Placement – a context where one can experience and explore their praxis (Freire, 2005: 51) within a real, everyday framework. Most of my peers where able to secure a place, alas that’s not my case.
I have contacted many people, many organizations though only a few replied and 3 out of 4 answers where rejections. Only 1 organization replied asking me follow up questions such as ‘what I am planning on getting out of my placement’.
What am I planning on getting out of my placement?
Currently, I am interested in exploring the crossroads between Contemporary Performance and Graphic Design. It’s a subject that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while and I thought that placement would be a great place to explore that. How could these two, seemingly, not relevant arts, cross paths and what would the end result be? I am sure that their dialogue could be of great interest. There are many tools in both parties that could be used to access creative information within each field, creating a fruitful and rich, artistically, partnership. ‘The Rodina’, an artistic duo based in Amsterdam, were able to make that partnership happen and through their work, one can witness the greatness of that collaboration, performativity within graphic design or else the performative design (Rullerova, 2015).
Graphic Design is not my only interest.
As an artist, I’d like to consider myself a visual artist. I am interested in the visual outcome of a performance piece, as an extra layer, an additional path for the audience to access the information I’d like to communicate through a piece.
In my opinion Visual is inextricable linked with Materials, hence my close interest with that concept as well. Tim Ingold argues that the emphasis should be on the materials themselves rather than the materiality of it, in his article Materials against materiality (Ingold, 2007). I am interested in the stories of materials that emerge through describing their properties, properties that are in constant flux (Ingold, 2007: 14). I am interested on how a performance piece could be used as a medium to express and communicate those (hi)stories.
Bibliography
Freire, P., 2005. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th ed. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.
Ingold, T., 2007. Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues, 14(1), pp. 1-16.
Rullerova, T., 2015. ACTION TO SURFACE. [Online]
Available at: https://www.therodina.com/actiontosurface/index.html
[Accessed 21 November 2020].
Thanks for posting Raf. Although you did not have a placement at the time of writing this, it offers a good sense of your interests and enquiries as an artist. Defining the importance of the visual in your work feels significant and I am interested in how you might approach your placement with this intention – even though you are working in a different context. It was making me think of the offering to create a zine or some other visual way that you might want to engage with the festival. The idea of materials/materiality will be another potential rich area for research as you develop your practice through this placement. I look forward to hearing how your ideas develop and how the first meetings with your placement provider have gone in future posts.