Post doc circle meetings 2020-2021

4.10.2021 2 Like 0 kommenttia Stefano De Luca

Post doc circle is a series of meetings for postdoc and visiting researchers at Uniarts Helsinki. Four to five sessions each academic year are organized by the Performing Arts Research Centre (Tutke). They each focus on different topics related to artistic research.

Between December 2020 and April 2021, Tutke hosted four post doc circle meetings, and the series will continue in the academic year 2021-2022, with its own blog entries in the Artistic Research Uniarts blog.

Below you can find the descriptions of each meeting written by the Doctoral Researcher Juli Reinartz, based on the summaries of the meetings by Dr. Pessi Parviainen, Dr. Joa Hug and Dr. Vincent Roumagnac.

• 1st meeting – How do we make research and how do we defend our research in grant applications?
• 2nd meeting – The Digitalization of Artistic Research
• 3rd meeting – Dissemination: The impact of our research
• 4th meeting – Black Performance

1st Post doc circle meeting: How do we make research and how do we defend our research in grant applications? – December 2^nd 2020

The central topic of the first post doc circle meeting is the question how to research outside of an institutional frame, how to stay in contact with the research community if not researching within academic contexts and how to disseminate research outcomes. 

After an introduction by the meeting facilitators Dr. Davide Giovanzana (Professor in Artistic Research at Tutke) and Dr. Leena Rouhiainen, (Professor in Artistic Research at Tutke), lining out central questions of promoting, disseminating and evaluation artistic research, invited presenters Dr. Kirsi Rinne (Uniarts Helsinki, research services) and Dr. Vida Midgelow (Middlesex University London) each have a 40 minutes presentation. They elaborate on topics such as how to lobby for AR and how to integrate practice relevant criteria into the evaluation of AR, what are problems in the promotion of artistic research in academic contexts and if there is something to be learned from artistic research contexts in other countries.  

Dr. Kirsi Rinne focused on the fact that artistic research is a relatively new discipline in the academic field and therefor has problems to make transparent its own criteria in, for and towards research to other, more traditionally oriented disciplines. Especially the concept of methodology seems to represent a weak point in AR in the eyes of more methodologically restricted research disciplined. Rinne here lines out that supporters and promoters of AR could and should learn from the beginnings of qualitative research methods and applied sciences in respect of the promotion of new methodologies. 

Professor Vida Midgelow tells about the situation of AR in the UK and its special structures for evaluating it. The trend in research projects supported by The Arts and Humanities Research Council goes towards inter-disciplinarily projects that do not answer to only one set of criteria and methods. Therefore, it seems an appropriate approach by The Research Excellence Framework (REF) to define criteria for practice to be central part of research. Assessed is therefore the documentation of a project rather than the methods of research itself. This assessment then provides ground for the assessment of universities and their research activities. 

In the following discussions, participants debate on the question what could be appropriate strategies to promote artistic research methodologies and interests better within the academic field. Do notions of lobbying actually put artistic research into an inferior position and could terms like “hacking” or “liaison” help to create a more equal relationship between the different research disciplines and methods? 

2nd Post doc circle meeting: The Digitalization of Artistic Research – January 28^th 2021 

An introduction by Dr. Davide Giovanzana (Professor in Artistic Research at Tutke) proposes two questions as central topics for the meeting: What is the language through which we share artistic research in a post-Gutenberg era? What happens to the notion of ‘liveness’ when the main media of sharing research are digital platforms? 

First presenter Dr. Annette Arlander (Researcher, Uniarts Helsinki) elaborated centrally on the notion liveness and proposed a tendency from timely to spatial co-presence and an increased internationalization of research presentations through online platforms. She concludes with the prognosis of a growing diversification of artistic research projects in respect of respect of location, disciplines and research purposes.  

Second presenter Dr. Imanuel Schipper (University Lecturer, Uniarts Helsinki) speculates that the digitalization of research not only influences the way it is presented but the whole idea of research itself. This concerns notions of expertise and archiving. Schipper proposes the idea of a digital archive for research in which materials can be conceptualised not as fixed, essential and substantial, but relational, decentralised, multi-perspective and dynamic. Schipper advocates that, through a digital approach to archiving, research is not limited to one author (or the idea of authorship as such). Instead, it becomes participative and can take care of more diverse elements of the research than, for example, one single artwork can.  

Following Arlander and Schipper, third presenter Dr. Michael Schwab (Editor-in Chief, JAR, Journal of Artistic Research), takes Bruno Latour’s model of scientific research in the book chapter “Circulating Reference” as an initiation point to talk about epistemological changes that artistic researches introduces into the scientific field. Rather than operating in clean scientific settings, it researches in noisy environments and promotes the locality of knowledge. These “unsecured knowledges”, in Schwab’s view, put in question traditional scientific epistemologies. He underlines that these knowledges need to be made claims for beyond the scope of AR. The following discussion concentrates on notions of knowledge and artistic practices that can forward these epistemological claims.

3rd Post doc circle meeting: Dissemination: The impact of our research – March 12^th 2021

After an introduction by Dr. Davide Giovanzana (Professor in Artistic Research at Tutke) elaborating on the problem of artistic researches having difficulties to reach broader audiences, Dr Jussi Lehtonen’s (Uniarts Helsinki / Finnish National Theatre) presentation follows the question “How does art change, when it is brought to different environments?”. It focuses personal experiences of bringing artistic activities into not art-related contexts and discusses the integration of artistic practice and academic research through action-based research. Discussions with participants investigated the relationship between the collaboration partners in the research projects and the complex issues of consent, inclusion, empowerment and vulnerability on the part of the people involved. How is power negotiated, what is the impact of research on art institutions, how to negotiate tension between subjective, individual and institutional understandings of artistic value were points of debate.  

The second presentation by Ari Tenhula (Managing Director at Zodiak Centre for New Dance, Helsinki) came in the form of a letter and presented the perspective of him being involved with artistic production in theatres rather than academic research. Agreeing to Davide’s initial thesis that artistic research has problems to address larger audiences, Ari elaborates on possible reasons for this such as shorter production cycles, a different pressure to stay in relation to audience and presenter for practicing artists but also different criteria for production and evaluation. Those make the two fields of arts production and research incompatible for him. He concludes with the question if research needs, at all, bigger audiences and further lobbying or if artistic production is in need of more support these days. 

Dr. Adrian Heathfield (Professor of Performance and Visual Culture, University of Roehampton), in the final presentation, took the position that evaluation perspectives, especially with respect to research temporalities, have to change if we want to discuss impact and reach of artistic research. He discusses this in relation to the artistic practice of Tehching Hsieh and the exhibition Doing Time at the Venice Biennial 2017. With this exhibition, audiences and organizations affected were multiple. For UK audiences, it put in question criteria for immediacy, visibility and quantifiability of impact. In the discussion, participants debated mediums of impact, the processuality of research outcomes, translation of research outcomes into academically valuable forms and the potentials for new valuable form through the digitalisation of research in a pandemic situation.  

4th Post doc circle meeting: Black Performance – April 16^th 2021 

In the fourth session, two presenters and participants discussed the notion of back performance in relation to representation, embodiment, appropriation, affect and sensibility and future. The discussion was moderated by Dr. Davide Giovanzana (Professor in Artistic Research, Tutke) and Dr. Hanna Järvinen (University Lecturer, Tutke).  

Hanna Järvinen introduced the topic with reference to her article “Ballets Russes and Blackface” (Dance Research Journal 2020) in which she problematizes the canon of classic ballet pieces as openly or complicate with racism and colonialism. Hanna then problematizes the use of the notion of black performance in the announcement for its mesh-up of black with generally minoritarian positions.  

First presenter Dr. Kirsi Monni (Professor in Choreography at the Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki) referenced her own career as a way to sketch the problematics of academic theoretical canons and aesthetics. Understanding what has been and is still missing in the discourse one is working with and engaging with discussions around black performance and art works of African and Asian origin, is a central element for her to be able to reflect on aesthetics and social and religious aspects of working. She then stresses the fact that there are artists that don’t want to be looked at as representatives of non-western origin but rather of futuristic thinking. Following discussions debate the challenges and potentials for embodied relations in the light of Black Performance and appropriation of practice and theory in academic contexts. Kirsi ends with a list of reference literature and lectures which can also be found in the longer report. 

Dr. Thomas F. DeFrantz (Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University) as the second presenter conceptualizes Black Performance Theory as a gathering notion of what could be, facing the question how black love, life and thought generate new possibilities. As, in his understanding, the category of black is a practical remain of white supremacy and systems of white racism, it is an encompassing term for what is not normative or non-binary. Black performance is thus always concerned with an “what if”. In black performance, the sacred and the social are intertwined and makes everybody involved with the crafting of time and in another way of being. With Christina Sharpe, Thomas calls for understanding thinking as care, as entanglement with black culture and resistance to mechanisms of othering. The formation of the weather finally supports Thomas’ understanding of black presence as aligning oneself with the possibilities of the planet, deserving care. In the following debate, presenter and listeners discuss ideas of a post-race future, pre-acceleration as a way to conceive of “a mesh of culture circumstance contingencies”, technique, ideology and virtuosity working for or against us, appropriation, and black sensibility as vibrational capacity to be alongside and with black performance and black culture. Together they dance to a gospel song to try out what black sensibility could practically mean.