Challenging questions at the intersections of art, pedagogy, and research
An Interview with microsillons (Marianne Guarino-Huet and Olivier Desvoignes) by Laila Huber and Elke Zobl
And what role does research play for you? Or do you understand your work as research?
Marianne Guarino-Huet: There are really two levels of research we can talk about. We have this vast field of artistic collaborative practices and pedagogies in which we are developing continuous research, trying to articulate inputs from critical pedagogies, feminist pedagogies, and post-structuralist thinkers with artistic practices. We are both PhD-researchers at Chelsea College of the Arts at the University of the Arts in London. And then, for each project we do specific research because the context, the groups of collaborators and themes are always different … We also have some topics that come back in different projects: gentrification gender, commons.
Olivier Desvoignes: Research is one of the keywords for defining our practice. And we are also really interested in the idea of action research or participatory action research. So, even though we are not trying to produce models that could have been proposed by participatory action research and we are not really specialists in that field, we are still very interested in the idea that research is not disconnected from practice, but that both are actually integrated, that research leads to action, and that the collaborators can take part in this research somehow.
Have you ever collaborated with action researchers or social scientists?
Marianne Guarino-Huet: We don’t know many people who would strictly define themselves as users of participatory action research, but we are currently doing research around Paulo Freire (http://another.zhdk.ch/2012/11/10/zurich-working-group/). It is very interesting because we have also traced back some articles containing the first moments of discussion about participatory action research and building groups, where those questions are discussed. We must say, it is inspiring, but not what we are doing per se, we could not define what we are doing as participatory action research.
We borrow some elements from there, from ideas of transformation, which are really interesting. With the Bologna process there were a lot of debates about what artistic research might be. Without trying to define what artistic research is, we base each of our projects on research that sometimes involves visual questions, political questions, ethical questions, social questions, or cooking questions, for example.
Thank your very much for the interview!
Laila Huber, Elke Zobl, microsillons – Olivier Desvoignes/Marianne Guarino-Huet ( 2014): Challenging questions at the intersections of art, pedagogy, and research. An Interview with microsillons (Marianne Guarino-Huet and Olivier Desvoignes) by Laila Huber and Elke Zobl . In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 05 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/challenging-questions-at-the-intersections-of-art-pedagogy-and-research/