Finding AFFINITIES
Last month RAAD researcher Becky Shaw participated in Finding affinities: Doing practice-research in non-arts contexts, an event organised as part of The Guildhall School’s ResearchWorks programme.
The Guildhall School’s ResearchWorks is a programme of events centred around the Guildhall’s research activity, bringing together staff, students and guests of international standing. Weekly public events throughout the term share research findings from the school and explore connections with other practitioners and researchers.
Finding Affinities was designed by social arts researcher and director of D-Centre, Sophie Hope, and drew together our own Becky Shaw with Anna Macdonald, Reader in Movement based at UAL: Central Saint Martins. As a dance artist/scholar, Anna focuses on the relationship between the body, time and affect and uses film to expose the resonance of simple movements. She specialises in working with others – looking to find movement in situations that feel intractable. Becky makes live, collaborative artworks that examine the tension between individuals, environment, tools and social structures, often in institutions of 'public good' including healthcare, education, utilities and work. Both Anna and Becky are involved in interdisciplinary funded research, championing the role of artists as research leaders rather than as ‘add-ons’.
After brief introductions to their artistic research the conversation, led by both Sophie and questions from the audience explored different dimensions of interdisciplinary collaboration, including:
What does it take to create a meeting of minds with the people you work with? Why is this important?
What kinds of structures of working emerge and evolve through socially engaged practice-research?
When are you working as an artist and when as an artist-researcher? What changes?
What is it you are producing e.g. the artwork that isn’t an artwork, yet?
What value do you think practice-research brings to non-arts contexts?
How do you relate to writing? What role does this play in practice-research?
Which worlds/disciplines does practice-research fit into? Where is it meaningful/where does it resonate?
By bringing together the different disciplines, communities, timescales, artforms and institutions that Macdonald, Shaw and Hope operate in, the conversation let a range of themes emerge. This included: the significance of artists skills in creating collaboration; shared and different languages of practice and research; artistic rigour and how rigour is built in other disciplines; the pressure and delight of writing alongside making; difficult decisions about publishing and how to build inter- or trans-disciplinary homes for practice research; and the complexity of managing artist and artist-researcher identities and visibility.
The discussion allowed for a reflection on the space ‘inside’ the collaboration: a space often hidden by celebratory narratives of successful outputs. ‘Finding Affinities’ begins a process which will be developed further in the next year, through the development of a new multi-author book on artistic collaboration in inter-and trans-disciplinary research.
