{"id":5870,"date":"2019-12-31T09:21:55","date_gmt":"2019-12-31T09:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/?p=5870"},"modified":"2020-03-02T22:46:34","modified_gmt":"2020-03-02T22:46:34","slug":"luisa-greenfield-et-al-eds-artistic-research-being-there-explorations-into-the-local-aarhus-nsu-press-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/volume-15-no-1-2020\/book-review-volume-15-no-1-2020\/luisa-greenfield-et-al-eds-artistic-research-being-there-explorations-into-the-local-aarhus-nsu-press-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Luisa Greenfield et al. (eds.), Artistic Research: Being There, Explorations into the Local (Aarhus: NSU Press, 2017)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\t
\n\n\t\t<\/i><\/span> <\/a>\n\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n

To perceive what remains hidden in our lives, to identify what we take for granted, to find ways to look more critically at our surroundings and ourselves, and to grasp what distinguishes this place from every other place. Perhaps these are the resonances of art practices and research that are grounded in the idea of the local<\/em>. (\u201cIntroduction\u201d 7)<\/p>\n

The opening lines of Artistic Research: Being There, Explorations into the Local <\/em>establishes a tension that persists through the volume: being somewhere\u2014experiencing the local\u2014and being involved in the creative process embodies the possible, the perchance, and the process.\u00a0 There are, however, other aspects to the contingency outlined above, those of displacement, itineracy, and loss.\u00a0 The editors acknowledge this tension by defining the local as an idea that \u201cfocuses on the strategies that allow one to become rooted in each place even when in the throes of transition\u201d (9).\u00a0 And for almost all of the artists whose work constitutes what is, in effect, a larger and collective creative project, the idea of transition, of change, and of movement, is connected to experiences of mourning and yearning.<\/p>\n

Place, locality, the local: each iteration is an intimate discursive space for communication and communion with times, people, things, and ideas that are either now elsewhere or still in the process of becoming. By foregrounding \u201cbeing there,\u201d the artists and researchers of the Nordic Summer University (NSU) unavoidably ask the reciprocal question: what does it mean to not be somewhere else?\u00a0 As for an answer, taken together, the collection\u2019s essays and creative projects seem to offer the following: everything is relational. There is no local without the global, no citizen without a stranger, no present without the past, no art without resistance, no I without thou.\u00a0 In the Preface \u201cBeing T\/here,\u201d Robert Mock gestures to this point when he describes the essays in the collection as \u201cutopian performances\u201d that offer \u201cfleeting glimpses of the \u2018potential of elsewhere\u2019\u201d (24; Dolan 5 quoted in Mock 24).\u00a0 The idea of \u201celsewhere,\u201d then, can only exist if there is a here, a locality from which to look out from and imagine a collective whole. Being in a state of \u201creceptive relation to an other <\/em>space\u201d drives the production of the creative works within Being There<\/em> and unifies them, at the same time (Greenfield 27).<\/p>\n

The interconnected sense of mourning and yearning that permeates the writing and haunts the performances may stem from the collaborative nature of the NSU; each artist is always aware of their larger role in a bigger project and, consequently, always aware of both the presence and absence of their fellow artists and friends.\u00a0 This dual awareness appears over and again in the writing and serves as a unifying core to the work, perhaps nowhere more obvious than in \u201cWindows. A Correspondence Between Elina Saloranta and Myna Trustram,\u201d which is a standout piece in the collection. While each woman is undergoing their own process of mourning\u2014one, a marriage and the other, a death\u2014both are yearning for each other\u2019s letters, for the relational interaction that helps form and give meaning to their artistic production and their individual experiences of the local as a moveable place for healing and comfort.\u00a0 There is a real intimacy in the exchange of letters across space and time, albeit mostly in email form, that transposes the sense of the local from a place of potential isolation (meaning, if you are there, and I am here, we are apart) to a movable and shared experience: \u201cSo, in the correspondence the two women move between the immediate (the green chair) and the distant (the geographical distance between them, their different responses to loss and so on).\u00a0 Where do they locate their losses?\u201d (111). \u00a0For Saloranta and Trustram their losses are indeed located, they reside both within and in places.<\/p>\n

The titles of the collection\u2019s three sections, \u201cItinerant Locals,\u201d \u201cPlacing the In-between,\u201d and \u201cEncountering a Singular Place,\u201d help narrow the ambitious scope of the work. In \u201cItinerant Locals,\u201d for example, both Per Roar\u2019s \u201cDocudancing the Local,\u201d and Ami Sk\u00e5nberg Dahlstedt\u2019s \u201cSuriashi,\u201d link the local with the dancing and choreographic body and, in similar ways, conscientiously query the nature and effects of the translation of culture from a local-historic-specific context to someplace else. Additionally, because of the deeply personal stories from which their projects arise, the moving body becomes a vessel for remembrance, an iteration of the local that resonates throughout the collection. The related ideas of \u201cslipping\u201d in \u201cMicropracticing the Local\u201d and \u201cspontaneity\u201d in \u201cFun Palaces,\u201d each speak to the generative value of repetition with difference, another subtext to the collection as a whole that is introduced early in these more theoretical essays and which resonates especially well with Maggie Jackson\u2019s rumination on possession and migrancy in \u201cOn the Road Again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jackson\u2019s essay, like the other middle essays of the collection, is most overtly concerned with what I mention at the outset as the shadow side of the \u201cbeing t\/here\u201d binary\u2014migrancy, refugeeism, displacement, or, to use Eduardo Abrantes\u2019 own words, the \u201ccontrast between the idealized wanderer who departs to gain the world she has not yet seen but dreamt of, and the refugee whose utopic dream is born of the violent eradication from the world she knew\u201d (91). Balancing this contrast is perhaps the collection\u2019s greatest challenge and feat, which is successful only because of its constant state of self-awareness and self-correction. The images of the compass and the semi-obscured billboard that reads \u201cHave No Home\u2026Keep Driving,\u201d in Larissa Lily\u2019s \u201cMeanwhile in Another Town,\u201d make the shadow side of the local unmistakable. The break from first person to third person narrative in Luisa Greenfield\u2019s \u201cMilena\u201d also speaks to this hard truth: sometimes, the weight of history causes a rupture, driving us from ourselves and from the places, the localities, where one cannot separate what has happened from what is happening\u2014\u201cthis could be anywhere\u201d (131).\u00a0 For the woman in \u201cMilena,\u201d walking into the water, forcing herself into a present and place that feels<\/em> different, even though it may be the literal embodiment of what she is attempting to escape, is what allows her to remain, to endure.<\/p>\n

The collection\u2019s final section focuses on these particular places, both within and outside the context of the familiar.\u00a0 \u201cI am writing in this place where I am,\u201d writes Alexandra Litaker in \u201cWe All Have Such Islands.\u201d\u00a0 To focus on being in the immediate experience of place is to perceive how Seamus Heaney\u2019s \u201ccold floor\u201d or Wordsworth\u2019s oars touching, breaking, entering, and leaving the dark waters of Ullswater Lake can produce a type of knowing otherwise obscured.\u00a0 Cecilia Lagerstr\u00f6m\u2019s \u201cSpies of Everyday\u201d and Eduardo Abrantes\u2019 \u201cLocal Sound Families and a Choir in Estonia\u201d both return to the idea of relationality and the artist\u2019s de-centered position as one who \u201cpatiently responds to events in the surroundings (Lavery 45, quoted in Lagerstr\u00f6m 154). Attentive walking and performance writing are mutually generative artistic processes for Lagerstr\u00f6m and develop what she identifies as the creative tools of \u201cboth closeness (recognition) and estrangement (distance)\u201d (157). \u00a0These \u201cobservant moments\u201d (cold floor, oars on the water, \u201cgreet the beggar\u201d) waver between closeness and distance, recognition and estrangement, here and there (156). \u201cNear and far,\u201d Eduardo Abrantes writes, \u201cat different pitches, the animal voices, simultaneously glorious and eerie, entered into an uncanny and undecipherable dialogue with the Northern Lights\u201d (178). \u00a0Abrantes\u2019 exploration of \u201clocal sound families\u201d examines the uniqueness of particular soundscapes, meaning groupings of sounds dependent on and emergent from a particular place (170). Yet, his powerful penultimate essay is equally about recognizing the \u201cradical interdependence\u201d of any given locality, regarding both its constituent parts and its alterity. His extension of the soundscape family to the animal world speaks to this recognition:<\/p>\n

The soundscape of that situated place at that moment, the local sounds experienced \u2026and their interrelationships, fully expressed their radical interdependence that, if interfered with, can make whole species extinct, or conversely, can awaken a strong sense of immersive co-habitation, of full and engaged ecological interconnection in its widest implications<\/em>. \u00a0(178-179)<\/p>\n

Dialogue, interrelationships, interdependence, a surmise that humanity seems to need reminding of again and again\u2014we are all connected and interdependent even when we are apart. Perhaps, a more fitting title for the collection would have been Being T\/here<\/em>, the back slash a visual representation of our mourning, of our yearning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of the book: Luisa Greenfield et al. (eds.), Artistic Research: Being There, Explorations into the Local (Aarhus: NSU Press, 2017)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":332,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1728],"tags":[129,139,1855],"coauthors":[1108],"class_list":["post-5870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review-volume-15-no-1-2020","tag-art","tag-migration","tag-performance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/332"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5870"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6003,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5870\/revisions\/6003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5870"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}