education through art, environmental education, ritual, and harvest. Chrystalleni argues for a more thorough and deep connection with our children while working, for taking children with us and making them a full part of the world: to build our life around children, not the other way around.
I wish you much joy and inspiration while exploring the contributions.
Falk Hübner
