One of the most special projects in which I participated in recent years, starting in the time when I was still working at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, and finishing while I have already been working as research professor at Fontys Academy of the Arts, was the transdisciplinary artistic research project In Search of Stories. In this project, artists worked with terminal cancer patients to co-create artistic works that reflect on their experiences with their illness, and how it had changed and impacted their lives.
Last Saturday, the publication of this project was presented at the third international conference of the Care Ethics Research Consortium (CERC) in Soesterberg, The Netherlands. Wellicht, edited by Marjolijn van den Berg, Nirav Christophe and Henny Dörr, published by HKU Press.
Written from the perspectives of the participating artists and artistic researchers, the book inquires into how such collaborations work, what they entail and mean, from the perspective of the artists. In my own contribution, “‘When it’s all there.’ From Walking to Artistic Connectivity”, I explore the relation of these creation processes to artistic connectivity, to what I call “artistic curiosity / curiosity of artists” and to the role that taking time plays in this work. This is also the first article in which I experiment with combining listening to the audio part of the work as accompanying sound files, while reading the text.
Falk Hübner 