UNKNOWN BEYOND ABYSS
Toward Vocabularies of/for/at the Limit
At this time of exception, in these extra-ordinary times there seems to be no limit to the limit: Once an extreme, excessive and acute experience, the limit has become an all-inclusive, continuous condition that coincides with a lack of language and other forms of expression and connection.
Aiming to collaboratively inhabit and investigate this border experience, the objective of this project is to create contemporary vocabularies and related contextualizations of/for/at the limit. In order to do so, the project’s design for 36 months will develop 3 arts-based research programs exploring 3 select limit-experiences: The Unknown, The Beyond, The Abyss. Each of the interrelated programs includes a score of 5 formats: banquet, symposium, exhibition, podcast and performance collaborations with Saint Genet, Tianzhuo Chen and Marina Abramović.
In turn, the research design uses 3 conceptual practice-devices, each of which is utilized in each program:
- Making Derrida’s subjectile fertile for arts-based research
- Creating a Strange Research practice
- Deframing hegemonial knowledge production
Within the framework of the subjectile, strange research serves as a method to conduct research towards the limit and as methodology from which dissemination practices and epistemic gestures of deframing are employed. Based on a rigorous commitment to the unknown, this research process is put into motion by/as an accordion– an object actualizing its potential – and the related dynamics of contraction and decontraction. Within this circular process, and through the research programs, the team creates vocabularies grounded in experience, arts-based research and theory, as well as in performative, visual, auditory and language-based art.
These research experiences are made tangible through the creation of a new space, Pillar Gaudenzdorf. A disused space that stands in a "nowhere space” between districts in Vienna and, therefore, literally at the limit, it expands the boundaries of academia and cultural institutions into a new geography.
This project is collaboratively led by Julia Hölzl, Derrick Ryan Claude Mitchell and Ruth Anderwald. Hölzl’s research and writing practice has explored the limit and limit-experiences in two dissertations as well as in numerous publications, talks and performance lectures. Mitchell works on the theoretical-artistic vocabulary, dramaturgy and application of creating artworks at the vanishing point of the limit. Within her longtime arts-based research on dizziness, Anderwald has explored the limit and the abyss in artistic and theoretical work. Hölzl’s “language of the limit” and Anderwald’s “compossible space” are used as sign posts for a dialogue with Mitchell’s interdisciplinary artworks and, in turn, culminate in the co-creation of vocabularies of/for/at the limit.