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And Others– Is Ephemerality Freedom?

When: —
Venue: Online

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Discussants: Ximena Alarcon, Kuda.org/Zoran Pantelic, Irene Revell, Marina Rosenfeld.

Moderator: Lina Dzuverovic

Keywords: collaboration, collectivity, sound, performance, improvisation, feminist, score, networks.

BIRMAC and Art Monthly, in association with Electra present:

One of four discussions within the research project  ‘And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives’ by Dr. Lina Dzuverovic, which investigates different questions central to collective work. Building on two months of asynchronous collective writing, involving seventeen participants, the panelists below consider how we might write, think, read and practice together through other means.

This panel questions the relationship between medium and process, taking in improvised and experimental sound practices to ask questions about different attitudes to and experiences of collective work, and whether a certain openness and enthusiasm towards collaboration, and an excitement about the process itself predominates within music and sound practice, as compared to the visual arts. Drawing on participant’s experience of working across both sound and visual arts contexts, the conversations considers structural issues of how such work comes into being—how participants become involved in collaborating or improvising together, how such processes find a form, and the ways in which that form then finds a place in the world, and then extends through encounters with audiences. It asks whether in their very nature of being temporary, migratory, unstable, and a lesser emphasis on the finished product or end point may offer openings for radical rethinking of contemporary art. What does it mean to work within a group that will ultimately disperse, and what are the relationships between that particular temporality, and the materiality of the score itself? 

Could such forms of process-based togetherness create communities that can be maintained and developed, or expand further through exposure, performance, sharing? Perhaps performance, improvisation, scores, or other forms of processual co-creation create possibilities of engagement and reception that are different to those cantered around the creation of art objects. If so, what can we make of such freedoms? If individualist, linear narratives of art, centred around a belief in the progression of an oeuvre as a gradual build-up of a singular artist’s career, could networks of collaborative, ephemeral / temporally based practice offer an alternative? What conditions are necessary to be part of such a network (who has access and through what means?) and what barriers might be in place for people in terms of engagement with such projects or networks?

Panelists  also address the specificity of context and conditions—personal, interpersonal and infrastructural, and asks how organisation and pragmatics can be accounted for and remain aligned with the political impulses of particular forms of practice and work. In particular it questions the role of listening in relation to such work, and its potential for redefining modes of attention, relation, and maintenance. Further, how can the researching, reviving, unearthing and curating of histories of improvised music and sound inform new models of organising for DIY networks, or artistic groups, and their complex relationship to institutions? 

The panel conversation will be followed by an informal Q&A with the audience.  

Please note all events within this series will be recorded.

This project has been supported through Birkbeck College’s School of Arts Research Grants and the Open Society University Network, Center for Arts and Human Rights at Bard College 2022 Faculty Fellowship.

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