the politics and ethics of fieldwork in art today
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Approaching Estate is a series of presentations and workshops organised by sensingsite at Central Saint Martins in collaboration with Furtherfield, Finsbury Park, taking place from April 9 – 11, 2019.
We use the term 'estate' to encompass a diverse community of interests and rights pertaining to the conceptualization, configuration, and management of place.
We welcome proposals from artists, activists, researchers, specialists and non-specialists
who wish to share methodologies of contemporary art practices and the politics and ethics of material enquiries into site, which are socially, politically, ecologically, historically and geographically entwined. We are broadly concerned with work that is interventional (such as 'site-specific', situated performative practices, etc) and representational (such as landscape, mapping, etc).
The event will be curated as a flexible and open-ended platform for hands-on workshops, presentations, performances, screenings, installations and discussion. It aims to cultivate a research community which can examine existing methodologies and generate new ideas, problems, and questions to set new agendas for experimental art practice.
The main activities of Approaching Estate will take place in Furtherfield Commons, based in Finsbury Park, London, which will also provide an opportunity to engage with the park as an interface, and with its diverse communities.
If you are interested please send an initial 300 word outline of a proposed activity, brief biography and support material (if appropriate) that can be developed to form part of the workshop sessions by Friday December 14, 2018 to sensingsite@gmail.com.
Do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to discuss your proposal further.
sensingsite is a practice-based research group based at Central Saint Martins, engaging with questions around the political, material, and sensory natures of site, place, and space.
Furtherfield connects people to new ideas, critical thinking and imaginative possibilities for art, technology and the world around us. Through artworks, labs and debate people from all walks of life explore today’s important questions.
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More information
Approaching Estate is a series of presentations and workshops which will examine the politics and ethics of fieldwork in contemporary art practices concerned with place, in order to develop critical, innovative and experimental engagements.
‘Estate’ suggests the parcelling, ownership and governance of physical space, founded upon historical, agrilogistic and colonial practices whose legacy has determined the status and identity of both human and nonhuman entities. Approaching Estate will also consider ‘estate’ as a broad community of interests and rights, pertaining to the materiality of space, how it is configured, managed, and conceptualised as place. As such it will acknowledge the current conditions of communities, material processes, and sites in the context of the continuing debasement of democracy, and the contemporary precarity of individual and community rights to movement and occupation of space. These relate to, and can be traced through, historical and contemporary forms of enclosure, land ownership, the commons, public space, colonialism, incarceration, expulsion, transportation, clearances, dispossession, extractions, depositions, and so on.
‘Fieldwork’ is used to broadly describe the artistic methodologies which engage in material enquiries into site and situatedness which are socially, politically, ecologically, historically and geographically entwined. As such they are often interdisciplinary practices and might be concerned with landscape construction, site-specificity, and social engagement; engaging with disciplines and activities such as archaeology, geography (human and physical), eco-studies, activism, mapping, and so on. Our aim is to set new agendas for fieldwork in art practice through development of a research network for experimental ways of working in art practice.
During the event we are interested in pursuing questions such as:
- What forms of methodological enquiry emerge from art practices concerned with specificity of site and place?
- What is the efficacy of such methodologies, and how do we evaluate them?
- What are the protocols and terms of engagement in site specific fieldwork?
- Who are the beneficiaries of the work produced?
- What is artistic or social agency (the role of the art) and what other intra-active engagements (human and non- human) are possible?
- How can the differing interests of collaborators working in an interdisciplinary context be shared meaningfully and productively?