Nordic Journal of Art & Research

Living as an a/r/tographer —A Nordic perspective

Torill Vist — 2024-12-16

This special issue of Nordic Journal for Art & Research is devoted to the arts-based methodology a/r/tography, as it is understood and conducted in the Nordic countries. Living as an a/r/tographer—a Nordic perspective enlightens the a/r/tographic space between the artist (a), researcher (r), and teacher (t) as well as between the personal or individual and the social—such as communities of practice. In this introduction, the four editors reveal the background and history of the special issue and shortly present the 13 peer reviewed articles in its first part. They also give newcomers a short introduction to the field and discuss some of the core topics relevant to their editorial work. The aim for the issue is to contribute to knowledge that shed light on the distinctive position that characterizes the work of academic staff in the arts in the Nordic teacher educations. However, the article submissions revealed and interest in a/r/tography far beyond teacher education, and the editors chose to include nearby a/r/tographic contributions too. This is a position which develops distinctive competences in its participants, but also a position with demanding work tasks in different directions.

Photo: Ann-Hege Lorvik Waterhouse

With an eye for the place through printmaking on clotheslines

Katrine Borgenvik — 2024-12-16

The project “between” is a collaborative art project that resulted in printmaking on clotheslines, as part of the Haugesund International Woodcut (HIT) and AVTRYKK festival in 2019.

Through an a/r/tographic approach with walking as a method, we explored how a shared city walk with cameras as a sketch tool, provided impulses for the creative process in the printmaking studio. We explored woodcut in relation to place, history, traces, and texture. Five arts and craft teachers from the secondary schools in Haugesund participated as co-creators. The result was a site-specific printmaking installation, in a private backyard in Haugesund.

The choice of Haugesund city as both visual images for the woodcuts and the exhibition site, became crucial for the project. In this essay, we wish to examine the concept of place and reflect on how the aesthetic approach opened our eyes to the qualities of the place.

Photo: Katrine Borgenvik and Charlotte Tvedte

“I felt like I ‘was’ actually there”

Svein Fuglestad — 2024-12-16

This article is based on the meeting between the audience and me as a performer in my interactive musical story about an All Saints’ Eve mass that I helped organise at the gay nightclub in Oslo called The Black Widow in the early nineties, a time when the gay community was heavily affected by HIV/AIDS. Using an a/r/tographic approach, I explore the concepts of resonance and affectivity, and ask: How can my subjective narrative from 30 years ago create resonance and affectivity in other people today? Reflections from five different audience members, along with two video clips from the performance, serve as raw material for discussing the issue in relation to relevant theoretical perspectives. Terms such as presence, vulnerability, courage, and openness, both in myself as a performer and in relation to the audience, are discussed, along with the significance of my own story and background as a Christian and a gay person in understanding myself as an a/r/tographer. In the article, which has an essayistic form, I intimate the importance of openness, presence, and the willingness to be touched – both in myself and in the audience – in order to create these moments of resonance and affectivity between the audience and me as a performer.

Photo: Thomas Berbom

A/r/tography as performative pedagogy in theatre production

Ellen Foyn Bruun — 2024-12-16

This article examines how a/r/tography can be used as performative pedagogy in theatre production. Based on Rita Irwin's view of a/r/tography as a dynamic way of learning we explore how bachelor students in drama/theatre can embody the role of artist-researcher-teacher. The empirical data stems from a course in devised theatre. Each student group produced a performance in collaboration with young people, and the role of the drama teacher was central for the artistic process. In the analysis we found three key insights for the implementation of a/r/tography as a learning strategy: (1) emphasis on artistic will paired with the teacher’s deep listening skills, (2) emphasis on modelling experiential knowledge as teaching/learning strategy, and (3) the benefit of the a/r/tografic researcher position. All in all, we see that the students’ awareness of the interweaving of the three roles, artist-researcher-teacher, facilitated a deeper learning and understanding of the theatre production process and the reference group’s life world.

Photo: Eirik Brenne Torsethaugen

Sketching across borders

Kari Korolainen — 2024-12-16

This article explores borderscapes as multilayered or displaced geopolitical and cultural borders through a/r/tography as living inquiry. Art making (via cartoons), arts-related research, a/r/tography, and border studies constitute a broad interdisciplinary framework for the study. The starting point is that a/r/tography as living inquiry provides an approach where interdisciplinarity can be seen more in terms of a “rupture where in absence, new courses of action unfold”, than as “a patchwork of different disciplines” (Springgay et al., 2005, p. 898). Hence, the main research question asked is: What kinds of new actions and understandings develop with ruptures involving visual arts-related research and the borderscape notion featured in this project? The focus is on the cartoons that address borders from different perspectives. The a/r/tographic viewpoints of metaphor and metonymy, openings, and embodiment are used to analyze these cartoons, their making processes, and ruptures that are linked to them. Moreover, I use general vantage points such as playfulness and temporality (memory) in my analysis. What was learned from a/r/tography in this study is how an a/r/tographic viewpoint could help to specify the symbolic ruptures within the visual and theoretical understandings of borders. In addition, the idea of playful openings was developed here to overcome not only the visual ruptures in the cartoons, but also those ruptures that are caused by the limitations of memory. Consequently, four ruptures – symbolic, visual, internal, and temporal – were approached as new actions and understandings that help to reconsider the border theory. For instance, it became clearer how the idea of borderscape touches on shifts of perspectives (identities) besides border spaces and other border processes. Thus, the observations in this paper can be used in the future for developing the study of the diversity of the border studies conceptualizations. Furthermore, the article provides insights through which to rethink connections between arts, scholarly disciplines, learning, and living inquiry; inward and outwards, as well as back and forth in time.

Comic strip: Kari Korolainen

BAD: Body – Art – Digital technology

Lisbet Skregelid — 2024-12-16

During the first lockdown in March 2020, I started running two to three times a week to a nearby beach. Since then, I have stopped each time about halfway, and have been filming the sea view from the same spot for 30 seconds with my mobile phone. The now over 550 films (October 2024) are stored on the digital platform Padlet that makes it possible to share with others. The project My stunning stream - Made with a little mischief (Skregelid, 2020-) makes use of a/r/tography which is a practice-based methodological approach that unites art, education, and research. A/r/tography explores art, research and education as forms of performative, explorative and lived inquiry, and thereby stretches the boundaries between these domains. This article draws attention to how the body and digital technology are entangled and interwoven in this project, and how this affective connectedness offers potentials for enabling ecological awareness in educational settings. It makes use of theories that consider bodies and technologies as united intra-actions and that are concerned with how to live your life in the world.

Photo: Libeth Skregelid

Artographic movements

Mette Berndsen — 2024-12-16

With shared roots in the master's program Educational Theory & Curriculum Studies at DPU, Aarhus Universitet, where classical educational theory and interdisciplinary cultural theories are connected in recent material thinking, this article presents a three-dimensional artography model. Bringing the model to each other's tables, it becomes an occasion for stories and joint fieldwork on how table practices are enacted. Around the tables, kinship is created in conversations and ongoing experiments with art, food, and meals. Around the tables, we become artographers and understand in the shared inquiry with the model how art (A), research (R), and teaching (T) have accompanied us as separate or intertwined threads through our educational processes in time and space. Our contribution to the landscape of A/R/Tography is to emphasize the processes of formation for all participants with the model's simple structure and the addition of the position S for student, grounded in socio-material fields. Through movements between our three dining tables and Bakkehuset´s new conversation corner, we will articulate a material concept of education that can lead to rewriting A/R/Tography from an applicable method to an integrated and lived artographic practice.

Photo: Mette Berndsen

Landtimescaping with Rossedalen

Helene Illeris — 2024-12-16

This article develops and explores ‘landtimescaping’ as an a/r/tographic practice that can help us as humans to expand and (re-)create our relationships to the Land. Through a/r/tographic fieldwork in Rossedalen, a valley situated in Southern Norway close to the city of Arendal, the authors experiment over time with different ways of being-with the Land. The aim is to contribute to art, research and education as worlding practices that facilitate diverse ways of sensing, relating and acting with other-than-human forms of being. By relating to Karen Barad’s theories of spacetimemattering, the verb ‘landtimescaping’ is coined to generate new knowledge through specific embodied practices, such as walks with locals and repeated visits to a certain spot. More specifically, three ‘landtimescapings’ are brought to life by intertwining different textual-visual approaches: Landtimescaping #1 –The neglected forest. Circles and cycles, Landtimescaping #2 – Deforestation. Life interrupted. Life to (be)come, and Landtimescaping #3 – The Quarry. Swallowing an event. In the final part of the article, the potentialities of landtimescaping for the practices of art, research, and education are discussed in order to open for a (re-)orientation of these separate forms of knowing towards entangled, fluid and open ways of existing.

Photo: Helene Illeris, Anne-May Fossnes og Tormod Wallem Anunsen

Putting It Together

Anne Cecilie Røsjø Kvammen — 2024-12-16

This article demonstrates how collaborative teaching in the field of musical theatre has served as a platform for uncovering the research methodology of artography. This methodology explores the intricate entanglement of the roles of artist, researcher, and teacher. The reorganization of a new curriculum and collaborative teaching among a group of teachers at the bachelor program in musical theatre at Kristiania University College forms the basis of our reflections. We, the two authors, were involved in this process. We connect these experiences to theories of artography and collaborative teaching. We argue that our multidisciplinary artographic awareness relied on certain conditions of growth within the teacher group. These growth conditions include: 1) a culture of sharing pedagogy among colleagues, 2) working beyond an individual’s level of comfort through co-teaching and 3) reevaluating teaching habits.

Cover photo: Johanne Karen Hagen

Polyphonic voices for the future

Lena O Magnusson — 2024-12-16

The point of departure for this study is an exploration of how a/r/tography can be used as a method to contribute to new ways of thought and a changed understanding of the researcher, the artist and the teacher in higher education. The data is derived from digital meetings, dialogues, and exchanges of texts and works of art. The data produced is polyphonic, taking the form of assemblages (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Data is analyzed and discussed by visualization of intra-actions (Barad, 2007), and the analyzing process is driven by affect (Kristeva, 1980, 1984), resulting in the discovery of the concept of intra-artistic-articulations, which challenges hierarchies and encourages the wild within the a/r/tographer.

Photo: Johanne Ilje-Lien

Learning through a separation process

Trine Ørbæk — 2024-12-16

In this article, I present an embodied a/r/tographical inquiry of my bodily and emotional responses experienced while going through a separation process, and a description of what I learned as part of this process that has implications for how I intend to teach and develop student teachers’ relational competence. By invoking the context of emergence, currere, the in-between and living inquiry, and in dialogue with the concepts of embodied affectivity and embodied interaffectivity, I observe the unfolding of themes such as activation of bodily resonance, the sharing of embodied experiences and embodied meaning-making, coming together to reveal an insight into relational competence as an embodied phenomenon. I have also revealed an awareness of my bodily inquiry and the merging of moving and writing. The implications of this study for teacher education may well include encouraging student teachers to consider their own relational competence by nurturing and enriching their own bodily awareness of a capacity to engage in meaningful and compassionate ways both with themselves and their pupils, not least when faced with unexpected and provocative situations in their practicum. Applying embodied a/r/tography as a method for developing student teachers’ relational competence may offer opportunities for including student teachers’ wonderings, feelings, reflections and meta-reflections as a means of knowing on their path to becoming teachers.

Drawing: Linda Oloey (with permission)

Axes of resonance in music education

Markus Tullberg — 2024-12-16

This article discusses the potentials of a/r/tography aka artography against the background of life in an accelerating academia that is increasingly shallow and unfulfilling, and where quality is only indirectly measured using bibliometrics. We find Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance to be useful when discussing the values that get lost in such a system. We appreciate the arguments for a slower, deeper, and more collegial way of working. It is where the distractions of ordinary life intersect with the vision of a more profound, qualitative way of working that we make our arguments for an artographic way of being. However, we also identify challenges by drawing on experiences in our own working lives, and specifically our ongoing collaborative research project. Exploring options for navigating around the constraints, we suggest a ‘toolbox’ for how the individual artographer can contribute to making academia a more resonant space.

Photo: Markus Tullberg

Becoming a visual arts teacher with a/r/tography

Tarja Karlsson Häikiö — 2024-12-16

Examination practice in art teacher education in Sweden is a part of the development of professional practice in compulsory, secondary and upper secondary education. Visual arts as a school subject entails a hybridity of artistic and didactic perspectives. In art teacher education, a double didactic perspective involves the learning of the student teacher and their future teaching of students in the visual arts. This article focuses on an examination of student teachers in the visual arts. An entry point is the methodology of a/r/tography, which entails exploring different subject positionings as artist, researcher and teacher in student teachers’ examination projects. Three examination projects were presented exemplifying how the use of art-based methods supports an understanding of subject didactics in the process of becoming a visual arts teacher. The examinations consisted of written academic texts and art-based explorative investigations in different visual media. The study also elaborated on how student teachers’ artistic production supports an understanding of the subject’s theoretical and practice-based content. The results indicated how a/r/tography can be used for reflected learning in becoming-teacher through student teachers’ efforts to encompass their future professional roles. The results also showed the challenges of student teachers in confronting their desires, doubts and fears in their learning processes during art teacher education.

Photo and artwork: Pseudonymized Student "X" (with permission)

Entangled with wool and places through the agencies of a-r-t-ography in teaching practice

Ann-Hege Lorvik Waterhouse — 2024-12-16

This article is written based on a teaching situation together with a group of students from early childhood teacher education and a large amount of discarded wool from Norwegian wild sheep. With a-r-t-ography as research methodology and pedagogical strategy, we explore how we can co-create through research, teaching and artistic making with wool, felting, students and places, and in what ways a-r-t-tography contributes to expanding our thinking about teaching when we move the workshop out into the open air. The study is rooted in process philosophy, posthuman perspectives and art-based research.

Photo: Ann-Hege Lorvik Waterhouse, Kari Carlsen and Trude Iversen