Transdisciplinary Art-based Research 155.904
Course lecturer, Rose-Anne Gush
From where do we sit or stand when we think and write about history? How does our location affect our view on the past? What do these spaces mean? What kind of objects inform our view? What barriers, walls or divisions obscure it? What from the past is not past? How do we grapple with the archive, its power and authority, how it limits what can be known and whose perspective it elevates, who it deems an historical actor? How do we resist, rupture and disrupt this authority? Guided by such questions, and considering for whom we develop our research, in this course we will explore the merits of discipline and becoming undisciplined in our approach to research. Drawing on work by authors such as Saidiya Hartman, Dionne Brand, Donna Haraway, Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh, as well as artistic and field research, we will explore radical social history made of ‘beautiful experiments’ (Hartman) and history from below, as well as situated knowledges, as methodologies that engage in plotting and mapping narratives that struggle against the violent and inhuman history of capitalist modernity. Within this course, students will develop projects based on their chosen archives, traversing the limits of art based investigation.