Touching/Transforming: Notes Towards Collective Critical Artistic Research Practices and Processes
with Bäckman, F., Close, R., Godin, M-A., Kallio-Tavin, M., Mehta, A. A., Qureshi, A., & Sadatizarrini, S., Research in Arts and Education, 4. Aalto University. ISSN 2670-2142
Cluster for Critical Artistic Research (CCARe) was established in 2019 as a research group within the Department of Art at Aalto University, Finland for critical artistic researchers. The research group brings together a community of doctoral students, post-doctoral researchers, and faculty members at the university and beyond.
In June 2021 CCARe organized the two-day seminar Touching/Transforming in Suomenlinna at HIAP (Helsinki International Artist Programme) and online. This seminar was centred around a public-online talk by Skolt Sámi theatre director and artivist Pauliina Feodoroff (2021).
Suomenlinna is an island in front of Helsinki with complex connections to Finland’s socio-political histories. The main attraction of the island is the fortress, which was built in 1748, a few years before a land reform popularly known as the Great Partition. Pauliina’s talk addressed, among other things, this and various other moments in history when land has been appropriated, privatized or resold for profit in imperial and colonial nation-building projects in the Finnish context. The subject of land uses and care for the land was a central thread in the discussions that ensued.
Touching/Transforming departed from the precarious relation of artistic research to both the university and a wider field of counter-institution building. While an artistic research practice may be formulated and marked by the discursive and political framework of the neoliberal university, the multiple genealogies of critical artistic research reach far beyond and are rooted in feminist, queer, antiracist, postcolonial and decolonial activisms and theory.
This tendency of artistic research to reach towards multiple sites of knowledge production occurs also within and across academic disciplinary boundaries, with many critical practices touching (on) the study of theory, film, music, technology, science or medicine.
This seminar hoped to provide a space to reflect on the value of touching fields of knowledge through material practice and what it means to transform them. The notion of touch proposed here embraces the physical and material as well as the virtual, literary and speculative. Touching/Transforming regards the power of magical thinking to transform institutions and knowledge as well as ourselves.
The text is a combination of documentary images of the two-day sessions, and a collective text composed of responses to the talk by Pauliina Feodoroff.