The past decade witnessed the appearance of new debating spaces within artistic research. At a time when art and culture, local and global policies and events are haunted by societal challenges as vast as they are unpredictable, what can artistic researchers offer in response to these concerns? How can artistic research resonate beyond its specific contexts and disciplinary borders?
Resonance is a prompt to address the transformative nature of artistic research as a connective element that evokes a response and qualifies our experiences as meaningful.
However, it can also be understood as a critical tool characterised by reciprocity and mutual transformation. Resonance is a response to personal and global challenges both poetically and through modes of political imagination and transformative meeting spaces.
Getting into resonance is to create a relation between artistic research and the world that requires questioning and answering, but also the ability to change and be changed.
Why Resonance?
Resonance is about responsiveness. A resonant experience is a function of vulnerability, both in terms of susceptibility to external influence and the quality of openness that facilitates a meaningful encounter with the world. What artistic research strategies can enhance openness and responsiveness to the affordances of our environment?
Resonance is about transferability and transformation of experience. How do artistic research methods contribute to cross-fertilisation between sectors and disciplines, enabling wider acquisition of skills, awareness, and agency?
Resonance is not consonance. How do artistic research practices embody conflicts and mediate crisis, creating spaces for divergent voices and intercultural cooperation?
Resonance is searching and imagining. Artistic research plays a fundamental role in developing counterfactual ways of thinking and exploring the path of what happens “if”. How do counterfactual reasoning and research intertwine to create narratives of change?
Resonance occurs in the invisible movements crossing geographical space and historical time. How do artistic researchers draw on ancestral storytelling and marginal sources of knowledge, despite colonial legacies and forced dispossession, to create new cultural practices?
Resonance is about transforming materialities. How do materials and the material culture of artistic research resonate with our time’s environmental, social and cultural needs?
Resonance is an effect of time and duration. How do artistic practices affect and change our experience of time? What time-based artistic research methods can enhance our sense of belonging?
Presentation formats
We call for proposals for presentations of artistic research projects in two formats:
Short presentation (20 minutes’ lecture + 20 minutes’ discussion).
Long presentation (40 minutes’ lecture of practice sharing + 30 minutes discussion).
We encourage original and experimental contributions from both individuals and collectives.
A call for posters on artistic research projects addressing the Conference theme will be launched separately.
