Water’s Endlessness: the interview as research method in an expanded field of interlocutors
Praktijken van Onderzoek | Anik Fournier
01 feb. 2025
De datum is nog niet bekend
taal: English
This workshop is for anyone within ArtEZ who is interested in the research method of the interview, and what it means to ‘listen’ to non-human entities, whether this be a living entity or a material substance like water. This workshop is part of the ArtEZ Doing (Artistic) Research Days 24/25 programme.
what it means to ‘listen’ to non-human entities
As a way of sharing this research method of the interview in an expanded field, and bringing it further in conversation with others, I would like to propose a gathering that centers what it means to ‘listen’ to non-human entities, whether this be a living entity or a material substance like water. What does this form of listening look like? Does it extend beyond the auditory to modes of embodied attentiveness? Can reading and deciphering scientific data about such an entity also be considered a form of listening? Can modes of translation be avoided when trying to make meaning and describe the experience of listening to non-human phenomena? What is the role of aesthetics in dealing with the opacity or impossibility of grasping the entity we are attempting to listen to?
To have some footholds to deal with such questions, I would like that the conversation be structured around three materializations/works that have sought to put such a method of listening into practice.
Three materializations/works
Guests
I would like to invite to the gathering three current fourth year BEAR students: Alejandro Jimenez and Ming Morssinkhof, who were part of the group that made Capturing a Cloud (June 2024); Dieuwke Oosterbosch, who is in Biella on fourth year artistic research residency and is writing daily on the exercise and experiment of being a water sommelier; and finally, I was interested in inviting either the artist Nina van Tuikwerd, who created Ecologies of Memorie, or to come into conversation with Dennis Gaens or Dieuwke Slump, if the research, questions and methods overlap with the ones outlined here.
The idea would be to structure the conversation in three parts: each centred around a work (that we would experience live) and a set of questions. The audience would be very much invited to participate.
To have some footholds to deal with such questions, I would like that the conversation be structured around three materializations/works that have sought to put such a method of listening into practice.
Three materializations/works
The first, Capturing a Cloud, is a sound piece created by a group of students from the theory block that attempts to listen to water’s entanglements during early morning walks in fog along the river banks in Arnhem.
The second, is the creative writing of a fourth year BEAR student currently in a research residency in Biella, and whose writings stem from a daily exercise of taking on the role of a water sommelier, describing the experience of tasting water, the moment its endless circulation enters and passes through the body; and the last, a piece I recently came across at the Sandberg graduation show by Nina van Tuikwerd, Ecologies of Memorie, addresses our inability to perceive and make sense of the shifts in the material and living world around us.
The audio-visual piece uses AI driven, long term-data but also sound recordings to ask how we can relearn a form a literacy that would enable us to read the stories expressed by non-human earth beings.
Guests
I would like to invite to the gathering three current fourth year BEAR students: Alejandro Jimenez and Ming Morssinkhof, who were part of the group that made Capturing a Cloud (June 2024); Dieuwke Oosterbosch, who is in Biella on fourth year artistic research residency and is writing daily on the exercise and experiment of being a water sommelier; and finally, I was interested in inviting either the artist Nina van Tuikwerd, who created Ecologies of Memorie, or to come into conversation with Dennis Gaens or Dieuwke Slump, if the research, questions and methods overlap with the ones outlined here.
The idea would be to structure the conversation in three parts: each centred around a work (that we would experience live) and a set of questions. The audience would be very much invited to participate.
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