Education is a key site through which we share in and contribute to the field of performance. Long-term collaboration with artists and researchers is central to our work. These endeavours take shape in artistic practice Artist Commissions and research into performance genealogies Research Commissions. While these new productions follow their own unique paths, they remain in dialogue with the field of inquiry underlying each respective biannual programme.
Every two-year cycle coalesces around a field of inquiry invested in performance and performativity. Fellows lead a Reading Group to theoretically and artistically explore this material that is grounded in the social and political rituals of daily life. The gleanings are shared in Open Reading Groups guided by guests, and unpacked in conversations with local practitioners on Radio Emma and in Exhibitions presented in our Library.
Finally, Readers document this dynamic and collaborative research. The study group opened a series of reflections on practice and its roots in everyday life. In this sense, the title is open to different questions about the relationship between artistic practice and context.
But what is creation? How do we actually initiate a process of creation? How do we form, and how are we formed by, daily life? And how can we β as proposed by Italian feminist Wanda Tommasi β understand working as a process of symbolic creation that leads to repair? These questions are used to encourage the study group to think about their daily artistic practices, and to find methodologies through which individual and collective work can be performed and sustained. Read full syllabus.
She is the β Taft Professor of the Public Humanities and will be working on collaborative and multi-modal methodologies related to art, ecology, and public histories. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on feminist and queer of colour movement work, possibilities of dissent, and the ways in which race and the environment work as terrains of power. The affectual, relational and embodied nature of performance work is not always easily captured in audio-visual formats.
