white writing:
technique, identity, and place in artistic research
Ben Spatz
Hartley Seminar Series
Department of Music
University of Southampton
13 November 2024
This talk introduces the monograph Race and the Forms of Knowledge (2024) and open a conversation about the ethics, materialities, and politics of arts-based practice research in the UK and beyond. The author will share a few excerpts from the book, with associated audiovisual materials, in order to ask how we can more adequately understand the relationships among technique, identity, and place in our own daily and professional practices. What is artistic (or practice) research and what do we need it to be? How does it intervene in the university as a social institution and in the broader forms of knowledge that structure our discursive worlds? And how might a radical critique of whiteness — launched from many points, including the ongoing emergence of practice research — be necessary in order to face the current planetary moment?
Chair: Erin Johnson-Williams
Respondent: Hettie Malcomson
Link to book: Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research, Northwestern University Press (2024).
Link to Video: “whiteness” by Ben Spatz with Ilona Krawczyk, Eda Erçin, and Agnieszka Mendel, Performance Philosophy 7.2 (2022).