LINK TO RECORDING: QUEERING ART & DESIGN PEDAGOGIES
JOY MARIAMA SMITH | Anti-productivity and Unrestricted Sociality
CARLY ROSE BEDFORD & GABRIEL .A. MAHER | Non Perfomativity and the ...‘This is KABK’
Moderator: Alice Twemlow
Royal Academy of Art The Hague
Friday, December 6, 2019
Organised by the Lectorate Design
This symposium presents research activity by members of the KABK teaching community with a particular emphasis on practice-led research that uses art and design either as its subject matter or means for investigation. It will feature some of the projects being developed through the current KABK Research Groups, alongside contributions from invited keynote speakers in thematic groupings:
Framing and Reframing Archives;
Performing Bodies;
Re-imagining Operations; and
Queering Art and Design Pedagogies.
The symposium seeks to identify approaches, methods and tools with broader application to the growing research culture at KABK and beyond.
LINK TO RECORDING: NON-PERFORMATIVITY AND THE … ‘IT’S JUST KABK’
Maher and Bedford will discuss their research process as a case study in itself. The phrase “It’s Just KABK” is a remark frequently uttered by students meaning, “damn, this thing doesn’t work!” As such, it becomes a metaphor for frustration and carries with it a concept of “non-performativity.” The term non-performativity is a concept developed by scholar Sara Ahmed primarily to refer to institutional speech acts that do not bring into effect what they name. [1] This term is used to frame and analyse the case study in relation to dominant and formalised institutional structures, formalised research processes and informal encounters with students.
The case study charts the microcosm from which the research trajectory began—as an investigation into their own pedagogic practices which centred around queer and intersectional feminist frameworks—to the macrocosmic entanglement of a school-wide phenomena they encoun¬tered during the research process. They foreground how IN_FORM_ALITY—as in, informal encounters and processes— became the most “productive” method for navigating the research trajectory. They discuss how and why the “failure of formality” prevailed in the research process and subsequently, how the “failure of formality” manifests within the structures of the institution that do not bring into effect what they name.
LINK TO RECORDING: ANTI-PRODUCTIVITY AND UNRESTRICTED SOCIALITY
Focusing on decentralized knowledge production and col¬laboration as researcher practice, Smith will reflect on their own methods of research starting by locating their own positionality in the context of institutions. Leaning on text by Moten & Harney and Okun, as catalysers for framing research, Smith will discuss action-oriented research that exists out¬side the dominant research culture(s). By engaging with anti-colonial and anti-capitalistic research praxis, via intuition, ancestral knowledge, emotional intelligence, self-care and rest, Smith will consider working in, and generating from, the margins.