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Constellating Through Artistic Research in Turbulent Times
FAST45 Final Conference
 

Constellating Through Artistic Research in Turbulent Times

 

Online Series
19 May / 10 July / 23 October / 18 December 2025
17:00–18:30 CET

About

These days and months, we are experiencing changes in the geopolitical organisation of democratic societies that affect everyday life in art schools on many scales — impacting both structures and bodies. ELIA’s Artistic Research Working Group has previously responded to challenges for artistic research and its diverse communities of practice through the projects Unislanding Artistic Research (2021) and Towards a Manifesto for Critical Openness in Artistic Research (2024). Now, we urgently ask how we might collectively relate and respond to the current turbulences we face on a daily basis. We propose to collectively balance the lack of institutional agency by forming constellations for artistic and educational modes of exchange, where we can ventilate concerns in elastic (not hard) ways and enable affective and transnational responses to the hard and soft authoritarianism that infiltrate our environments as well as our nervous systems.

In the first session on 19 May, we began by exploring some first thoughts on Walter Benjamin’s anti-fascist pedagogy and tuning in to his ideas of constellation and making protocols. Making protocols involves experimenting with structures that can channel affect and hold communities together in times of systemic failure and confusion. The second session, which took place on 10 July, focused on the potential of protocols and proto-colling as imaginative tools for collective thought and action in turbulent times. The third session of the series on 23 October aimed to develop a collective protocol on artistic research for our turbulent times, bringing together the online group and a live study group at Glenn Loughran’s 'Night Study' exhibition at Uillinn in West Cork Arts Centre.

 

The final session of the series will take place on 18 December 2025.

 

REGISTER HERE

 

The publication Towards a Manifesto for Artistic Research: SCORE #1 and the digital pamphlet Unislanding Artistic Research: A Decolonial Dialogue both emerged from previous initiatives of the Artistic Research Working Group, each translating collective inquiry into tangible outcomes. In the same spirit, the ongoing series Constellating Through Artistic Research in Turbulent Times aims to develop a concrete outcome from its shared explorations.

 

Image credits: © Florian Amoser und fsp-t ZHdK