Enacting Futures DASTS Roskilde University June 2014 Fictions and Futures 2 Sara Malou Strandvad & Connie Svabo Performance-design, RUC

Enacting… Is inspired by the ontological turn in science and technology studies Asks – what kinds of realities are enacted in and through research? Urges research to embrace its generative potential: to form matters, to shape realities To let go of a metaphor of perspectives – and engage in making Law (2004): After Method: mess in social science research, Routledge Law & Urry (2004): Enacting the Social, in Economy and Society, 33:3, pp Mol (2002): The body multiple: ontology in medical practices, Duke University Press

…futures What is tied down and what is set free in analyses? Etymological traces of the word analysis – from greek analyein – which means to unloose, release, set free An advocacy for research which opens up for imagining futures Research which is not caught in objectivist goals of documentation – fixation – tying down realities – Research which seeks to open up spaces for thinking, imagining, making and creating realities

The film Wasteland by Lucy Walker About the artist Vik Muniz & the making of “Pictures of Garbage Series” Futures are excavated from the remains of contemporary society An artistic project, but also an archaeology

Enacting futures through hybrid forms of knowing Uneasy relationship between representation and reality Blurring boundaries between science and art, embodied in the work of Michel Serres who is of central inspiration for Latour, Law, etc. Art-archaeology which enacts futures

Inspiration from art Seeing artistic practices as equal to/or a development of academic research? Symmetrical methodologies (rather than opposites)?

Sepia Jardim Gramacho landscape with vultures Photograph by Vik Muniz, courtesy of Vik Muniz Studio

Vik takes photo of Tiaõ as Marat (Screen grab) Courtesy of Vik Muniz Studio

Fabio and Tiaõ point down at Marat portrait (Screen grab) Artwork courtesy of Vik Muniz Studio

Final Tiaõ photographic print entitled “Marat/Sebastiao–Pictures of Garbage” Photograph by Vik Muniz, courtesy of Vik Muniz Studio

From trash to treasure Wasteland shows an artistic (archaeological) transformation of value: material objects go from trash to treasure During this transformation of materials participants (garbage pickers) are also transformed Film clips:

Participatory art “By using people as a medium, participatory art has always had a double ontological status: it is both an event in the world, and also at a remove from it. As such, it has the capacity to communicate on two levels – to participants and to spectators (...) But to reach the second level requires a mediating third term – an object, image, story, film, even a spectacle – that permits this experience to have a purchase on the public imaginary” (Claire Bishop 2011: 45)

Double ontology Wasteland demonstrates how participants are constituted and new futures are enacted Participants are not only audience members who may have a transformative experience by encountering a piece of art They also literally embody the transformation which the artwork documents

Mutual constitutions Seeing artists (and participants) as constituted by the work – as well as the work constituted by artists “avoid the necessary choice between what comes from the artist and what comes from the work” (Latour 2011: 8) Looking into “how could we be produced by what we produce?” (Latour 2013: 248) Latour, B. (2011): “Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les différents modes d'existence” i G. Harman, L. Bryant og N. Srnicek (red.): The Speculative Turn Continental: Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press Australia Latour, B. (2013): An Inquirey into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Art as research Wasteland shows similarities in knowledge creating processes between art and science Being based in a performance design department we advocate for an integration of these approaches – exploring how art practices may form part of academia, and the other way around Towards hybrid forms of knowing