ARCHIVE

Artistic
Research
Week 2021

Panel discussion

TRANSPOSITIONS—
JAR, Mette Edvardsen and modular diaries*
At the start, the idea for an artistic research conversation with Mette Edvardsen did not spring out of the topics shortlisted for the conference—hospitality, vulnerability and care—but a book that she had co-edited, and dropped in my shelf. I could have reviewed it. Late in 2019 I wrote a review a book called Transpositions(Schwab ed., 2018) in JAR. Though this sort of exercise is ideal to incorporate a new topic, it related to the concept ‘transpositions’ in a protocolary way: seeing the artworks discussed in the book pass in the review, rather than really inhabiting them.
Receiving Mette Edvardsen’s (& al.) book Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine(2019), I realised that I could learn something about transposition from movements within her book-material, and commit myself temporarilyto the volume with a dual approach: a)I have only one bookand it is not mine; b)a book is to be had, only as it contains several books. This quip on Derrida’s “Monolingualism of the other: or, the prosthesis of origin” (Oslo, 1994) and ties up with his ideas of hospitality, from Camille Norment pitch to the artistic research conference in 2021.
The quip will be used to host the analogiesbetween her book and a collection of modular diaries entriesthat I have been producing—and posting on KHiODA—as the C19 pandemic passed from lockdownto the present interimof health-security restrictions. The purpose of our exchange, conceived, in the genre of an ‘artistic research conversation’, will cautiously seek to compare our two materials, using vitality as a criterion for our temporary travel-companionship, on our journey through between-spaces. We want to see if we can bring some transpositions into performance. theodor.barth@khio.no

Edvardsen, Mette; van den Brande, Kristien; Pérez Royo, Victoria; Borch Skolseg, Runa. (2019). Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine—A book on reading, writing, memory and forgetting in a library of living books. Oslo Biennalen. Mousse Publishing.

*) Cf, Thompson, Chris. (2011). Felt—Fluxus, Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama. Minneapolis. Minnesota University Press.

Care as a critical investment in subject matter, performance and the substance of artistic research