WHITE ETHICS: RACE, METHOD, AND ARTISTIC RESEARCH
Hosted by the (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics project
Thursday 30th March @ 11am in Graz (online)
This seminar will consider how the project of artistic research could be reframed by a decolonial understanding of history and the present.
A methodology of productive deflation will be used to examine the structural, institutional, and atmospheric whiteness of european artistic research, simultaneously rejecting its implicit claims to universality and reactivating its potential politics as a mode of critical whiteness practice.
We will ask:
- What happens when racialization and coloniality are taken as fundamental aspects of the given conditions or experimental apparatus that underpins artistic research?
- What happens when we assume not only that our identities are constructed by our practical techniques (as social theory and performance studies have long argued), but also that our epistemic techniques arise out of our embodied and emplaced identities?
- How can the naming of whiteness — as in critical black studies, critical indigenous studies, and critical whiteness studies — help us to link thedynamic introspective and micropolitical ethics of artistic research with broader social and political movements?
The seminar will be organized around material from Spatz’s artistic research and from their forthcoming monograph Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research (Northwestern University Press).
