mission statement

In making sense of our job as curators of a symposium for dance and other contemporary practices, we are following the lead of artists, activists, and academics who specialise in making-knowledge by making-art. We invite artists, activists, and academics to share the example of their practice in the context of the symposium. Our mission is to create a space where practice can function as the primary modality of knowledge exchange. By engaging with specific examples of knowledge- and art-making practices in the context of this symposium, we are learning about what it takes to create a space for practice. In creating a space for practice, our aim is not only to create a functional space, but a hospitable space. We understand hospitality to be essential where the exchange of knowledge-through-art is at stake.

The curators of this symposium have always been practicing dance artists, academics, and activists. Our approach to curating has always been based on experiment. Our experiment began in 2013, with the first IDOCDE symposium. The experiment requires us to modulate the format of the symposium on an annual basis according to our growing understanding of what it takes to create a space for practice. As Associate Professor at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, UL, Dr. Jenny Roche pointed out, one could see the symposium and its changing format as documenting the curatorial team’s ongoing research into the question of what it takes to create a space for practice.

When talking about making-knowledge by making-art, we are talking about embodied knowing that emerges through art-making. In academic terms, making-knowledge by making-art is most commonly associated with the phrase artistic research. Multiple definitions of the phrase artistic research are currently in circulation on the global stage. In our work, we like to refer to Lucy Cotter’s definition of artistic research whereby artistic research “establishes a connection between art and knowledge” (2023-24, p. 14). We appreciate the directness of Cotter’s approach. It helps us understand that knowledge, and specifically knowing-through-dancing, has always been central to our cause.

• In 2020, exhausted by the pandemic, we asked “When you do not know how you will survive, (sustenance, shelter, warmth, health) are you able to produce art? Is art sustenance? Can we live and survive on art? Or: Can we survive without art?” (link)
• In 2019, we organised a symposium that took place continuously during 25 hours. We wanted to know whether “we [can] treat the symposium in its entirety as a unit of somatic exploration? Giving and receiving information, dancing, sleeping, eating, resting, contemplating, listening, sharing, touching and being touched, breathing together…” (link)
• In 2017, we framed our Call for Proposals as a Call to Action. We wanted to know what your  practice was “actually doing to the world – given [your] experience of managing personal pedagogic and artistic practices? How are [your] pedagogic and artistic decisions shaping the world of others – [your] students? [Your] peers? And what, in particular, is the effect of the decisions [you] are not making?” (link)

Over the years, we’ve often looked at knowing-through-dancing through the term practice. Practice, coming from dance practice, is evocative of cyclical methodologies that are regulated through alternating periods of activity (experiencing) and inactivity (observation), exercise (experiment) and rest (analysis), often over long stretches of time. Our question was and remains fairly simple. The capturing of what orders of embodied knowing does practice, in its many forms, make possible? Aside from the aforementioned characteristics, we like to keep the definition of practice open. Time and again, we engage with the example of artists’ practices to examine and document variety in practice and corresponding knowledges.

Like Lucy Cotter, we work under the assumption that artistic research “comes into being through highly intuitive processes, and [that] its unfolding through practice follows the inner logic of artistic processes, rather than academic protocol.” (ibid.) By creating a space for practice, we wish to evidence how artists make sense of the world and celebrate the worlds organised according to artists’ sensibilities. By making that space hospitable, we wish to evidence the labour of hospitality and show what it takes to create the conditions for effective exchange of knowledge formulated through artistic practice.

“[…] many artists […] seek to create new questions and new forms of knowledge, using the kinds of embodied-material-conceptual thinking that goes hand in hand with art making. In doing so, they are often pointing to what has not yet been thought, what remains unknowable, or what has been overlooked or misperceived because thinking within the related field has been limited by the shapes and the forms of standard academic research.” (Cotter 2023-24, p. 15) (italics are mine)

How do we make a space hospitable for something like intuition to be recognised as a  way of knowing, a form of knowledge, or a method for knowledge-making? How do we create opportunities for exchange, when what is being exchanged is unknowable, irregular, relational, or fluid? All these questions remain open, functioning as orientational devices that guide us in our work. To ask them, however, is imperative because, as Cotter’s explains, “[...] what’s at stake in questions surrounding artistic research is a radical questioning of what defines and constitutes knowledge in the world [...]” (2023-24, p. 24)

bibliography:

Lucy Cotter, “Artistic Research in a World on Fire,” in Reclaiming Artistic Research, Expanded Second Edition, ed. Lucy Cotter (Berlin: Hantje Cantz Verlag GmbH, 2023-24) (link)