Hello. Dear Juniper, I am going to bring your regards to the junipers, other shrubs and artists in Porto. Besides others of your kind, Juniperus communis, there might be cade, Juniperus oxycedrus, or some of the rare junipers in Portugal, Juniperus turbinata and Juniperus navicularis, which are red listed, actually.
If trying to share your work, we would encounter similar dilemmas that we deal with when publishing artistic research in JAR. I am thinking of your way of exploring or investigating, which could resonate with many forms of artistic research.
You engage in embodied research, exploring or investigating by doing, which is difficult to document, digitalize, distribute, and publish.
Your work is situated, context-specific, bound to your circumstances here and thus difficult to translate, share and validate outside your cultural environment.
Your investigations are emergent, evolving, in process, that is, alive and thus difficult to stop, freeze, and mummify for archiving and publishing.
Your exploration is based on your modular structure and on exchange and collaboration with all kinds of agents, like the mycorrhizae at your roots and thus often difficult to delimit or demarcate to one author or one field.
These characteristics of your work, dear juniper, resonate with artistic research, which paraphrasing a colleague, Bruce Barton, is often embodied, situated, emergent and interdisciplinary.
In a text called “Artistic Research and/as Interdisciplinarity – Investigação em Arte e/como Interdisciplinaridade” (excuse me my pronunciation) published in artistic research does #1 by Research Group in Arts Education/ Research Institute in Art, Design, Society; Faculty of Fine Arts University of Porto in 2016, I was interested in artistic research as enabling and demanding interdisciplinarity.
Today I would suggest it is rather ‘undisciplinarity’, a term borrowed from curator Taru Elfving, that characterises artistic research. Undisciplinarity is the special methodological gift of ‘not belonging’ and ‘not behaving’ that artistic research can offer to other forms of research. Undisciplinarity creates some challenges, however, to allow and account for in publications such as JAR.
Undisciplinarity, that strange form of singularity in entwinement, often alongside persistence through precarity, is something artistic researchers share with you, dear junipers. Although in being undisciplinary you clearly are the pioneers… Thank you, and see you again.