Encountering Tensions Within Collaborative Artistic Inquiry: An Eco-Tracing—1

• In Event: Encountering Tensions Within Collaborative Artistic Inquiry: An Eco-Tracing

Abstract

As artist scholars in the field of arts education and curriculum, we have contextualized our research and artistic practices through performative inquiry and embodied poetic narrative in relation to ecologies of place and Indigenous ways of knowing. We recognize that improvisational encounters within our four situated and individual art practices of inquiry also create unique knowledge ecologies.
In our artistic research, we engage in site-specific performance, exploring the familiar and unfamiliar in order to disrupt the disabling constraints of the institutional, environmental, cultural, and societal spaces and practices in which we dwell.
Creative collaborative inquiry offers us as practitioners an opportunity to learn how to explore, navigate and engage co-emerging aesthetic phenomenon in reciprocal relationship to distinct ecologies; including both the human and more than human. In previous work together, we have investigated the aesthetics of vulnerability as revealed in disconnection, fragmentation, and loss experienced when individuals and communities are alienated from their natural environment through displacement and institutional, societal or cultural practices. In this research performance, we will, like jazz musicians, informed by our individual art practices (native flute, dance, and poetic narrative) take up the motif of ecological encounter in a site-specific improvisational inquiry.

Our theoretical positioning complements existing artistic practices and ways of theorizing that explore performative, embodied, indigenous and contemplative perspectives that are participatory, experiential and aesthetic (Barone & Eisner, 1997; Bagley & Cancienne, 2002; Bresler, 2004, 2007; Cajete, 1999; Denton, 2004; Diamond & Mullen, Eds., 1999; Garoian, 1999; Greene, 1995; Irwin & deCosson, 2004; Knowles & Cole, 2008; Leavy, 2008; Prendergast, Leggo, & Sameshima, 2009). Through collaborative inquiry and artistic creation, our research shifts understanding and practice from mechanical, structural frameworks to living ecological forms, metaphors and analogs.

This presentation is based on a discursive creative process whereby we are very much in response to a dynamic and emergent interface with the place and those present. We are exploring the notion of an eco tracing which situated within an indigenous understanding of research as a process that is respectful and ethically relational to place.

The intent is to inform our present and ongoing research, by evoking and provoking new understandings, while also contributing to a reimagining of collaborative arts-based research and mindful artistic practices. We will begin with our research performance, followed by dialogical inquiry among the performers and then transiting to a conversation with all those present.

This site-specific ecological encounter is part one of a presentation which will be followed by a collective layering and laying bear of the individual theororizing that informs and inspires our work . This then is followed by a dialogue with delegates to further extend and augment collaboratively the tensions and resonances that deepen the understandings of our various overlapping practices of arts based scholarship. In summary our intention is to navigate, negotiate and explore emergent tensions, resonances and affordances within the human and more than human reciprocal relations to further our understanding, appreciation and articulation of ecologies place.

Authors

• Kathryn Ann Ricketts, University of Regina

• Vicki Lynn Kelly, Simon Fraser University

• Lynn Fels, Simon Fraser University

• Celeste Snowber, Simon Fraser University