Author: Kevin Walker

The Post-Publishing & ArtSpaceCity research strands of the university’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures held a day-long event exploring the boundaries between the scholarly and the creative. Through a mixture of talks and hands-on practice, they troubled the line between research, literature and performance, investigating co-created, genre-defying, ways of writing, annotation, attribution, presentation, and publication.

The event included talks by Dr Lucia Farinati and Adeola Eze. It asked questions about authorship, how we engage with research material, how we write, and how we might write and annotate collaboratively. One of the key questions is how can working with texts, or interviews with research participants be incorporated into thesis writing in a way that goes beyond simply citing or quoting a work?

According to postgraduate researcher Alex Parry:

One of the reasons I was interested in working with colleagues on this subject is that I believe elements of collaborative practice in scholarly work is not discussed enough. I never did any training on how to write notes, annotate or cite others’ work. During my earlier studies, I found that students were expected to know how to write notes on lectures, articles and books. I learned how to work with other people’s texts and ideas by doing it. To me, annotation and working with other people’s text often felt implicit or obscured from view. As annotation was not discussed, it felt private and solitary. In a talk about his research on annotation, Remi Kalir [who Adeola discussed later] reminds us that annotations have a social life beyond the page, whether that is handwritten responses in a book that are read in a bookshop years later, collective annotations in reading groups, or other forms of comment and notation such as in graffiti. 

In my artistic practice, I frequently collaborate with others. Collaboration is always a nuanced negotiation, and, like my experience learning to annotate, I have often stumbled through it. Again, the work of collaboration itself has frequently felt somewhat implicit. In my work researching participatory art workshop practices, one artist describes why this might be:

‘in theatre and live art, it is easier to find established methods for collaborative practice,which contrasts with how art practice is often depicted, taught, and enacted as solopractice.’ (Edginton, 2024)

In my experience, collaboration is often tricky. it is not an easy practice. Yet, despite its difficulties and sometimes breakdowns, the demand for negotiation in collaboration fosters a practice of learning to work and think together. It is a continual attempt to orient oneself within and towards collective practice.

Whether working with voices on or off the page, collaborative practice is always a question of power and agency—a means of speaking back, with, or to. Kalir describes the possibility of ‘courageous annotation’ that can support justice-oriented objectives (Kalir, 2020, p. 63). This involves taking risks, being present, and engaging in critique.

As an artist and academic, citation, borrowing, blurring, stealing, and being inspired are inherent in the process. Working with different voices comes in many forms, whether through annotation, quotation, interview practices, writing a paper, or hosting an event or talk like this. Everything is in relation to other beings – be it human or more than human. Within this interconnected network no work is done in isolation.

The organisers are a collective of postgraduate researchers who bring diverse knowledge and practices to the subject.  

Clare Harvey – is a novelist researcher. Her practice research looks at how remix can be used as a new way to write biographical fiction. Her claim is that sampling from memoirs and incorporating ‘real’ voices into fiction elevates fictional subjects to the status of co-authors, thereby representing their lives in a more ethical way within the story.

Adeola Eze is with the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities. Her research explores the significance of book formats from antiquity, prior to the printing press, in deepening our understanding of the relationship between historical contexts and contemporary literature.  Adeola Eze is a children’s book author, young writers’ mentor, and publisher.  She runs PhD Beyond 50, a blog and community space for mature PhD students, offering support, advice, and reflections on doing doctoral work beyond midlife.

Alexandros Plasatis is a doctoral student at Coventry University’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures. He is the founder, publisher and lead editor of the other side of hope: journeys in refugee and immigrant literature, a literary magazine edited by immigrants and refugees that publishes poetry and prose by migrants from around the world. Established in 2021, the other side of hope receives funding from Arts Council England, and became the UK’s first ever literary magazine of sanctuary. His first book, Made by Sea and Wood, in Darkness, narrates the lives of the undocumented Egyptian migrants who work as fishermen in a Greek town, and was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. Stories from this book have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of The Net. He has a PhD in ethnography-based Creative Writing. 

Alex Parry – I am an artist-researcher conducting practice-led research on the role of participatory art workshops in what is described as the current polycrisis, a global intersection of crises that exceeds the sum of their parts. I explore the participatory art workshop as a space to build association and imagination. As part of my research, I have interviewed artists about their participatory art workshop practices to gain a deeper understanding of how these workshops are often sidelined and considered a secondary art practice and their relevance in the context of wider precarity today. 

The order of the day was as follows: 

It started with Adeola Eze with Remixing Scholarship – Kathleen Fraser’s Poetic Reworking of the Vindolanda Writing Tablets 

This session explored Kathleen Fraser’s m ov a b le TYYPE (2011), a collection that moves beyond conventional poetry into visual experimentation. While Fraser’s earlier work reflects feminist and modernist themes, here she engages with artist books, typography, and the poetic value of ‘errors,’ ‘absences,’ and ‘visual transfusions.’ Adeola focused on Fraser’s poem ‘from The Vindolanda Writing Tablets (Tabulae Vindolandenses III),’ which echoes ancient Roman tablets but is inspired by their 2003 scholarly edition by Alan Bowman and David Thomas. Fraser remixes this material, tracing a path from ancient Roman handwritten text to scholarly edition and to poetic transformation. How does remixing ancient and scholarly texts opens new creative possibilities? How can poetic experimentation reinterpret ancient narratives? How might textual transmission become a site of innovation?

Following this, Clare delivered a writing workshop which used elements from Lucia Farinati’s ‘As a Possibility of an Encounter’ as the stepping off point for a series of micro-writing activities. This was be a playful, practice-based response to some of the ideas Adeola Eze discussed around the transformation of historical records/scholarship into creative work. Using these recombinatory writing games also served as an introduction to Farinati’s work, which was explored through the afternoon’s sessions (for anyone interested in the scholarship that underpins this session, recombinatory writing games fit within the framework of Creative Writing Games for Reading, which use creativity as a motivator for reading scholarly texts; a useful reference point would be Allen Jones’ paper “Open World” Texts: A Framework for Analyzing Recombinatory Writing Games (RWGs)) 

After lunch, Adeola, Clare and Alex joined forces. This hands-on session focused on their annotation practice – how we annotate and why, as well as how annotation can alter the meaning of a text itself. Whilst focusing on Farinati’s work, they considered how annotation as a practice can not just reinforce authorial meanings, but create new meanings, too. 

For the final session of the day, they were fortunate to have Lucia to discuss her text ‘As a Possibility of an Encounter: A Performative Reading of Autoritratto (Self-Portrait) by Carla Lonzi’ (2024). Carla Lonzi’s work, Autoritratto (Self-Portrait), published in 1969, is a constructed text described by Lucia as an ‘imaginary convivium’ (Farinati, 2025: REF). The text brings together interviews Lonzi conducted as an art critic with male artists and one female artist over the course of seven years. Lucia’s article not only examines Carla Lonzi’s innovative approach to interview practices but highlights its significance as an important feminist work and as a creative tool for prefigurative feminist micropolitics. The article thoughtfully reflects on concepts of authenticity and emphasises the roles of recording, listening, transcribing, assembling, and re-performing interviews. This article is part of Theorizing the Artist Interview, a collection edited by Lucia and Jennifer Thatcher, which brings together various approaches to the artist interview.

References

Kiesewetter, Kolb (REF) Annotating Publishing : Publishing as instituent practice

Kalir, J. (2020) “Annotation is first draft thinking”: Educators’ Marginal Notes as Brave Writing. English Journal 110.2 (2020): 62–68

Kalir, J. (2025) Re/Marks on Power How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice. MIT Press.

Lucia Farinati is a writer-researcher, curator and activist. In 2007 she established Sound Threshold, an interdisciplinary curatorial project that explores the relationships between site, sound and text. She has worked with the Precarious Workers Brigade and the Micropolitics Research Group and has collaborated with many sonic art projects and radio initiatives. Her research focuses on dialogic aesthetics, especially on the work of artist William Furlong and the feminist writing of Carla Lonzi which she has activated through collective readings and radio broadcasts. She holds a PhD in Critical Studies from Kingston University, London. She is the co-author of The Force of Listening (2017), Training for Exploitation? Politicising Employability and Reclaiming Education(2017) and co-editor of Theorising the Artist Interview (2025)

Artist-researchers Mel Jordan (Coventry University), Andy Hewitt (University of Northampton), and Michael Wright (Middlesex University) collaborated with Kings Heath residents to create zines capturing hopes and ideas for their local area. These have now been compiled into a book published by Northampton-based Silly Gooze and launched in April 2025. Working alongside the West Northants Community Safety and Engagement Team, the project combined free workshops and conversations to exchange ideas and perspectives about Kings Heath, identifying areas for practice-based research interventions focused on community development and infrastructural change. The book documents personal reflections and collective aspirations, emphasising the vital role of community voices in shaping local futures.

In May 2025, Hewitt, Jordan, and Wright will return to Kings Heath with People are Publishing, a new project that will generate a community-stitched banner while also exploring how online communities connected to Kings Heath express their shared histories and hopes.

Photo: graphic novel created for Riar Rizaldi: Mirage exhibition

We started with a basic definition of research: as defined by UK research councils: ‘A process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared’. Breaking this down: a process (as well as product) of research; investigation = methods; new insights – in the PhD, an original contribution to knowledge (not practice). New insights: for particular recipients/stakeholder groups/field(s); how do you differentiate yourself, how do you evidence the originality of your contribution? Then in the above defintion, sharing = documentation.

What makes practice research? It’s the rigour – having some systematic way of answering questions or exploring. It can be an intellectual rigour, it can be in the methods.

This session was given over mainly to PhD students talking about their own research. One pointed out that you may not want to take photos, of workshops or events for example. But funding requirements might mandate documentation. There are, of course, anonymisation techniques: blurring and blacking out faces is fraught, in my opinion; better to photograph hands and backs of heads. A photograph might serve as proof that something happened, but could also serve as advocacy for the funder, or to obtain further funding.

Diagram related to my own PhD research

Photos or video by others might serve as good documentation. A photo of Joseph Beuys running a workshop – an image that has sort of become iconic, taken by one of the participants. Transcripts also (obviously capture different knowledge). Diagrams, mind maps, collectively-edited documents, instructions and how they are enacted on various occasions, toolkits that become documentation/works themselves, eg Fluxus toolkits.

Mapping – for example institutional details that cannot be publicly shared. Practice books: creative/reflective writing. Sometimes the workshop space remains in the exhibition, sometimes with instructions for visitors to add/interact, sometimes just as static documentation, perhaps with diagrams or other artefacts from the workshop/performance.

Photo of Geumhyung Jeong’s exhibition Under Construction at ICA, London

Sometimes practices of documentation change during the course of the thesis – from more to less or vice versa.

‘Practice is messy, is my takeaway,’ one PhD student said.

How does a body of practice ‘stand alone’, particularly if it is documentation of practice that might have been ephemeral? How do theory and practice in the thesis inform each other?

We discussed the use of video: it can be placed on an external website (assuming consent and permissions) or an internal OneDrive site, and referenced in the written thesis. It helps to be selective, to keep examiners/viewers focused, as the thesis should be narrowly focused anyway.

This practice-based PhD project is developing a methodology of new media art making specifically using the praxis of hydrofeminist world-ing, in order to explore the impact of transmedia storytelling and collective making on creating cultural change about the climate crisis using emerging technologies. An original methodology of hydro-feminist, posthuman worldbuilding is developed, in addition to a body of new media work. This approach links the flows of migrants and goods across waterways and geographical areas, with flows of water, data and creative energies, as a part of a broad agential assemblage that hydrofeminism figures connected in essence.

Hydrofeminism is a term coined by Astrida Neimanis in her book Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water. It refers to the intersection of feminism and the materiality of water, and how water can be used as a metaphor for understanding and reimagining gendered power relations. Neimanis argues that water can be seen as a site of potential transformation, as it is constantly changing and adapting to its environment. Our fluid and porous relationships with our environment beyond dualisms is also discussed within Donna Haraway’s take on the term world-ing in which she implies becoming with the world rather than designing it. Bringing those concepts together, hydrofeminist world-ing is investigated and exercised as a creative methodology of new media art connecting art, technology, science and philosophy.

My current state in this artistic praxis of speculative mythology and technology of an ocean-based culture can be seen at https://www.buketyenidogan.com/

Alex Masters of Centre for Postdigital Cultures on using AI and Raspberry Pi for frugal design. Read about it here.

Work by Sarah Sze, photographed by Kevin Walker

This is documentation of a seminar about documentation and exposition in relation to practice research, run by Kevin Walker in July 2023 and July 2024.

This seminar is about process, tools and materials as well as products of practice research. ‘Exposition’ refers broadly to a wide range of outputs, as used in the Research Catalogue. We differentiated it from externalisation, as used for example in activity theory in terms of how and what knowledge is internalised and externalised; and elicitation, such as the use of speak-aloud protocols and stimulated recall techniques to externalise such knowledge. 

Since participants in this seminar have so far been generally situated within the arts, that is where the focus has been, but with reference to scientific and technical methods for documentation and exposition. 

I started by showing recent work undertaken as part of the SPACEX project. I only used materials which were left where they were found, so the photo documentation travelled much further than the finished objects, which were likely to be collected by a single person or else discarded. 

What does it mean to practice? What makes practice research? We differentiated from research-based practice, which could broadly indicate any type of research done for practice. There are many variations of the term, but we did not go into academic discussions, referring generally to practice as a research method. In this case, it is the rigour that makes it research. 

Finding a simple binary distinction limiting, I extruded the Venn diagram to create a torus, in which research and practice become a single surface across which a practice-researcher can move. 

However, we should perhaps add a third element: theory. If research refers broadly to a wide range of approaches, designs and methods, theory is distinct from practice, and may or may not be included in research. 

Extruded into three dimensions however, a triple Venn diagram becomes too complex to read easily (though some practitioners depict their process as even messier).

Great documentation of process from student Meret Vollenweider, who investigated the research question, ‘Can I generate enough electricity from my body for my daily needs?’ Find out more about the project here.

It is often useful to make your own instruments. For this Micro Research workshop, lecturer Caroline Claisse made a one-metre square frame for students to explore different perspectives in the environment. This took inspiration from artists such as the Boyle Family. (photos courtesy of Caroline Claisse, used with permission)

Practice research requires the researcher to be both insider and outsider (as in ethnography), which can be difficult to balance. According to O’Donoghue, this means resisting the imperative to record immediately or force an interpretation from a distance; instead it means immersing oneself directly in the research experience. (Participants pictured here: Thomas Gardner, Nicolas Marechal, Colin Priest)

In artistic research it can be more useful to think in terms of validity, not reliability or generalisability, as in science: Can we learn from it? is there a good reason for doing it?

Practice research departs from practice, by making and communicating new understandings – not only making work. Where is knowledge in your work? This might include nonlinguistic and tacit knowledge which may resist capture, coding, or classification. If you start off defining research as only what is measurable, you will miss a lot. ‘Data’ is a science word; documentation is more suitable to artistic research.

Documentation and exposition may be about the creation of a narrative. Artist-researchers can control the narrative in the interpretive materials they provide alongside their work, instead of ceding control to the viewer or critic. 

Sometimes the documentation becomes the work, as in this example by Artist Placement Group, which placed artists in companies and government between 1966 and 1976.

Documentation can simply serve as evidence that something happened, or can communicate the deeper aims of the work, according to Coventry postgraduate researcher Alex Parry.

Here is another example: artist Anna Ridler printed 10,000 documents from the Wikileaks archive, and traced a love story in emails between two US government employees. This became an artwork, with the addition of an augmented reality app on an iPad – see Anna’s website for her always-excellent documentation. 

Artist Sarah Sze shows the value of printing and saving everything – this is from an exhibition of hers, in which she exposes the process, which in turn becomes part of the work.

Another artist, Alexandra Mir, also told me to save everything – because years later, her entire archive was acquired by an institution. 

Foregrounding the process of production can provide one compelling narrative, as in this 2016 robotics exhibition at University of Tokyo.

Simple before and after images immediately tell a story without words.

I photograph the process not only for documentation, but as a memory aide: Which wire goes where? A blog or website is a common way of exposing the process. Another narrative can be told in comments placed within programming code: a narrative for a very specific audience. 

Finally: If you can get a professional to document your work, you get not only great images but another perspective. This photo by Carl Bigmore of an exhibition I curated. Work in the foreground is by Celeste Camilleri and Jordan Edge. 

(All other photos in this post are by me.)

Since emerging in the UK university context in the early 1990s, practice research has expanded the horizons of knowledge production, challenged institutional hierarchies, and generated innovative impact at the intersection between academic disciplines and publics. Coventry University’s Institute for Creative Cultures (ICC) is host to world-class practice researchers in the arts and humanities from the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities (CAMC), Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) and Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC). The ICC provides a unique context for further expanding the impact of practice research in the arts and humanities by specifically exploring its transdisciplinary potential across Coventry University’s wider research environment.

In January 2022, the ICC established the Practice Research Working Group (PRWG) with the aim to bring together practice research across the institute, strengthen our transdisciplinary research approach and advocate locally, nationally and internationally for a new research paradigm. The PRWG’s work focuses on three main interest areas: training and resources for postgraduate researchers, ICC leadership in Practice Research and effective advocacy. 

The Creative Cultures Practice Research exhibition was planned as a key initiative to stimulate cross-disciplinary exchange and collaboration with other research fields at Coventry University. The aim was to introduce colleagues from other research Institutes and Centres across the University to practice research in the arts by sharing a number of diverse works ranging from virtual reality, participatory methods, socially engaged art, installation, music, and curatorial practices. The exhibition featured practice research projects by José Dias (CAMC), Ruth Gibson, Petra Johnson, Lily Hayward-Smith, Karen Wood, Louisa Petts, Vipavinee Artpradid (all from C-DARE), Mel Jordan (CPC), Anthony Luvera (CAMC), Teoma Naccarato & John MacCallum (C-DARE), Carolina Rito (CAMC) and Kevin Walker (CPC). 

Carolina Rito & Scott deLahunta. PRWG Chairs

AmplifyHer: voicing the experiences of women musicians in São Paulo

2021

José Dias, Rogério Costa, Kirsty Fairclough, Haftor Medbøe, Ana Fridman, Lilian Campesato, Tide Borges, Marina Mapurunga, Paulo Assis, Lígia Xavier, Matias José Ribeiro, Valeria Gospodinova

AmplifyHer: Voicing the experience of women musicians in Brazil was a pilot study designed to assess the most pressing challenges faced by female musicians in Brazil, namely those related to the lack of media exposure and poor access to job opportunities, income and financing. This was a research project funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), involving researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University, University of São Paulo and Edinburgh Napier University, from such diverse fields as Musicology, Ethnomusicology, Gender Studies, Film Studies, Sound Studies, and Sociology. The study ran from March to July 2021, and involved twelve female musicians from São Paulo, who represent the broader Brazilian reality. Six of the twelve participants are white and six are black. Six in twelve belong to the age group from 20 to 39 years old (New Talent – NT); three belong to the age group of 40 to 55 years (Established Artists – EA) and three belong to the age group of 55 and above (Senior Artists – SA). Data in this report were obtained from three focus groups (four participants each) and individual interviews. The methodology followed two types of triangulations, according to Denzin (1978), with the data being analysed individually and crossed by three researchers, and three types of data were obtained: focus group, direct observation, and interview. In this way, quantitative and qualitative data were obtained. All participants received training on self-promotion from music industry professionals and produced individual Electronic Press Kits (EPK) in 2022 to showcase their talent, profile, and views as women in music. In this Practice Research showcase, you can see a collection of these twelve, five-minute EPK. An industry report was also produced and distributed to the Brazilian media, and as a result, our researchers and participants have been interviewed for Brazilian and international media outlets.

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Expanded Fields

2019

Ruth Gibson, Jenny Roche, Mel Mercier, Bruno Martelli, Kévin Coquelard, Henri Montes and Ursula Robb.

Expanded Fields invites audiences into proximity with a piece of choreography, to encounter the inner worlds, sounds and sensations that dancers experience in the performance of a moment of dance. Behind this work lies a deep curiosity about how to convey the complexity of a dancing moment and to allow the feeling states and images that are experienced by dancers to be perceived by an audience. How do we create an encounter that makes us aware of our capacity to experience the world through all of our senses and to transmit these sensations between each other when we share a performance experience? It’s something ineffable, intuited and yet familiar—our ability to connect with each other on a myriad of levels at once. Film, sound installation and virtual reality spaces alongside episodic live performance illuminate the ‘expanded fields’ emanating from this dancing moment, inviting the viewer into an intimate perspective on the complexities of individual and shared experiences of dancing together. 

The micro-phenomenological interview was used in the studio to mine the dancers’ feelings and thoughts in the moment of making solos in the form of voice recordings, diaries and drawings. The verbs Push Jolt Rebound were choreographic starting points for trios and solos. The creative team worked with live performance, film, motion capture data and sound recordings of the dancers to produce an installation which enables the audience to enter this intimate perspective on what it means to dance a piece of choreography.

Partners: 

This project is funded by the Irish Arts Council and supported by the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick, Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Live Collision International Festival and Lightmoves Festival of Screendance.

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The Shape of Sound

2021-2022

Petra Johnson, Lily Hayward-Smith, Karen Wood, Louisa Petts, Vipavinee Artpradid

This project consists of installations, performances, and engagement workshops with different communities. The installation, ‘The Shape of Sound’, is an artist impression of the hair cells inside the cochlea of the inner ear. The hair cells are represented through suspended strands of delicate silk and wool threads. 

The performance is an exploration of the installation through listening, movement and touch highlighting the element of touch in the physical process of hearing a sound. The dance artists practice a process of exploratory improvisation, where research is developed through moving and deep listening with the strands, interacting with light, darkness, shadows, and silence within space. We frame our project as practice research, utilising this process as a methodology to explore research questions through movement and public engagement. Please refer to the document ‘Practice as Research in The Shape of Sound Project’ for more details.

In 2021, open rehearsals took place as part of the Being Human Festival Coventry Hub. Partnering with Historic Coventry Trust and Coventry University, the project became a site-specific installation in the Anglican Mortuary Chapel at London Road Cemetery in Coventry as part of Coventry Opens in May 2022. In Spring 2024, it will be installed at the Charterhouse in Coventry, inviting visitors to engage with a participatory movement-based exploration where they explore their bodily intelligence through sound and movement whilst simultaneously learning about the historic site. 

The interdisciplinary work blends the fields of sonic, dance, heritage, and audience engagement research.

We are interested in potential collaborations with creative technologists and establishing relationships for long-term research.

Website: https://www.theshapeofsound.art

Contact: Vipavinee Artpradid

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Art-Study-Action: Developing Methods of Opinion Formation with Cultural Organisations. 

2020-

Mel Jordan and Andrew Hewitt

My research activity originates from my artistic practice. I work as part of the Partisan Social Club to develop participatory works and co-learning initiatives. We create temporary public spheres in the art gallery, which use the production of artworks to engage citizens. Membership, shared study, tagging and publishing together are used as methods to produce new values and opinions. (Jordan and Hewitt: 2020). 

I am Co-Investigator on the Spatial Practices in Art and Architecture for Empathetic Exchange (SPACEX), EU funded RISE Project. It is a research action that brings together cultural organisations and higher education institutes to explore how spatial practices effect public exchange and opinion formation in urban spaces. The aim is to understand the role that visual culture plays in promoting democratic ways of living together. Research questions addressed are, how do the pedagogic strategies employed by spatial practices effect and contribute to the transformation and construction of subjectivity? How can spatial practices impact upon cultural and social policy to promote inclusionary processes? The short film, Collective Nouns II (Reflections on Commoning), was produced whilst on a research secondment at Sirius as part of the SPACEX project.

I am also PI for a Research England funded project, Making Tools Together: Exploring new ways to understand arts social value (MORE). The objective is to apply the artistic practice of ‘rewiriting, recommoning and rehearsal’ (Jordan and Hewitt: 2023) that I have trialled, in conjunction with small cultural organisations, to form part of their audience evaluation planning. I am working with three UK based cultural organisations; Coventry Biennial, Coventry Art Space and NN Contemporary Arts.

Websites:
http://partisansocialclub.com/
https://www.spacex-rise.org/

Contact: Mel Jordan

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Agency

Anthony Luvera

Participants:
Amy Howard
Arshak Lanin
Bengy S
Bernie Howard
Cecelia Stower
Dualeh Ali Dualeh
Jason Read
John Kiely
Ken Hornblow
Martin
Mick Bickley
Sue Sadler
Tracy Villiers

Agency is a practice research project created by Anthony Luvera in collaboration with people who have experienced homelessness in Coventry, commissioned by Coventry UK City of Culture. Through weekly group workshops and individual meetings, Luvera met with over 30 participants inviting them to take disposable cameras away to document their experiences and places in the city that are significant to them. Participants were also invited to work with Luvera to use digital medium format camera equipment in order to work on the production of a self-portrait for the artist’s ongoing series, Assisted Self-Portraits. Agency was first shown as part of the Home: Arts and Homelessness Festival held in October 2021, in an exhibition staged in the public realm on Warwick Row, Coventry, and published in community newspaper distributed freely across the city. Agency has since been featured in numerous publications, journals, and reports, including the first ever report published by Amnesty International UK about homelessness in England, and in exhibitions held in Landksrona, Sweden and in Oslo, Norway. Luvera continues to work with participants to support their independent activities as the Agency Photography Group. The first Agency Photography Group exhibition, titled Constellations of HOME was held in the FAB Gallery at Warwick University in October 2022. 

Installation of Agency by Anthony Luvera, Warwick Row, Coventry, Coventry UK City of Culture 2021, 8 – 28 October 2021

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III: Once Returned / On being together in time 

2022 – 2023

Teoma Naccarato & John MacCallum

The rhythm of our daily lives and relationships is inextricably entangled with ongoing scientific, artistic, and philosophical reincarnations of the “clock”. Importantly, tools for planning and tracking time are not only descriptive but prescriptive of human behaviors. Design choices such as the discretization of time into days, hours, minutes, and seconds provides a structure for managing and measuring behaviors over time — on the condition that the behavior being aligned to a clock may also be discretized, for example: one step, one gesture, one breath, one heartbeat.

In my collaborative practice-as-research, I examine timekeeping systems as a form of choreography. In a recent project called “III: Once Returned”, created and performed with composer/computer scientist John MacCallum, we scored our every action, down to each inhale and exhale, over the course of a continuous, 72-hour livestream performance. As we endured for three full days and nights, each attempting to correlate our temporality with the pre-composed metronome, we were also accompanied by a pig heart that decomposed slowly between us at its own pace. Throughout, we wore electrocardiograms (ECGs), from which heart rate data was used to inform the temporality of the music for the audience.

The multiple, irreconcilable temporal processes unfolding over the course of this extended-duration performance were tethered by our shared context and intention. Sustaining temporal alignments between the various performers – us, the heart, the metronome, the music, the streaming platform, the video software, etc. – required a continual negotiation of the boundaries of what is means to be together in time. 

website • contact

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Institution as Praxis – New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research

Carolina Rito

2017-

Institution as Praxis is a curatorial research project that uses curatorial programming (talks, workshops, performances, screenings, exhibitions) as a methodology to activate the research questions. From 2017 to 2020, this curatorial research project explored the critical and investigative capabilities of public programming in contemporary art institutions and in contemporary curating. In other words, how are institutions of display generating new knowledge about the world in which we live? Through more than hundred initiatives such as series of public events, publications, and exhibitions this project created a new model for research-led curating for the cultural sector.

The research questions were:

What are the research capacities of curatorial public programming in contemporary art institutions and in contemporary curating? 

How can a research-led curatorial programme in a contemporary art centre be developed? 

How can the cultural sector’s curatorial practices inform and contribute to the debates in academic curatorial research? 

To the present, this multi-component project has delivered: 1) a three-year series of curated public events; 2) the publication of an edited book, Institution as Praxis – New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research; 3) the publication of one book chapter in the edited book Institution as Praxis – New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research; 4) and the publication of “Advisory Document on Collaborative Research” for the AHRC Midlands4Cities Consortium and Arts Council England. 

Institution as Praxis was developed in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary (contemporary art centre in Nottingham, UK) and two Higher Education institutions, Nottingham Trent University and University of Nottingham. The partnership between the cultural and HE sectors at Nottingham Contemporary offered the curatorial conditions for an experimental curatorial approach located at the intersections between two paradigms of knowledge production: the academic and the curatorial/artistic. 

Partners
Nottingham Contemporary
University of Nottingham
Nottingham Trent University

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Nine Earths

2021-2023

Kevin Walker with D-Fuse

Nine Earths, produced by artist collective D-Fuse, explores climate change and consumption through the daily lives of average people (primarily aged 16-34) in various countries around the world. The title refers to countries using up to nine Earth’s worth of resources each year. We commission artists and filmmakers in each country to film a day in the life of one person, then compile the footage into films and immersive installations. Associate Professor Kevin Walker of Coventry’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures engages in visual ethnography using the film footage, to address the following questions:

• What can video collected by artists and young people in different countries tell us about global consumption?  
• How feasible and suitable is remote ethnography for illuminating specific local contexts and making cross-cultural comparisons about consumption practices in relation to climate change?

These questions are addressed by analysing the footage against themes developed with climate scientists, through the ethnographic practice of ‘thick description’, not seeking to produce an authoritative, objective account but embracing what Marisol de la Cadena calls ‘not knowing’ (2021). The footage is then edited into films like the one shown here – more art film than documentary.

Nine Earths exposes power relations between the participants and the local infrastructures and global industries that constrain and shape their actions. We found participants to be keenly aware of these connections between the local and global. Cultures can no longer be studied in isolation. The act of editing footage into stories is unavoidably subjective, and there is a degree of stage direction in much of the footage. But we found that we cannot make judgements about individual people or places. 

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Event photos