Month: May 2020

The third Harvard/PSL workshop, held at Harvard on 26 and 27 February 2020 was part of an exchange between Harvard University and the SACRe laboratory of PSL University (Paris), and aimed at questioning the process of practice-based research in the context of research-creation.

We do not intend to report here the detailed interventions of the four Harvard doctoral students (Amanda Gann, Seiyoun Jang, Julia Sharp, Javier Nueno) and the three PSL doctoral students (Léandre Bernard-Brunel, Joseph Minster, Geoffrey Rouge-Cassarat): each of us was invited to present his or her work, and for several of us, the work presented was at a relatively early stage.

However, we can draw some lessons from the discussions we had about the questions raised by research-creation – questions that the workshop was not, of course, intended to answer, but rather to identify, in order to guide our reflection in the years to come.

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In late February, I had the chance to discuss my artist practice as part of the PSL-Harvard workshop “Inquiry through Practice.” For me, what remains from the two-day workshop is the exchange of ideas and newfound friendship not only with the visiting cohort from PSL––Joseph Minster, Leandre Bernard-Brunel, and Geoffrey Rouge-Carrassat ––but also with fellow graduate students at Harvard––Amanda Gann and Seiyoung Jang (not to mention the ongoing collaboration between everyone who formally and informally participated: researchers, faculty, administrators, and students).

Everyone’s presentation took a different form: Seiyoung performed electronic sound, highlighting its relation to the body; Amanda took us through an emotional history of death in the theatre, acting out the role of death herself; Geoffrey led us through his practice as a director, blurring the line between game and play; Leandre screened his documentary, an ethnographic search for ghosts; Joseph showed his films as variations on the reality of the Alps; I showed my personal image and writing archive. Xavier Nueno presented his paper “On Independent Investigations in the Age of the University-Corporation” as a way to tie our practices together, and other audience members, including Critical Media Practice students, participated in lively discussions on how to define and frame “research” “practice” “archive” “experience” “institution.”

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