I have recently been closely considering some questions that have been posed about my residency at Altogether Otherwise, which includes the Final Fridays mark-making walks, alongside an installation.
What is happening in the relationships between myself as the facilitator, or ‘the artist’, and the people, or ‘the participants’, joining me on the Final Fridays mark-making walks? Whose choices determine what happens?
The formation of Landscape art that happens on the mark-making walks is co-created. Authorship, if such a thing can even exist, belongs to all those taking part, if at all. I am more of an artist as curator than ‘the artist’. Through my practice and my research, I am interested in the things we can all see together. I am not particularly interested in phenomenology, psychogeography, or one person’s individual response over the collective. No one person’s perspective is any better than anyone else’s. There is no value hierarchy, only variability.
Am I analysing my own practice or analysing the work of others?
Both. I am analysing the work of a dynamic collective of collaborators and co-creators, of which I am part. The work is formed through the intra-activity of the collective. We do not exist as independent agents, but co-operative and interdependent agents. The work of Karen Barad, and her theories around interrelationships has been influential to me as I continue to contextualise this dynamic.
The walks are time-based, collective, and relational landscape artworks, facilitated by me, by co-created by all those taking part. We are interdependent; not independent, intra-acting; not interacting.
The installations are both prequels and sequels. They are both a before and an after. A priori and posteriori; reactive and proactive. They activate and expand. They diffract and intra-act. They investigate the walks and become entangled with them.
Authorship of the installation is unimportant. As ‘the artist’, I am not fully in control of it and I make decisions based on the outcomes of unexpected encounters.