Premises, Promises

Abstract

The spaces between things are spaces where everything happens. Knowledge practices in institutions are negotiated, deliberated in the interstices of institutional cultures and environments: stairwell and water-cooler conversations, elevator pitches and coffee break meetings, lunchtime chats, conference dinners and last drinks at the bar. These are the academic and artistic scenographies of both art and research where cultures are produced, languages relaxed, methods modulated, skills and knowledge transferred, identities reconstituted, in and as back- and side-channels to representational, academic discourse. It is in these gaps that all the work really gets done. These gaps become constructive as they help us refuse what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten phrase as “the call to order”. Such spaces of refusal allow dissonance to continue and resonate, as they invoke sessions, conversations and exchanges which refuse the call to begin, to formalise, to order, to end. The interstitial gaps of the physical spaces and architectures of art and research allow study to continue, but study that precedes our call and will continue after we have left these spaces. In investigating our other places of work, this session will take the group of researchers, artists in attendance to architectural gaps of ZHDK — stairwells, elevators, hallways, coffee and tea kitchens — presenting at each a specific conversation. Mapping these in advance of the discussion to develop links to the ongoing themes of SNSF project “Institutions as a Way of Life” (IWL, www.institutions.life/), each space/discussion will evoke the emancipatory authenticity that non-plenary, informal institutional spaces allow and even encourage. During the session, IWL researchers will propose short inputs based on their respective practices of artistic research, as physical-institutional critique, highlighting relations to each place and situation. These hallway conversations and watercooler chats open into discussion, as digression and elaboration by all participants, helping to render apparent the identity and category slippages that occur when institutional roles and scenographies are enacted and relaxed. These conversations about arts, knowledge, performance and place are our other workplaces, in the gaps of the institutions we occupy, that cannot be called to order.