Waves and wigs

Waves and wigs: Cultivative processes of art and research meetings and transformations

9I. The affective in political ecologies: Arts as ways to cultivate resistance II. Wednesday 16:30 to 18:00

Presentation for Undisciplined Environments, International Conference of the European
Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE),20-24 March 2016 | Stockholm

Alison Neilson & Andrea Inocêncio
Abstract: This performative session draws from projects initiated from opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but both landed by fishers in the Azores islands. Independent of one other, but both full of art and inquiry, the researcher/artists now meet to cultivate further resistances. Alison and Andrea will share their workings-in-progress to highlight and explore ways that researchers/artists can transform their own practices to resist hegemonic and agonistic politics. Andrea will draw from À prova de fogo e de bala (fire-proof and bullet) photo-paintings made with the collaboration of 15 women, from 10 to 60 years old, who participated as models of the costumes they created to show the figure of woman as a complex social-cultural construction. These figures, in the form of comic book heroin were created from their experiences and visions, and question the place occupied by women’s images in the construction of identities as well as in cultural exchange and production. Alison will draw from EDUMAR ethnographic and autobiographic-narrative inquiry about the ways people in the Azores understand the sea. Stories elicited from photos and multiple creative collaborations were transformed creatively into flowing wet meanings in which we are invited to swim. Now together, Alison and Andrea attempt to cultivate the figure of researcher as complex, as artist and as able to creatively raise their voices over the environmental conflicts they are embedded in.

       

Extended abstract and guide to performance

“The medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1964)

“stories [are] medicine, that a story told one way could cure, that the same story told another way could injure” (King, 2003)

Set up for 2 side-by-side simultaneous presentations:
Screen/wall space 1– Video with music of making of  À prova de fogo e de bala
Screen/wall space 2 – Video of final images from  À prova de fogo e de bala

Alison and Andrea will simultaneously perform/present beside the showing of a video which has music but no speaking (this will keep them disciplined to time – 18 minutes). We request that the chairs and/or the organizers of this session accept our invitation to assist with props and encourage the “audience” to participate in the performance as well.

We recognize that all presentations or performances, including Waves and wigs are education following all three of Schugurensky’s (2000) mapping of informal forms: “self-directed” since people decide to come to the session to hear ideas/learn something about art and research, “incidental” since information about the context in which Andrea and Alison work will be shared, and “socialization” as we will re-enforce and/or disrupt ideas about research via the assumptions which are manifest in the performance. Furthermore, we believe that no presentation can be considered as merely transmitting objective description, and like education, cannot be neutral: it either supports the status quo or challenges it. We actively chose therefore, to take a popular education approach as described by Chris Cavanagh, as that which seeks “to resist unjust uses of power or, in a word, oppression”.

Our interactive performance will incorporate multimodal communication in order to simultaneously present from a completed exhibition, while performing the building of the ever-changing, but well established super-artist incognito in juxtaposition with attempts to cultivate researchers incognito. In this way, we hope that exploring a working-in-progress collaboration and the deliberate uncertain attempts at artful forms by a lesser-skilled/experienced artist, will inspire, rather than confuse, and excite both the skilled and lesser-experienced since we support this messiness with robust art performance and research experience. We aim to be undisciplined and break rules, as we understand that as researchers we embody the very oppressions that we study, so we need to acknowledge, articulate and disrupt our habits (marino, 1997).

À prova de fogo e de bala (fire-proof and bullet) was creating having in mind that women are the protagonists of socialization processes and cultural integration through the education of children, not only in the figure of woman as mother-educator and family support, but her image also has gained power in the religious, erotic and advertisement spectrum. This photo-painting exhibition created in 2008 has been displayed since 2009, but the documentary video we will show, shares the working-in-progress, which highlights ways that researchers/artists can transform their own practices to resist hegemonic and agonistic politics. Andrea made this exhibition in collaboration with 15 women (10 to 60 years old), some immigrant women from São Miguel Island and others from, AMPA, the association of wives of fishermen and ship-owners of Terceira Island, who participated as creators and models of costumes that show the figure of woman as a complex social-cultural construction. These comic book heroines were created from their experiences and visions, and question the place occupied by women’s images in the construction of identities as well as in cultural exchange and production.

While showing photo-paintings from À prova de fogo e de bala, Andrea will also show how to cultivate the figure of researcher as complex, as artist and as able to creatively raise voice over the environmental conflicts in which we are embedded. Andrea´s alter ego Super-Artista Incógnita, emerged from the previous project to spread and inspire via her spontaneous public performances, creative power throughout the world, especially with women in the midst of multiple oppressions. She awakens both the super heroes/ines and the inner child, surprising people and breaking their daily routines. During this performance, the audience will be invited to assist in the transdressing of a woman artist into the Super-Artista Incógnita.

Concurrently, Alison will attempt to perform her “ideas that are trying to come out, angrily held in check by fonts and lines and limits which build castles and careers and fences of post (and pre), keeping out the unruly who dare to challenge by attempting to cross the seas to freedom, only to be drown in the waters of the Troika, when they try to be as they do, rather than say and say and say” (Neilson, 2015, research journal). As she begins to dress as Super-Researcher Incógnita, she thinks back to days on the islands exploring what the sea means to the Azoreans for her EDUMAR postdoctoral research project.

She remembers: “The first words I hear in Portuguese are little more than a new music: compelling but mysterious in my lack of comprehension. My eyes begin to uncover stories, relationships, and feelings. I see welcome on faces as I walk on the cobble stones. I notice a closed hunch, apparently defending against the wind, a shiver, perhaps in response to the humid air. But my eyes too are sometimes confused and mislead by memories of other faces, other storied landscapes. There are so many clues to find, so many pieces of stories – some screaming at the top of their lungs, others whispering furtively” (research 2008 – 2010).

On an early trip to Pico she wrote: “I cannot decipher the conversations that cross the room but I want to know these more than those at the busier whale watching place. But I am clearly the tourist here. A card game is about to begin with a notebook opened to the next spot for a game – the players take their seats – a missing card is recovered from the top of a nearby cabinet. I write these words and observe this world, invisible to the players, the women watching and to the woman who made my coffee. Are they playing for money or for pride? Do they play because they are together or because they are together they play? I hear them counting – euchre maybe.  My presence is inconsequential” (notes from Pico, 2009).

Since arriving in the islands, I have become part of professional and personal networks, within a “small connected community” (Damianakis &Woodford, 2012). When I go to buy bread, I bump into the mayor of São Mateus who may invite me to speak at an upcoming meeting of fishers. He also asks why he has not seen me lately at the practices of the folkdance group. When Enésima and I call the community centre to arrange to speak with senior’s groups in the coming weeks, the coordinator will ask if we could pick up her uncle on our way, as he heard about our project and wants to share his stories even though he does not attend the group…

I am an insider of the communities we are studying. I eat fish; I see the ocean from my desk; I see fishing boats on the water and fishers carrying poles and buckets of freshly caught fish. But I am not a fisher, nor from a fishing family; I am from a place far from the sea coast. I am an outsider. Yet, insider and outsider are concepts too simplified and compartmentalized to be accepted uncritically as we engage in our own narrative about the narratives we see and hear. (Neilson et al., 2015)

Perhaps Alison will begin with the long black cape… What will the researchers/artists in the audience think?

References:

Cavanagh, C. (2014). A Syllabu-zine (Or Zine-abus) Popular education for social change, Part I: Theory/practice. Be passionately aware that you could be completely wrong. Unpublished syllabus ENVS 6150, Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada.

King, T. (2003). The truth about stories: A native narrative. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press.

marino, d. (1997). Wild garden – Art, education, and the culture of resistance. Toronto, ON: Between the Lines

Neilson, A.L., Bulhão Pato, C., Gabriel, R., Arroz, A.M., Mendonça, E., & Picanço, A. (2015). Speaking of the sea in the Azores islands: We sometimes went for lapas. In Filipe Themudo Barata & João Magalhães Rocha (Eds.) Heritages and Memories from the Sea, First International Conference UNESCO Chair in Intangible Heritage and Tradition Know-How: Linking Heritage. Évora. Portugal, Jan 14-16, pp. 116-129, Evora: University of Évora.

Schugurensky, D. (2000). The forms of informal learning: Towards a concceptualization of the field. WALL Working Paper, 19(February 10, 2009). Retrieved from http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/depts/sese/csew/nall/res/19formsofinformal.htm