A performance as a presentation of a research, April 11th, during the 9th Society for Artistic Research International Conference on Artistic Research, University of Plymouth April 11-13, 2018. Conference title: Artistic Research Will Eat Itself (ARWEI).
http://www.sarconference2018.org
As an artist engaging with issues of objecthood and personhood, with a practice consisting of performance, collaborative and performative events and interventions, I proposed a performance for ARWEI. The performance is part of, and also a way to present, a research entitled 'The Self as a Relational Infrastructure in Process', a practice-based research commissioned by the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (Caradt) at Avans University, NL. (http://www.caradt.nl). In this practice-based enquiry I am looking at the production of different versions of ourselves, the technologies and processes used to produce these versions, and how to understand the self within the existence of these multiple versions. Simultaneously it is a research into the ways in which artistic research produces specific forms of knowledge that differ from what is produced in science and philosophy. Performance is explicitly approached and activated as a research strategy: a way of thinking that involves the physical.
Technologies of versioning are the objects, the concepts and the apparatuses that transform us or replicate us, propelling different forms of ourselves into the world, or into our own minds eye. The ones that I am most interested in are those that we interact with or produce physically, or that are part of our physicality, such as the voice.
The voice is a technology of versioning: it is ready at hand, housed in our bodies yet able to travel, transform and penetrate. The performance I presented at ARWEI is called Ventriloquists III. The act of ventriloquizing is commonly called the ability to ‘throw’ one's voice. Throwing the voice can mean to give voice to an object, to another person, another version of that person or of the self. But it can also be understood as forcing one’s voice upon another, or throwing it away as in rejecting or giving one’s voice away.
In Ventriloquists III, strategies of voicing —giving voice to, throwing the voice, being voiced— are uncovered and tested and transformative objects and concepts are brought into play. In the course of this ±30-minute, partly participative, performance, it becomes clear that these strategies are in effect generating versions, lived instances of transformation and self-shaping within a discourse of plurality and relationality.
Text, concept and performance: Philippine Hoegen
Dramaturgy: Lilia Mestre
