A work-share of field research findings and documentations of spending a month with the breaking Hochvogel /\/\ountain (AUT/DEU) and the remains of Ok glacier (ISL) in an installation form for a participative audience; In this case, the Embodied Knowledge Research Group (EKRG) of the Lectorate of the Academy of Theatre and Dance, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca and Emilie Gallier. Several non-human entities have been spread throughout an indoor studio space. Clothing, hiking equipment, a hand-poke tattoo set, sleeping bag, textiles, pencils form a group of entities that have been with me on the mountain - and glacier visits. A second group forms the audiovisual documentation (moving image, sound) of experiences and activities of hiking, climbing, slipping, tattooing, drawing. A third group consisted of books and articles in relation to ecological grief, extinction, mountaineering, time, death, absence-presence, continuing bonds, design, mountain performance and eco poetry. A fourth group consisted of rocks collected in the IJmeer in February 2024, forming miniature mountains.
The participants received a short introduction on the field research and that every part of the installation is an invitation or a score for making some work in the broadest sense, movement, reading out loud, talk, discuss, draw, write, frottage technique, wearing the clothes, wrapping the textures, moving (with) each element, observing, listening, touching, smelling, tasting. It has been a first step towards sharing "affective data" through embodied practices that possibly could, but don't have to, result in visuals or sound.
The session's duration was around two hours of everybody exploring and working with the installation and all elements, of which the final thirty minutes merged into a rather presentation form, or a verbal discussion in which specific occurring questions regarding experiences of the field research have been answered. This lead to a feedback round on the EKRG members' experiences, findings, comments. The experience has been described as emotional in both, a sad and joyful way, beautiful, based on the elements being present in the installation, while my body has been absent, or absent-present. "The absent body was here", as participant Maria Ines Villasmil had put it in her "result" (see photo in the attachments). My absence has been described as sad, something that has passed, while another participant found this the beauty of it, the present elements are seen in the documentation clips and are worn by me. The next steps will be on investigating how to play with the idea of an absence-presence and relate this to ecological loss and grief as wel as to environmental exhaustion and the climate crisis from human and more-than human perspectives. How to bring the this affective and intense experiences in building an intimate relation with the mountain to different audiences as a "miniature allegory" of (the realization of) the anthropogenic* climate crisis in order to build closer relationships with the environment on the long term.
During the feedback part we discussed what, or how, elements of this installation can be seen as data, (how) are they portable, how to document them, with who do you share it and when? What are your research ethics?
Feedback:
Maria Ines: "Everybody here has a certain experience in this installation. This experience is data. Not binary, just experience. There is a lot of data coming out of this room, intriguing us, through sensation, physicalities. I forgot to mention the scent when you opened the room, this is data. How will you document this experience? But I think it is a little bit unconventional to them (scientific researchers), they are expecting numbers." Another participant added that in in “scientific research there is an object-subject relationship where you keep your distance, analyze the research object and write about it. You are totally striking this out because you are putting your body in it and you are getting your data by doing, by feeling. How you act as a researcher and how you engage with your research interest (instead of calling it research object), is probably not what people are used to. Ethics, data, portable, not-portable, how do you share an embodied experience?”
Considering ethics in relation to data management in a university context, Marijn de Langen was interested in my research ethics: “They are pretty advanced. The amount of care that you have for the mountain, for the nature, for the stones, and I was about to say for your own body; and then I hesitated, as it is very daring what you do Sometimes I am feeling like a worried mother, when I see you rolling down (the snow) or standing on that plateaus. Glad he survived. It triggers and I am not sure I am the only one thinking like this. At the same time there is a lot of care of your own body, in a weird way. I think you have a very ethical way of working with data. You are very conscious about: what to take from the mountain? Am I allowed to take it? What does the “taken” do here in this environment? What do I give back to the mountain? That’s a valuable part of what you are developing, also a result."
The form of how to access the data was up to every participant themselves, as I had not given instructions. As one participant put it afterwards “You are not forced to a certain form of engagement, but you can choose and feel, for engagement that calls: the room calls, the rock calls, the book calls.” Earlier Zeynep mentioned there was the time to relate to any body in the room in your own time. The whole installation setting was described by Emilie Gallier as “invitations for various movements.
The work-share gave a first idea on how to further deal with "affective" or "embodied" data in artistic research and how to document and share it ethically. It questions data as being something purely measurable and opens the discussion how or if there is a "universal" way of sharing it or, due to its relational core, if it is rather a way to be shared differently depending on location, time, participants and more.
