VIS #10 – THEME: Circulating Practices

In issue number 10 of VIS, Circulating Practice, we focus on collaborative artistic constellations that explores temporality and dramaturgy in the exchange of practice and methodology.

Collaboration in artistic research often leads to unexpected and process-oriented discoveries. How do we define and situate research collaborations? How do matter, direction and time affectively interact? Who do we identify as the collaborating agents in an artistic research process and how can we discuss authorship/copyright in a co-creative whole?

In the editorial work, it has been of interest to look at how the artistic process is reflected in the expositions. Documenting an artistic process can be sensitive and multifaceted. In the context of time-based art, interesting discussions arise regarding the enduring nature of documentation and how it relates to the temporary and processual materiality of the projects.

This issue of VIS presents six expositions, and a recorded conversation, that in their own way are discussing and challenging the circular, as a practice and method, as a model of collaboration, as a theme and as a symbol.

Fernanda Branco
evocations – towards a poetics of documentation investigates non-conventional documentation of performance and artistic practice. The artistic documentations relate to encountering artworks in displacement in both time and place. The documentation viewer is invited to imagine – rather than to see – what occurred.

Søren Kjaergaard and Torben Snekkestad
TRAVERSING SONIC TERRITORIES intends to challenge our idea of ‘a personal sound’ in acoustic improvised music in particular. The project explores how a collaborative sharing of these 'personal sounds' through modern sampling technologies can help expand improvisational and imaginary horizons. Authorship, origin and sonic identity are diffracted – b(l)ending also the practice into an electro-acoustic field, where digital code contributes to and disrupts the acoustic logics and architecture of the instruments.

Per Roar, Luisa Greenfield, Myna Trustram and Camilla Graff Junior
Tracing Practices – questioning and circulating archives: the explorative research process around the performative potential of the archive, both public and personal, is shaped by the researchers' different artistic mediums and practices in film, performance art, choreography and essay. The exposition is not a documentation, but a juxtaposition of text, movement and media assembled in a circular, collaborative process.

Kent G R Olofsson and Jörgen Dahlqvist
Death to the Welfare State: An Essay on Political Discourse and Artistic Collaboration
unpacks how the relation between discourse and narrative can inform text and music, and how it can allow for a dramaturgical structure that includes all the various performative elements and artistic expressions at hand. The collaboration between the artists is described as being characterized by circulating practices and open-ended dialogue as methods which enabled distributed decision making, as well as artists performing in other ways than they are used to.

Carlota Mir
Cosmologies of Asylum: A Lumbung Collaboration between Trampoline House and Project Art Works is based on Massaging The Asylum System – a year-long collaboration between refugee justice centre Trampoline House (DK) and neurodiverse collective Project Art Works (UK) in the context of documenta fifteen. The project is set out to explore how migrant and neurodivergent communities are affected by social systems of care and control, aiming for the asylum system – to become softer and more humane. It is bringing together the vision and artistic tools from both organisations, becoming a temporary coalition of dissident bodies.

Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya and Lena Séraphin TEXTORIUM: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space is a language-based artistic research project that explores collaborative score-based approaches to live, situated writing and reading practices, for attending to the experiential aspects of situated embodiment with/in public space. Their inquiry foregrounds a corporeal, sensorial and bodily approach to language, where writing and reading are conceived as a collaborative undertaking rather than a solitary endeavour.

Chrysa Parkinson, Frank Bock and Andrew Hardwidge
Studio Conversations is a research project focused on ways of asking contemporary dance artists about the practices, working and knowing happening in their dancing. The project is centred around the development of a thinking, making and talking methodology called "Studio Conversations" with the aim to encourage ways to attend in a conversation to the specificity of material and experiential artistic processes of dance knowledges while situated in the tensions of different roles, identities, soma, psyche, place and memory.  

Cecilia Roos and Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen, Editors of VIS #10

VIS Editorial Committee: Anna Lindal, Behzad Khosravi Noori, Cecilia Roos, Eliot Moleba, Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen, Magnus Bärtås, Serge von Arx.