The Experience Of Being In The University In Turbulent Times: Learning And Doing ABR

Author(s):

Marina Riera (presenting / submitting) Marina Vaquero (presenting) Fernando Dorrego Nicolás Fernández Rachel Fendler Fernando Hernández-Hernández

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

29. Research on Arts Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

29 SES 03, Apparatuses, transitions and experiences in arts education

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-08

17:15-18:45

Room:

557.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Catarina Silva Martins

Contribution

This paper addresses the experience of being a student/worker/subject immersed in the knowledge society. To this end, we have explored our journeys and relationships within this framework, developing a reflexive approach over the course of the semester, within the class Arts-Based Research, offered as en elective for Fine Arts majors at the University of Barcelona.

Our research questions emerged over time, working from our personal interests towards a collective process. In this process, our weekly planners served as an image-apparatus (Agamben, 2006/2009) while at the same time provided a historical and political register of our day-to-day schedules. The calendars represented a subversive metaphor (a counter-planner), whose expression is carried out through texts and images, both in physical as well as virtual formats. For example, we worked with collage in class, and at the same time online on Tumblr and HotGlue, and generated photographs and video documentation. In this sense, the calendars were a link, representing the emerging relationship between the concepts and students’ experiences. Our main reference was Therese Kaufmann (2011), who advocates for the use of arts-based research to perform a revision of our position within cognitive capitalism, from a post-colonial perspective.

We have discussed at length what research methodologies should we adopt in order to give an account of the research process, and thus have asked ourselves what we can achieve, and what is involved, in using arts-based research strategies, while at the same time participating in a class on arts-based research.

As a result, the research process has given rise to a participatory and democratic educational experience, whereby, from a critical perspective, we have examined our shared and individual identities, revealing narratives that otherwise would have remained invisible.

The research question. Working from these premises and questioning our condition in terms of how we saw ourselves reflected in the texts we read, we articulated the question: How do we transition as students and workers in knowledge society? We proceeded then to:

a) Discuss our experiences;

b) Share them using artistic methodologies;

c) And, give an account of them and what they mean in a narrative that would show our process and reveal what, with other methods, would have remained invisible.

This process was an effort to generate knowledge of the topic, as well as document our learning process within a course on arts-based research.

Things were not as easy as they seemed initially. Defining a research topic was dependent on the cohesiveness of our group. The task of bringing together a heterogeneous mix of people who didn’t know each other, to find common ground, was risky and hard. We discovered that by contributing personal experiences—me and my experiences—we were able to generate a dialogue that went beyond the individual and began to resonate with a collective understanding of the situation. Therefore our method was always fragmented; because if “my and my experience” allowed us to generate a shared interest and empathy it was also a barrier to collaboration. To overcome this, later we looked for information outside our experiences, linking what we had shared so far to a greater context and allowing personal experiences to act as reflections of social life. We then were lead to a new question: How can we represent our research process?

Answering this second question forced us to confront two issues: How can we narrate our process? How can we transition from the individual contributions to a collective understanding? We needed to reconstruct our process from the last several months. This became as well a mode of analysis, by reflecting and bringing together the perspectives and relationships that we had been generating.

Method

We drew on references from visual culture to address the representation and imaginary of the university as produced by the university, inquiring into these images and statistics, engaging critically with them and using them to configure a tale that could be both analysis and an account of the research. The evidences we generated are the following: _Micro-narratives: we shared visual and textual narratives that referred to our experiences in and outside the university. At first these narratives responded to three key issues: our work experience, communities we participate in outside the university and ways of resistance we engage in within the university. _Weekly planners: we began to register weekly images of our personal planners, which served as both narratives and evidence for the research. Given the importance they hand in our process we will discuss them later in more depth. _Collage (wall): we copied and printed our narratives, and other data we had gathered, so that they had a physical presence. We created a collage in the wall of the meeting room where our class took place. This allowed us to redistribute the material and create connections and links between different elements. It also established a non-linear presentation of material. _Tumblr: We chose this site to create a collective and public archive of our work, where we shared narratives, images, facts and statistics, policies, and other evidence that supported our work. _Hotglue: we took elements located in our Tumblr to create a counter-planner. This virtual object documents our research process and exploits the format of the planner as an apparatus (Agamben, 2009). _Audiovisual documentation: We filmed different moments of the class, so that we could then edit a short film to document our process. We defined the role of the planners in our project in a variety of ways: _Image (visual method) _Localizations (i.e., our positionality) _Evocation of an infantilized subject (planners are scholastic tools) _Showing fragmentation and dispersion _A way for sharing ourselves in the group _Apparatus for controlling people and bodies _Apparatus for recall (memory) _Indicator of the priority we give to work _Reflection of how some artists make personal subjects part of their public art: Alice Maher, Tehching Hsieh _A tool that invites artistic methods into social research _A reference to other readings: Benjamin, “A history of fragments” or Ranciere, “The emancipated spectator”.

Expected Outcomes

We have attempted to understand ourselves from a different logic. Generating alternative practices that did away with individualism, identifying our histories and transforming them into experiences by narrating them to our peers. We inquired into how we are represented, by others and by ourselves. This meant we had to leave behind an established path in order to build a new one… or at least attempt to. The course on ABR became a space for acting, resisting and reinventing. It followed a non-normative logic, in an effort to think and construct our gaze critically, in our particular space and time. The resources provided by ABR allowed us to connect, and above all understand, bridges between the personal and the political, the intimate and what we share with others. ABR introduces an alternative to other ways of researching and acknowledges the experiential and subjective. In our work, we understood artistic processes as a critical apparatus for dialoguing with the images and representations that surround us. We understood that we were working from the border between fields, demarcating an alternative, or a resistance, to hegemonic languages, both within research and the arts. Basing our formation in ABR in an inquiry into the university system created a strange reflection. The (poor) functioning of the institution had repercussions we could observe in the development of the course, which was marked by a lack of cohesion and persistence, and where the group became increasingly less populated as time went on. Finally, using different critical strategies we shed light on our experiences inside/in relation to the university. We generated evidence that speaks to the different perspectives and the relationship between them. We tried to adhere to an attitude of inquiry in order to establish an ongoing dialogue with the images that we found and produced.

References

Agamben, G. (2006/2009). What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Stanford University Press. K. David & S. Pedatella (Translators). ISBN: 0804762309. Caffentzis, G. & Federici, S. (2007). Notes on the edu–factory and Cognitive Capitalism. Instituto Europeo para políticas culturales progresistas. Retrieved 12-12-2014 from http://eipcp.net/transversal/0809/caffentzisfederici/en Corsani, A. (2004). Wissen und Arbeit im kognitiven Kapitalismus. Die Sackgasse der politischen Ökonomie. In, T. Atzert & J. Müller (Eds.), Immaterielle Arbeit und imperiale Souveränität. Analysen und Diskussionen zu Empire, pp. 156-174. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Fendler, R. & Hernández-Hernández, F. (2013). What Does Research Mean for Fine Arts Students? In, F. Hernandez-Hernandez & R. Fendler (Eds.), 1st Conference on arts-based and artistic research: Critical reflections on the intersection between art and research, pp. 227-232. Barcelona: University of Barcelona - Deposit Digital. http://hdl.handle.net/2445/45264 Garoian, C. & Gaudelius Y. (2008). Spectcale Pedagogy. Art, politics and visual culture. New York: State University of New York Presss Kaufmann, T. (2001). Arte y conocimiento: rudimentos para una perspectiva descolonial. Instituto Europeo para políticas culturales progresistas. Retrieved 12-10-2014 from http://eipcp.net/transversal/0311/kaufmann/es/#_ftn2. In English: http://transversal.at/transversal/0311/kaufmann/en. Knowles, A.L. & Cole, J. G. (2008). Arts informed Research. (pp.55-70). Lazzarato, M. (1996). Immaterial Labor. In, P. Virno & M. Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, pp. 133-147. University of Minnesota Press. http://strickdistro.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/09/Week-1_Immaterial-Labour_Lazzarato.pdf.

Author Information

Marina Riera (presenting / submitting)

Universitat de Barcelona

Montcada i Reixac, Barcelona

Marina Vaquero (presenting)