ABOUT THIS SITE >>> This site is a blog as well as an archive. It gives visibility to the continues working of radical_hope, its current move to radical_house, the research project Distraction As Discipline (2016 - 2019) and the process of OTÇOE - works for passers-by, a working trajectory (2013 and 2014).
radical_house is a long term project and has a threefold nature: it presents a physical place, a framework and a logic. When in 2013 teaching and mentoring became an extension of Langsdorf's artistic practices now radical_house stems from her pedagogical experience where 'being in dialogue' with others is her main principle.
Distraction As Discipline is
an investigation into enactivist principles in art and education
(research trajectory at KASK School
of Arts Ghent 2016-19). It considers the potential of performance art and
pedagogy in general, in resisting the current and massive
desubjectivation, by critically reclaiming both, attention for the moment and participation in a process.
OTÇOE - works for passers-by was the development of radical_hope's artistic practice in the city and questioned how and by whom this practice (and its bodily, social and economical aspects) is perceived. The title refers to the public of a city and to how we encounter and register most things on our way through the city: Out of The Corner of Our Eyes. OTÇOE.
SEASONAL REFLECTIONS
NEWSLETTERS
TIMELINE
MAIN PRACTICES
CONVERSATIONS
Launching DAD
26/5 2016 @ KASK School of Arts / TramZwart
[research project || KASK School of Arts / Ghent 2016 - 2019
researchers || Heike Langsdorf & Anna Luyten
in dialogue with || Alex Arteaga
project coordination || Kristof Van Gestel]
[Anna and me met at KASK, rather by accident (if one can say so). During some chats we found out that we handle very similar interests and that what we do has similar objectives. We got curious to look into this seemingly similar components of our practice and quickly found out that how we think is quite different. This motivated us to apply for this research together. What both of us foster - although in different ways - are strategies that enable a certain distraction that gets oneselve out of one's habitual ways of looking and thinking: strategies that lead to self-inititated mental excursions. In Anna's case she works with registration-techniques with her students. They develop a certain mental discipline for looking at what comes in their way. The work I make tries to enable people to respond to it in different ways of relating to it. The discipline here is maybe a certain character of the work: it is there, makes engaging with it possible but could be neglected as well. It can be discovered ...]
[Our research has a short title:
Distraction as Discipline >>>
and a quite long sub-title:
An investigation into the function of attention and participation in performance art, art pedagogy, artists texts, writing and thinking practice.]
How to do research is one question, how to communicate with it, is another.
How can we be researching? As the word says, it is a marvellous thing to do: re-searching ... -, freeing us from inventing the new, from adding to what has already accumulated. Finally time to give attention to what already happened on the subject matters' ground.
How to conduct a research within an open frame, to be used together with others, and re-adjustable according to the synergies showing up, the processes running together?
There is the tendency to declare the 'co' as something good. Co-llaboration, co-operation, co-mmon-ing, as long as it has a co-hesive character is a hit.
I am a cohesion-sceptic and wonder what gets lost while believing in it too much? Maybe attention and participation in the first place ...
Why not invest in discernment, differentiating between things rather than the idea that everything needs to mingle, engage itself for the collaboration sake ... and the assumed profitable synergies.
Why not re-discuss aesthetic experience. The actual capacity of art to make us available for experiencing ourselves in witnessing things. When is this enabled and when not?
Being attentiive IS participating.
How does art deal with what we call attention and participation, two mental occurances, behaving in a comprehensive way?
They cannot be enforced upon us but are always self-initiated in some way. They go together and make us circumspective, rather than introspective and perspective.
As i am neither a philosopher nor a theoretician, I refer here to my last attempt to cope with my concerns and to what I would like to try next.
last attempt: SWTB 24/7 <<<
next try: Mount Tackle <<<
... and what it means to have the 'headquarters' of a research in an art school, we will find out step by step. First let's develop the Conversation Room.
MORE >>>