2022
Organizer: Jagiellonian University in Krakow (dr Mateusz Chaberski)
The workshop participants were asked to read the following texts before the workshop:
Żyniewicz, Karolina
. Transmattering in the Making: Autoethnographic Analysis of Relations among Human, Post-Human, and Non-Human Liminal Beings. PhD thesis. 2022.
Żyniewicz, Karolina.'Contamination as collaboration: Being-with in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic
', Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 20:1&2, 2022: 141–52.
https://doi.org/10.1386/tear_00087_1.
Signs of the Times: Collecting Biological Traces and Memories (project description)
Culhane, Dara. 'Imagining: An Introduction.' In
A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies, edited by Danielle Elliott, Dara Culhane. The University of Toronto Press, 1-23, 2017.
Kozubowski-Heuston, Magdalena. 'Performing.' In
A Different Kind of Ethnography. Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies, edited by Denielle Elliott, and Dara Culhane. Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 113-133, 2017.
Rambo Ronai, Carol. 'The Reflexive Self Through Narrative: A Night in the Life of an Exotic Dancer/Researcher.' In
Investigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience edited by Carolyn Ellis and Michael Flaherty. Sage Publications, Inc, 102-124, 1992.
Day 1:
The group was divided into smaller teams in the first part of the workshop. Each team was asked to select one project from my website and to analyze it from the methodology perspective. Participants had to imagine what to do to implement the particular project. They noted the imagined steps. In the end, the analysis was confronted with the factual trajectories of project production.
The second step was participating in my project, Signs of the Times, which served as an example of the artistic process. The essential thing was to share with participants the inside of the project and explain their role in the long process of project implementation.
The day's most important task was searching for ideas for their art-based research. To make the work easier, I gave them a bunch of passwords:
#pandemic
#nature
#culture
#human
#non-human
#environment
#matter
#body
#technology
#relation
#symbiosis
#archive
Each team presented its ideas to others and discussed the concepts.
Based on the project sketches, the participants started their fieldwork. They were allowed to leave the workshop space and collect material in the city on their way home or at home. They were equipped with test tubes, swabs, Petri dishes to take biological samples, a sound recorder, and pocket microscopes. It was a task requiring discipline and self-organizing.
Day 2:
The second day was dedicated to working with fieldwork materials. All teams presented the raw material first. Then, they worked on selecting elements that would be processed further according to the concepts created the day before. The next step was preparing a project presentation at the current initial stage and planning the next steps that could be taken outside the workshop framework.
