On 30.06.2022, Marina Gržinić gave a lecture at the 13th SAR Conference online on “Convivial Epistemologies.” The lecture proposal was submitted together with Jovita Pristovšek and Sophie Uitz.
The 13th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research took place from 30th of June until 3rd of July, 2022, for the first time in Germany at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. The conference consisted of a 24-hour online event and three days of live, on-site events in Weimar.
The SAR 2022 conference presented the state of the art in Artistic Research, as critically responding to the Frascati Manual and the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research: excellent research through means of high-level artistic practice and reflection; an epistemic inquiry, directed towards increasing knowledge, insight, understanding and skills.
CONVIVIAL EPISTEMOLOGIES
(LECTURE ABSTRACT)
The last decade has witnessed a metamorphosis of collaborative development of a new definition and practice of conviviality as a positive and affirmative act of agency for change. However, the global capitalist world and its processes of racialization and neocolonialism systematically oppose the possibility of conviviality. Moreover, the pandemic has reinforced this structural inequality while creating another barrier to conviviality.
In May 2021, we launched the FWF-PEEK project, “Conviviality as Potentiality: from Amnesia and Pandemic towards a Convivial Epistemology” (AR679), hosted by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. After an initial theoretical investigation on conviviality, we put the theoretical analysis of concepts into practice. With various marginalized communities, LGBT*QIA+, minorities, BIPOC, Black people, refugees, migrants, activists, and grassroots organizations, we have engaged in encounters and intimate interactions to explore and codevelop (artistic) practices that have the potential to intervene in these disruptive dynamics. We start from the assumption that art-based research can act as a “tool for conviviality” to negotiate the uncertainties and obstacles of “living together in real-time” by engaging with practices, vocabularies, and artistic and knowledge-based methods.
Through these encounters, working within and negotiating the structural and material constraints of coming together in proximity, we have engaged in the process of co-creating convivial epistemologies. We decided to record the statements, the different thoughts interacting, the sounds surrounding the encounters, the silences, the temporality in the air, took the podcast format, and began developing an experimental fictional docu-research on the potential of plural languages and experiences for building future communities of resistance under and against neoliberal global capitalism, structural racism, and racialization.