The Research Day 2024 of the Academy presents the range of current research activities at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, gives insights into specific projects and their results, and encourages collegial discussions. The Research Day focuses on presentations of research projects in advanced stages. In this context we made a presentation focusing on the first thematic cluster within our artistic-research project.

Below you will find a comprehensive transcript of our presentation together with the slides we showed during the presentation.

This project, titled “W/ri/gh/ting Archives through Artistic Research,” is co-led by us, two researching artists who, individually and collaboratively, had engaged with both working with/in archives and archiving/archival work.

Rafał Morusiewicz comes from the Academy’s PhD-in-Practice context, in which they designed and practiced artistic-research methods of queering archival research, deriving from the music-based practice of remixing with a specific focus on film. Guilherme Maggessi developed his interest in the archive through an engagement with orientalist painting through his own artistic-research project within his Master in Critical Studies thesis that examined the meeting between two artworks in the Ägyptisch-Orientalische Sammlung of the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

We started our collaboration in mid-2020, and, since then, we worked on conceptualizing and running projects where we were interested in investigating how the meeting of our positions generatively complicates issues of representation, narration, medium, and materiality in relation to archives and archival research. One thing that we share in our practices is a feeling of ambivalence towards the materials that we use: while our practices draw material and inspiration from multiple archives, we also recognize that archives are frequently sites of heterogeneous violence, which we are curious in finding ways to address.

One starting operational idea for this artistic-research project was to extend our critical attention toward studying the relationship between conducting artistic research dedicated to archives and performing the work of archiving in artistic ways. For this purpose, we formulated a theoretical framework that combines theories, ideas, methods, and political agendas that we derived from texts written in the intersecting fields of queer studies, post- and anticolonial studies, applied human rights, and critical archival studies. The main two motivations that we wish to communicate through this framework are: (1) to think of archives as relational entities, and, while doing so, (2) to practice doing research through art: to conceptualize and perform research-based activity that would have artistic practice as its epistemology, i.e. as the agent of generating knowledge and meaning.

One key theoretical influence, which is immediately visible in the project’s title, comes from a research essay titled “A Glossary of Haunting,” written by Eve Tuck and C. Ree. Interested in the methods of engaging with colonial archives, the authors write about a few intersecting intentions that they caught with a trifecta of partly-homonymous phrases: “wronging the wrongs” (which can mean: perpetuating violence by focusing on stories of violence that bring no resolution to or resolve violence) “righting the wrongs” (which can mean: working towards justice, understood as a way of compensating for or offering retributions for instances of violence), and “writing the wrongs” (which can mean: narrating stories of violence). One among many ideas in this text that were interesting to us was the authors’ reflection on the very possibility (and therefore meaning) of attaining or imagining social justice, also in relation to revenge or retaliation, which the authors describe as “a form of double-wronging” that is “dangerous, mercenary, terrorizing,” and yet it is an action frequently undertaken due to the realization that “righting wrongs is so rare,” that “[j]ustice is so fleeting,” that “there are crimes that are too wrong to right.” This framework of ideas that the authors present was important for us while conceptualizing this project, since it concerns what we define as the “generative” value of this project’s aim of staying with archival violence for the purpose of transforming it into something positive. We read the distinction between “righting the wrongs” and “writing the wrongs” as fascinatingly blurry and inevitably intersecting. We observe that the former stems from the need of intervention, from a realization that violence takes place and that archives are its product. On the other hand, “writing the wrongs,” which are also guided by the demand for social justice, shifts the focus towards reflecting on possible forms of representation and narration, through which archival violence could be grasped, yet not perpetuated. The latter assumes consensual and cooperative action towards a mutually satisfactory goal that either starts from scratch or reroutes a problematic setting towards a collaboratively negotiated outcome. In this project, righting the wrongs and writing the wrongs converge into the methodology of “w/ri/gh/ting archives.”

Let’s briefly address the second half of our project’s title, which names “artistic research,” that is the discipline within which we promised to operate. As a discipline, it shares a lot of characteristics, agendas, and operational procedures with what is conventionally described as “scientific research.” A helpful starting point for us to define “artistic research” was the description by Julian Klein, the director of Berlin’s Institute for Artistic Research. His definition says: “to be artistic, research does not have to be carried out by artists but needs to involve, in its process and/or manifestation, a mode of artistic experience.” This description corresponds to the UNESCO definition of “research,” which encompasses “any creative systematic activity undertaken in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture and society, and the use of this knowledge to devise new applications.” What this definition implies is that any research activity assumes the researcher’s recognition of their inherent “not-yetknowing,” which is also accompanied by their motivation toward “knowledge enhancement.” Defined in this way, artistic research may take on several modalities, which derive from the following binary distinction. According to the first one, artistic research can be an artistic expression that is based on research or is generated through research-based methods. According to the second, artistic research can be an artistic expression whose manifestation is research. The latter may be synonymous with the phrase “research as art,” according to which research may become artistic through the adoption of research methods and questions. Klein also points here to the list of modalities in which research can be made artistic, and these are: motivation, reflection, discussion, conception, composition, implementation, publication, evaluation, and the discourse that it generates. What complicates this seemingly clean distinction is what Klein claims elsewhere in the text: that artistic research can “always a/so be scientific research,” since it is inherently interdisciplinary. Apart from Klein’s definition, we have also acknowledged other definitions of the field in our project. One comes from Janneke Wesseling, who offers a distinction between what she calls “research into art” and “artistic research.” The first term (“research into art”) denotes a theory-based or theorizing investigation into artistic practice, which is characteristic of art history and cultural studies. The second term (“artistic research”) implies an effort to reach something of an equilibrium between theoretical reflection and practical action, with none of the two gaining more prominence overall. Another important aspect that Wesseling points to is that any research, be it artistic or scientific, needs to be given a public and public-domain presentation form, which is also what we’re doing here right now. This is to say, whatever is researched needs to be discussed publicly in order to “yield fresh insights, not merely into one’s personal work but for art in a broader sense as well.” One more definition of artistic research comes from a seminal book by Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta, and Tere Vaden, for whom artistic research needs to revolve around an art work. Such art work is, therefore, a primary source, raw material which serves the purpose of generating meaning and knowledge through what the three authors call “artistic experientiality,” which they place at the “core of the research” and its transmission and dissemination. This definition is also key to our project because it points to the importance of the awareness of the historical and disciplinary context of one’s research, which also corresponds to the idea of situatedness, both of which the authors recognize as key qualities and critical interests for artistic research activity. What they propose is that this awareness needs to be practiced and made present through employing “diverse research methods, presentation methods and communication tools” and generating knowledge about “the social, social-psychological and psychological, … political and pedagogical meaning of art.”

With this in mind, we thought of this project as an ongoing and process-based practice of artistic-research methods of doing archival research. We assumed that the methodology with which we enter the project would be continuously updated on the basis of the knowledge generated through the methods, outcomes, and collaborations, planned for each of its stages. For the latter, we came up with two main forms of collaborations: (1) Co_Labs, which we planned as three several month- long collaborative laboratories, where we wanted to invite and collaborate with a few researching artists and institutions while conceptualizing, completing, and presenting each Co_Lab’s outcome. While we planned specific outcomes for each Co_Lab, opting initially for conventional artistic-research formats, such as exhibitions, publications, and workshops, which then became more idiosyncratic and “organically” attached to the working process, through which they originated. The second form of collaboration, was Net_Works, designed as one-month webbased residency programs, where we invite singular researching artists to present and practice their positions in sound art, writing, and community-building work. We planned each of these three residencies to happen near the end of each Co_Lab so that the invited artists could engage with the material that we had generated.

Let’s move on to the first Co_Lab. We will briefly discuss its methodology, working process, and outcomes. In terms of topical orientation, Co_Lab #1 was built around the underlying theme and object of research that was “personal archive.” This is a concept that we delineated broadly: as spaces, objects, memories, and other ephemera and paraphernalia that are, at the moment of being discussed, “archives-in-becoming.” What came about partly as the result of the last-minute time-structure changes to our initial proposal became, in hindsight, extremely valuable to the whole working process, as, in this way, we started our critical reflection on archives and archival work from the perspective of closeness. The adjective “personal” implies a certain intimacy or a relational intensity between such archives and individuals or communities to whom the former are “personal.” This relation may signal a sense of ownership, affective attachment, or a feeling of responsibility for them. These were the qualities that we were interested in reflecting on and, through this, finding modes of research-based expression.

With this focus, Co_Lab #1 was designed as a collaborative process leading toward an artistic format of expression, thought of, from the start, as a crossover of workshop and exhibition. When we were looking for a conceptual entry point to Co_Lab #1 at the beginning of 2023, we wanted to create a framework through which we would engage with the project’s main research questions. Through a series of exchanges and discussions with the Co_Lab #1’s core participants, we eventually landed on the format of arts-based assignments, which we found inspiring for short workshop formats, which, as we decided, each of us would formulate and assign each other over the course of a few weeks.

We chose this format inspired by Wicked Arts Assignments (2021), a book collection of arts assignments edited by Emiel Heijnen and Melissa Bremmer. The book presents a series of assignments along with several essays and interviews, authored by arts-based educators who use this format in their teaching and researching practices. The interviews provide valuable insights into situated practices that are designed around the collaborative, process-oriented artisticeducational activity. In one of them, for instance, author Nina Paim points to Paulo Freire and bell hooks as the underlying theoretical references for thinking of the arts assignment format as unlocking the “emancipatory” potential of education. In a similar vein, Heijnen and Bremmer point out that arts assignments are already present in educational curricula, though their presence is liminal: they function as “scores, instructions, prompts, and briefs.” Conceived in this way, arts assignments play the role of theatre-text didascaliae, a backbone to “a living curriculum that is personal, dynamic, and embodied.” With their open-endedness, process-based orientation, and outcome unpredictability, arts assignments offer an element of intellectual and structural surprise, balancing the focus on summative (end-of-term, end-of-year, end-of-assignment} feedback, i.e. the curricular design where all activities lead toward the end-of-term grade, conceived as the key (if not the only} element of student assessment. Through their focus on language-based description, arts assignments provide pedagogic balance to disciplines, such as performing arts, which employ embodied teaching practices, where communication, “directions, prompts, and coaching strategies” are physical, and therefore not written or verbal.

We chose arts assignments as the recurring format of knowledge production in this first Co_Lab, as it seemed fit to respond to the entry-point assumption that started our collaboration. Our aim was to perform research-based artistic activity, with, to, and around a number of objects, concepts, and ideas that each participant would bring along as a representation or example of what they consider to be their “personal archive.” The use of the word “archive” in this context was oriented more towards an unspecified future: we thought of these objects as being part of archives in the making or as belonging to a future archive of some sorts. This was a frighteningly open-ended premise. Our intention was to stay with the possibly uncomfortable tensions generated in the moments of unknowing and of theory- and practice-based ephemerality that would inevitably occur when imagining that such objects belong to an abstract yet confining framework of an archive. Despite this declared openness, we had a few tentative premises set from the beginning. Early on, we decided that the first Co_Lab would conclude with an exhibition that would, somehow, display the results of the several-month-long collaborative research session. We knew that we would like to ask each participant to bring along an object (material or ephemeral) that would be representative of the idea of a “personal archive” and that, during the process, would lead, somehow, to a form of expression that would find its place in Co_Lab #1’s final presentation.

We also wanted to employ the format of artistic assignments to explore the possibilities of critically “exhausting” the objects and the contexts around them. It was important for us to design the tasks through which we aimed to engage with the participants and their selected objects in a way that would be specific and yet open, that would acknowledge the parameters that defined the task’s completion {which, in this case, was the last workshop and exhibition, each of which had specific and narrow timeframes), and, more abstractly, that would somehow pertain to the broad thematic fields {or axes of interest) that we pre-defined in the project’s proposal as the themes pertaining to archive-based research: accessibility {who can access whose “personal archives” and how this access is facilitated), narration {what and whose stories are told through which narrative methods and tropes), and attention {what and under which conditions can be thought of as “archival”). We also wanted to reflect on what it would mean for each invited participant to leave behind, at least temporarily, in an exhibition space, a part of what they would think of as their “personal archive.” Since the objects that each of them thought of as personal possessions were to become the lead actors in the envisioned exhibition, we wanted to reflect not only on framing them within the broad concept of a “personal archive,” but also on figuring out what each of us wanted from this situation, not only individually but also as a group, an amalgam of different relational intensities, affective affinities, and project-related responsibilities, each of which would also be dependent on different modalities, irregular intervals, and fluctuating sets of our interactions and meetings.

We planned our project so that each Co_Lab takes place in the context of a collaboration with one of our project’s cooperation partners. In the case of Co_Lab #1 and our project’s first year, we collaborated with queerANarchive, an NGO based in Split {HR), working in the field of cultural production and LGBTIAQ+ advocacy. queerANarchive manages the LGBT Centar in Split, a community center that presents and hosts art projects, film screenings, gatherings, a radio program, and other community-centred gatherings. Apart from that, queerANarchive organizes exhibitions, performance evenings, and club nights in Split’s Dom Mladih, at the MKC Gallery and Club Kocka. In our project, queerANarchive was represented by its coordinator and artistic researcher, Tonci Kranjcevic Batalic.

It needs to be mentioned here that choosing queerANarchive as the institutional collaborator for our project’s first year was partly a pragmatic choice. Our two other cooperation partners, originally scheduled in the first two years, had experienced some location and infrastructural changes, due to which we could engage them at the scope that we needed only in the project’s second and third year. But this shift, which also informed the conceptual changes to the project’s originally planned dramaturgy, turned out to be beneficial, also because we could start the process by working with an association that we had already been well acquainted with due to a few prior collaborations.

The same was the case when it came to the other participants of the first Co_Lab: Selina Shirin Stritzel (theatre maker, political education worker, and transmedia artist) and Mika Maruyama (writer, curator, researcher, part of Mai Ling). Both of them are artists and cultural producers whose practice we had known for several years before starting the project. As a group of five people, we started discussing around the ways of conceptualizing this Co_Lab in early 2023. Apart from regular zoom meetings, we convened a three-day working group meeting in Vienna in March 2023, where we brainstormed around the keyword of “personal archives,” which we planned to be our orientation for this Co_Lab. It was important for us to map out, as both of us had done earlier in the application writing process, the theory-based concepts and examples of practices through which we would shape our working process for several months ahead. In June 2023, our group increased up to ten people, with another five participants brought to this stage of the project through an open call issued by Tonci Kranjcevic Batalic: Vlad Beronja, Josip Knezevic, Ivana Serie, Petar Vranjkovic, and David Wilhelm.

The conclusion of the working process of Co_Lab #1 came in September, with four workshop weeks organized at Exhibit Eschenbachgasse in Vienna. We didn’t spend this time working as the whole group of 10 people, but instead we designed working sessions revolving around clusters of 2-3 participants, whom we brought to Vienna for one week. These sessions had always one “public” day (Wednesday), when we opened the space and the process to the public and hosted a discussion/presentation session of our group’s participants and of invited guests from Vienna, whose practices, we assumed, would create a dialogue with the practices of our group’s individual participants. The Vienna-based guests included Ari Ban, Georgia Holz, and Herbert Justnik. This four-week workshop session was concluded with a short exhibition, titled “An Archive, a Body, an Album, and a Story,” which we launched for one week at the beginning of October, where we presented the works generated through the workshop sessions, together with several film- and video positions from invited artists whose work was key (both content- and research-wise) to some of our discussions during the workshops in Split and in Vienna. These artists included: Pol Merchan, Rebecca Jane Arthur, Mirelle Borra, Manuel Embalse, Nathália Oliveira.