In november 2017 stelde het lectoraat Image in Context van Academie Minerva te Groningen in zijn jaarlijkse tentoonstelling en symposium onder de noemer Artistic Research in the North de wijze van publiekelijk maken van onderzoek centraal. Als tentoonstellen een geëigende vorm is voor het presenteren van kunst, is het dan ook een geschikt format voor het presenteren van artistiek onderzoek? Beide zijn tenslotte deels discursieve en deels beeldende en ruimtelijke praktijken. Drie onderzoekers (twee kunstlectoren en een hoogleraar) werden uitgenodigd hierover een reflectie te bieden. Sara Strandvad (RUG) ziet in de tentoonstelling vooral een mogelijkheid om het beeldende van het artistieke onderzoek naar de voorgrond te halen. Peter Sonderen (ArtEZ) brengt de noodzaak van het present zijn van het onderzoekproces als overdrachtsvorm onder de aandacht. Ruth Benschop (Hogeschool Zuyd) vraagt zich af hoe een tentoonstelling van artistiek onderzoek een andere toeschouwer kan produceren dan een tentoonstelling van kunst. De reflecties maken duidelijk dat de transformatie van kunst-tentoonstelling naar kunstonderzoek-tentoonstelling ingewikkeld is. Curator Anke Coumans licht in een inleiding het opzet toe.
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In November 2017, 'Artistic Research in the North' presented the exhibition 'Dwell, Act, Transform' and the symposium 'Thought Things'. Researchers from Minerva Art Academy and the University of Groningen, together with international guests like Tim Ingold, approached artistic research as a form of research that interacts with the social, material and academic environments in which it occurs. Based on their shared perspectives, researchers collaborated across the boundaries of disciplines and institutions, searching for new research methods and ways of working.Artistic Research in the North is a coproduction of the Research Centre Art & Society (Minerva Art Academy, Hanze University of Applied Sciences) and the Department History of Art + Architecture (University of Groningen). My role was that of co-curator and producer of the exhibition with Anke Coumans
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The Dutch national platform for artistic research organised a day of talks and discussion regarding the topic of ethics, care, and code of conduct for researchers. The introduction laid out several of the key topics and themes for the day, along with the social contexts (#MeToo, BLM, environmental crisis, Corona pandemic, GDPR, and further topics) that make it necessary to explicitly focus on ethics in our work.
Students in Higher Music Education (HME) are not facilitated to develop both their artistic and academic musical competences. Conservatoires (professional education, or ‘HBO’) traditionally foster the development of musical craftsmanship, while university musicology departments (academic education, or ‘WO’) promote broader perspectives on music’s place in society. All the while, music professionals are increasingly required to combine musical and scholarly knowledge. Indeed, musicianship is more than performance, and musicology more than reflection—a robust musical practice requires people who are versed in both domains. It’s time our education mirrors this blended profession. This proposal entails collaborative projects between a conservatory and a university in two cities where musical performance and musicology equally thrive: Amsterdam (Conservatory and University of Amsterdam) and Utrecht (HKU Utrechts Conservatorium and Utrecht University). Each project will pilot a joint program of study, combining existing modules with newly developed ones. The feasibility of joint degrees will be explored: a combined bachelor’s degree in Amsterdam; and a combined master’s degree in Utrecht. The full innovation process will be translated to a transferable infrastructural model. For 125 students it will fuse praxis-based musical knowledge and skills, practice-led research and academic training. Beyond this, the partners will also use the Comenius funds as a springboard for collaboration between the two cities to enrich their respective BA and MA programs. In the end, the programme will diversify the educational possibilities for students of music in the Netherlands, and thereby increase their professional opportunities in today’s job market.
The main aim of the project is to provide new research in the arts by focusing on the concept of the inter-sensorial as an essential text for the creation of art and culture. It is designed to foreground the role of the sensorium as an underpinning source for many aspects of thought and cultural heritage. This project will blend visual arts with applied arts and traditional local traditions, revealing new light on the artistic facets and customs which are usually overlooked.The extended residencies will promote transnational mobility for emerging artists, facilitating international relationships between different artistic and cultural contexts within the EU. This will promote transnational interconnectivity between artists and cultures, creating a resourceful intercultural fertilisation, endorsing cultural diversity, social inclusion and most of all, further research on the intercultural facets.Through the various side-activities to take place during the mobilities of the artists, the project aims to strengthen and develop diverse audiences by producing the necessary elements for a dialogue, illustrating interpretations of rich layers of tangible and intangible heritage and legacies of European countries related to the tradition of sensorial experiences and how they evolved around traditional customs. Furthermore, it also aims to rethink and project new and innovative ways for documenting, preserving and communicating data to different audiences.
This PD project aims to gather new knowledge through artistic and participatory design research within neighbourhoods for possible ways of addressing and understanding the avoidance and numbness caused by feelings of vulnerability, discomfort and pain associated with eco-anxiety and chronic fear of environmental doom. The project will include artistic production and suitable forms of fieldwork. The objectives of the PD are to find answers to the practice problem of society which call for art that sensitises, makes aware and helps initiate behavioural change around the consequences of climate change. Rather than visualize future sea levels directly, it will seek to engage with climate change in a metaphorical and poetic way. Neither a doom nor an overly techno-optimistic scenario seem useful to understand the complexity of flood risk management or the dangers of flooding. By challenging both perspectives with artistic means, this research hopes to counter eco-anxiety and create a sense of open thought and susceptibility to new ideas, feelings and chains of thought. Animation and humour, are possible ingredients. The objective is to find and create multiple Dutch water stories, not just one. To achieve this, it is necessary to develop new methods for selecting and repurposing existing impactful stories and strong images. Citizens and students will be included to do so via fieldwork. In addition, archival materials will be used. Archives serve as a repository for memory recollection and reuse, selecting material from the audiovisual archive of the Institute of Sound & Vision will be a crucial part of the creative work which will include two films and accompanying music.
