In the summer of 2023, the ELIA Academy took place in Évora, Portugal, with the title “Exploring Situatedness.” ELIA invited the international community to situate themselves, to explore the situatedness of Évora’s culture, heritage and place, “as a confluence of complex interwoven histories and artistic sensibilities” (ELIA website). The ELIA website continued:
Reflect on how art is created now and how it is defining its value for the future. Take a moment to consider your place in time and space, and share what situatedness means to you.
This was a perfect opportunity to share our work, and to think further regarding the conceptual potential of situatedness itself (see here for a quick throwback to my time at the Academy). Since the beginning of the professorship Artistic Connective Practices, carrying out situated artistic research residencies have been a core element of our methodology. These residencies, whether in the area of local community work, healthcare or working with youngsters, have always been working in a way that honours the locality, the humans and other-than-humans present in these contexts, and engaged while being present. We work from the very context we find ourselves in, and consciously leave space for the residencies, their forms, and purposes to emerge from the ground up, from scratch and through situated practice.
After the conference, the journal of Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education launched a call for a special issue on situatedness as a follow-up to the conference, edited by Susan Orr and Stacey Salazar: Again, an excellent opportunity to share our work and, especially, to develop its conceptual side further. I am happy to share that the journal issue is out now, and that my article “Exploring Connectivity through Artistic Research Residencies. A Situated Perspective” has just been published in this issue, in Open Access. Many thanks go to the editors, the ADCH-team and the peer reviewers for their helpful and critical comments and questions!
In this article, I share the notion of artistic connectivity and the approach of socially engaged artistic research residencies, think through them as situated approaches, and explore how such approaches can contribute to situatedness as a conceptual framework for socially engaged artistic practice and research. The central outcome in this text is a framework for situatedness, consisting of five elements and developed through our practice of socially engaged artistic research residencies: presence, locality, slowness, taking seriously, and the complementary pair trust/responsibility.
The article builds on reports from the professorship’s various residencies, including the wonderful work by Danae Theodoridou, Kamila Wolszczak, Jacqueline Hamelink, and Juriaan Achthoven.
Falk Hübner 