What happens when we take historiographical research and engage in a collaborative arts-based proposal?

This was the ignite for exploring how can historiographical knowledge and document-based research be explored within a historiography of educational ecologies (HEC) – a trend that defends an intertwined timespan of present and past, and is concerned with spatial relations, within an interdisciplinary, collaborative, artistic, cartographical, and narrative approach (HEC, 2021). Also, in search for ways of knowledge building, HECological thinking forged the ecologies of thinking within the visuals by experimenting with Benjamin’s Archades. Mosaïque technique in particular (HEC, 2022) showed awareness of how non-humans may interplay with the conceptualization of the very same research objects.  

In this context, having previously developed workshops with people from different areas of expertise – thus stressing “training and scholarship” as layer of power(s), or better said, “a form of gravity” (Bryant, 2013, p.13) – we have grasped to use HECological guidelines to develop them yet further as art educators and other teaching and training environments. This brough and additional awareness of the agency of the non-human (withdrawn to ensure anonymity).

At the same time, “to enunciate new assemblages of existence”, in different study groups can imply “collective assemblages of human-nonhuman that 'assemble' to form spaces and modes of being that subvert capitalist trajectories of destruction” (Greenhalgh-Spencer, 2014 , p. 324) and other modalities of power. It is from this potentiality that we seek to situate this proposal, which focuses on participatory, artistic, historical and ecological processes as lines of force that converge to make visible the utterance of a human-piano in movement, lived in the past and updated in the present from the agency of its objects.

  - our main human actor ? - The Portuguese pianist and composer José Vianna da Motta was born in the African island of São Tomé (1868), and based in Berlin with a royal Grant since he was 13 years old (1882) up to the 1^st World War (1914). Then he had to move to Switzerland and finally returned to Portugal, where he stayed most of the time up to his death in 1948, seamed the perfect case-study to explore other possibilities hybridizing the history of the arts and the education within a HEC approach, especially if focusing on the potential to frame a cartographic experiment (Hernández et al., 2018). In fact, in between, first as a young student that was ‘adopted’ by a German family and the protégée of several important teachers, he was constantly travelling around Germany; and as an adult that was a professional concerto player and major professor all over the world, he travelled regularly inside Germany, Europe, but also Asia and all the American Continent. n a basis of ecologies of existence. Most of these displacements, travels, study trips, vacations, etc., as possible ecologies of existence can also underline the need to further develop this concept: VM desires to settle – Berlin, Weimar, Frankfurt, Genève, Lisbon – but travels almost all his life; and in Benjamin’s view, “one can only get to know a place after having experimented with it in every possible dimension” (1926/2022, p.106)

By focusing on cartography and inviting the participants to engage in a collaborative experience of moving through time and space as fluid categories we stress the HEC guidelines in order to accommodate the participatory and transdisciplinary. In our research questions we wonder:

How can participatory and artistic processes allow for JVM’s cartography as processes of knowledge-building within a HEC perspective?

How does this process allow for the problematization of (inter)connection, simultaneity and void of JVM’s cartography of existence?

The research questions will be the motto to set up a workshop where the attendees are invited to participate from their original standpoints as educators, pedagogues, artists, arts educators, historians, etc., moving towards a more hybrid and transdisciplinary perspective. The workshop consits on an invitaion to develop a collaborative cartography of Vianna da Motta's ecologies of existence. Whatever we produce will be highly contextual and a situated processess of collective (and invidual) knowledge builing. In this ephemeral reply the different archival objects that belonged to the life and work of Vianna da Motta will change their status as research objects. For the example, objects such as a music sheet, a letter, some personal belongins may be issued, but also some soundscape will be activated. And in this enactment what is an original and what is the copy when we use it? As longing for disobedient modes of expression, we hope to illuminate the possibilities to unlearn (Baldacchino, 2019) and disobey (Atkinson, 2018, 2023) our own knowledge and instructions, but in the current state we would display several groups with these historical materials and handwork materials in order to invite the group to organise an installation (working in smaller groups). In the end of this exercice, some card-questions will be distributed opening up for discussion: How can/could we participate in an investigation we know nothing about? How did we allow ourselves to dwell today in a past time? How can an artist that is no longer humanly with us actively participate in an investigation through the objects that were part of his life? How participating in a cartography of an artist's existence transforms us and expands our knowledge about our original disciplinary academic area? How can the artistic, eventually poetic creation that we may produce with archival elements about a past life gain the status of constituting itself as interdisciplinary/hybrid knowledge for these disciplinary areas? What can a new-born installation add to the concept of ecologies of existence and its ways of catographing it/them?

The first outcome predicted is overall the distance of most Musicology, history of education and music history approaches, that tend to demonstrate the processes by which a musician was raised, influenced, trained in specific technique, experimented in style, turned expert in specific repertoire and how his work was received and the importance of public and critique’s feedback into renewing his work, eventually being outcasted by new pianists and aesthetic currents. The literature on the work and life of the Portuguese composer and pianist José Vianna da Motta is no exception and as a child-prodigy he is potentially added to the nature/nurture debate held both by Music Psychology and Sociology of Music and to enact it within the non-human elements is part of an important strategy of opening up new possibilities. In a theorethical basis, the workshop will allow both to explore the concept of "ecologies of existence" and also discuss the collaborative (hopefully transdisciplinary) knowledge-building. By underlining the supplementary arts education ground as necessary to develop this exploratory research, we expect to facilitate a framework allowing for the suddenly possible (Atkinson, 2018) to emerge and to suspend – at least momentaneously – the traditional approaches towards an historical object. Ranging from positivism (what really happened and the material evidence) to any kinds of the hermeneutics (what can it mean, and what it means in context), and including the poststructuralist essays (sometimes very conceptual, many times highly grounded into series of documents), the very idea of what does it take to assemble historical knowledge is here set aside, moving towards a post-humanist thinking, but specifically engaging in a HEC approach, proposing yet new ways to approppriate, entagle and expand it.

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