ABOUT THIS SITE >>> This site is a blog as well as an archive. It gives visibility to the continues working of radical_hope, its current move to radical_house, the research project Distraction As Discipline (2016 - 2019) and the process of OTÇOE - works for passers-by, a working trajectory (2013 and 2014).
radical_house is a long term project and has a threefold nature: it presents a physical place, a framework and a logic. When in 2013 teaching and mentoring became an extension of Langsdorf's artistic practices now radical_house stems from her pedagogical experience where 'being in dialogue' with others is her main principle.
Distraction As Discipline is
an investigation into enactivist principles in art and education
(research trajectory at KASK School
of Arts Ghent 2016-19). It considers the potential of performance art and
pedagogy in general, in resisting the current and massive
desubjectivation, by critically reclaiming both, attention for the moment and participation in a process.
OTÇOE - works for passers-by was the development of radical_hope's artistic practice in the city and questioned how and by whom this practice (and its bodily, social and economical aspects) is perceived. The title refers to the public of a city and to how we encounter and register most things on our way through the city: Out of The Corner of Our Eyes. OTÇOE.
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DISTRACTION AS DISCIPLINE 2016-19
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Distraction as Discipline
An investigation into the function of attention and participation in performance art, art pedagogy, artists texts, writing and thinking practices.
[research project || KASK School of Arts / Ghent 2016 - 2019
researchers || Heike Langsdorf, Anna Luyten
outside-eye, co-editor || Alex Arteaga
project coordination || Kristof Van Gestel]
"... Performance studies have a huge appetite for encountering, even inventing, new kinds of performing while insisting that cultural knowledge can never be complete," (...) "If performance studies were an art, it would be avant-garde. Projects within performance studies or act on or act against strictly ordered or settled hierarchies of ideas, organizations or people. Therefore, it is hard to imagine performance studies getting its act together or ever wanting to." (Richard Schechner, 1934 - present)
Can we find the resistant potential of art and art pedagogy, in times of massive desubjectification, in a critical reclaiming of attention and participation?
Wandering as thinking, as doing, as daring. Allowing for coincidences, mistakes and failures. What does that mean for an artist in times aspiring for high efficiency and where can it lead to?
In this research, performance artist Heike Langsdorf and theoretician Anna Luyten want to expand on a methodology that both of them apply in their artistic and educational practice: they want to elaborate on the value that can stem from 'being distracted' and equally investigate the significance of a certain kind of attention coming along with this.
Both depart with and in the same time question the method of participation: to actively participate and let others participate in artistic processes while acknowledging the consequences of that. It is a process of discretely embedding oneself in a reality, a physical or mental landscape, and finding one's way there. That leads to winding roads that can not cope with one single discourse. Their methodological problem is making them search for the significance of attention that is verbal, textual or corporeal, that is a focused distraction, an open system or play.
How can we translate attentive distraction in a digital age?
The study consists of three pillars:
* A: a studio, * B: performance-work and * C: theory as practice.
In this triptych the problem is investigated respectively in a different way. The three pillars nourish one-another and allow for various forms of interaction.
In the studio, both researchers want to work with others, not only on the meaning of 'distraction', 'attention' and the 'participatory' in their investigations and other artistic practices, but also on its pedagogical relevance. Also here participation is a methodological key word. With 'Performance as Discrete Device' Langsdorf examines the critical approach of attention and participation in her own work (passed and current). With 'Attentive Distraction' Luyten explores facets of the same attention, participation and being astray, and the way one can communicate about, reflect on and theorize art practices.
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