Emotional Practice -- Try, Trial, Tried, Nice Nice

- OPEN is a research initiative that draws on decolonial methods to explore how our world views translate.

- We (re)think individual positions in terms of diversity and difference of experience.
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- Our aim is to discover and develop OPEN art and design practices with transformational capabilities that are inclusive of emotional work, self-care, respect and positionality.

This session invites papers that explore the imaginaries of the decolonisation of design historythrough case-studies, practitioner accounts, and emergent models that contextualise the agenciesengaged in historicising design. Histories of design can frame design cultures and discourses as theproduct of advanced industrialised economies, capitalist modernity, star practitioners, companybiographies, and present designers as the sole custodians of the design profession. Thishistoriographical tendency equates design with the colonial endeavour and denies the co-existence ofdiverse approaches. Drawing from both art history and cultural studies, design history on the onehand reasserts disciplinary boundaries to define the specificities of the field and validate theprofession – a defensive disciplinarity attitude that mirrors the current moment of hyper-nationalism. On theother hand, histories that open up the social and political imaginaries of design by offeringalternatives to the status quo of the Eurocentric canon complicate such disciplinary boundaries. Possible topics include:• Histories of design in the Postcolonial / Global South• Decolonisation of curriculum, bibliographies, and teaching methods• Dori Tunstall’s proposal for Respectful Design• Case-studies of indigenous design and interpretive frameworks• Accounts of the challenges of redressing injustice as defined by Tuck and Yang (2012) when decolonising design practices• Emergent models that contextualise the agencies engaged in the production of alternative design histories. Submission Guidelines:• Speakers may present no more than TWO papers.• A paper that has been published, or presented previously may not be delivered at the AAANZ Conference.• Acceptance in a session implies a commitment to present a 20-minute paper at that session in person and payment of the conference registration fee and AAANZ membership fee. AAANZ Membership benefits and costs are detailed here: http://aaanz.info/membership• Please note all speakers and convenors must be current AAANZ members at the time of the conference to be included in the conference programme.

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Emotional Practices

Portfolio Page: Please scroll to see all artists

Lubna Gem Arielle

Title: Bridging the Blue
My work uses personal iconography to share a lived experience of mental breakdown to enable those who are concerned about family members or friends to gain a deeper understanding of how depression feels and to challenge common misconceptions of mental illness and also to offer validation to those who have also been unwell, to alleviate feelings of shame and the pressure to remain silent.
I am interested in the potential of the novelty-factor, playfulness and immediacy offered by VR in empathetic storytelling through the opportunity to enter into and move around within another’s (my) mental landscape. I am curious to see how this might shift perceptions, open up dialogue and steer though stigma. Each screen grab shows one of the three environments in Bridging the Blue.
Made in collaboration with V-SENSE, Trinity College Dublin.

Menara Vieira

My work - my ‘constructions’ - are made from fragments of cloth, stones and other artifacts that were once clothes, jewellery or toys. They are objects that have captured my attention, my emotion, and lead me to connect them to a new existence and meaning. I am moved by what is considered ‘less’.
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This ‘language’ in my work comes from observing my own processes of evolution, and also with the observation of and connection with others. I live in a country with an enormous social inequality; being able to ‘speak’ through these tiny uselessfragments, is to be able to speak of our re-significations in this difficult human evolutionary process.

Stella Chen

Title: Standing by the source of the river I cried
This video essay reveals my personal deep longing for belonging in the Australia diasporic space. It witnessed my journey following the more than human, Sphagnum moss, peat, soil, rice and the river. White rice which was introduced into the landscape during the White Australia Policy, and it was detrimental to the river and soil. White rice also carried my personal familial lived experience in the colonial time in Taiwan. Standing by the source of the river I cried critiques the biocultural parodox of migrants, to reveal the undeniable facts about the responsibilities we carried, standing with the sovereignty of this land.

Sofie Layton

Title: Pink Tears
Pink Tears explores the language and the physical impact of chemotherapy drugs on the body undergoing treatment. Chemical dyes, which are synthetic molecular structures, also form the basis for some chemotherapy treatments. These chemicals were originally developed for use within the dye and manufacturing industry, perhaps not such a sweet colour when they are given intravenously. “Do not be alarmed if she cries pink tears, it’s to do with the medication”, not so pretty and pink after all! The colour pink is first explored through a series of experimental hand dyed samples, a collection of handkerchiefs. These samples become the skein onto which the design is printed. The fabric is filled with a repeating pattern, the code letters ACTG which represent the nucleotides adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine that make up a persons’ DNA sequence. Here the pattern hides the story which is the warp and weft of a person, interwoven from conception, a tale that can be decoded within the DNA. The pattern of inheritance is what forms the cancer and underpins the narrative.

Our genomes are a complete and complex set of instructions which are entirely unique to each person - four letters ACTG repeated and arranged and repeated again in a sequence would fill around 250,000 pages of a book. It would be impossible for most people to extract any real meaning from the book unless it is decoded and yet this seemingly simple and beautifully designed string of letters holds the answers to many of our biggest questions about health and disease.

The pink fabric becomes a conceptual articulation of what causes a mutation, and by implication becomes the reason that the childhood cancer occurred in the first place, a biological differentiation caused by a piece of faulty DNA coding. These patterns of inheritance, interlaced with the metaphors and fairy tales with ferocious beasts are part of the DNA code. As part of the artwork the bedtime tale is untangled from its genetic code and read at set times during the day. The code is the tells the story that takes the audience on a journey between gestation and grief.

Eriko Takeno

Title: Crafting Narrative
Crafting Narrative introduces poetic thinking as an alternative healing tool from anxiety. Italian theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi says: ‘The poetical act is a revelation of a possible sphere of experience not yet experienced (that is to say, the experienceable).’

A set of two books invites the audience to experience the healing aspect of poetic thinking and the artist’s own journey to develop the alternative tool to meaningfully share her personal exploration with others. Alongside her written projects, the artist has developed a ‘Sensory Multimodal Workshop’ that has been run several times in Japan and the UK. Collaborating with psychologists in Japan and Australia, the artist has found somatic aspects in poetryand process reflectively use both the internal and external spaceof one’s body. They help to deconstruct traumatic narratives in anxiety and craft them into new narratives. Alongside ‘Soma_’, the second book shows the internal and external process within the artist’s journey with her own anxiety.

‍Special thanks to Yoko Arai, Clinical Psychologist, and Lutza Ireland, Psychologist

Ceyda Oskay

Title: The Event of a Storm with Lullabies
The fabric is a mix of old clothes, fabric printed by the artist and readily printed fabric. The work is about the sensory qualities of textiles, and their associations with memory. The images are fragmented and layered, like memory, and there are various imagesassociated with the sea (landscape, boat, fish, abstract waves etc).The work combines elements of various locations (Vietnamese and Japanese lullabies, scenery from Turkeyand the UK, and Ghanaian textiles) and thus creates both a unityand dis-location- somehow- through memory, or current and ongoing dialogue with others, existing in multiple cultures at the same time. The work being in the form of pillows also alludes to especially nomadic textile arts practice, making the functional art as not much could be carried on journeys.

Mico Toledo

Title: Velho Chico

Velho Chico, which translates to “Old Francisco”, is the nickname given to the São Francisco, Brazil’s longest river. A common facet of Brazilian culture, this nickname is “how the dwellers of its banks and surrounding areas affectionately refer to it, as if the river itself was a member of their family, a neighbour, an old friend,” Mico explains. “I was initially drawn to it by reading Brazilian novelists such as Jorge Amado, Euclides da Cunha, and Rachel de Queiroz, that have the Sertão region and the Velho Chico river as a backstage for their stories, characters and narratives.” As an area rich with folklore, it also struck Mico as the perfect place to explore the crossover of fiction and reality; a space in which he could discover characters and stories within a given framework.

Photography by Mico Toledo, illustrations by Sophy Hollington

Elise D'Arbaumont

Title: Subtle Protest
‍[Being against [...] — Standing in a crowd — Holding a sign — Feeling anxious — [What am I even doing here?] — [Take me out of here] — Still wanting to express... ]
An introvert struggle

I have been working for the past months on the topic of introversion and especially on how introvert people can better express their voices and their feelings facing such an extrovert world, the one we live in. My project is intended to make people aware of the different types of emotions and reactions introvert people could have in situations where others will not even react. The will is to create a fruitful and fertile dialogue between those two antithetic parties.

Subtle Protest is composed of 2 pieces of garment which are 2 scarfs with ’introvert’ messages engraved on it. They are printed on tone on tone white so the message appears in a very subtle way and plays with transparency and light.

Leren Li

Leren Li is a PhD candidate in the RCA History of Design programme in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum. Leren is working on Japanese patchwork, mending culture and contemporary fashion theory.
Her PhD research explores the creative potential of Japanese patchwork boro through its living
history, and focus on the flow of material circulations through different agents under various cultural contexts.

Elvira Korman
Anne Goldenberg

Title: To Do With What Is
In the fall of 2018 we (Anne and Elvira) were in Sarajevo for a 7-day art residency. Following an injury to Elvira's hand, we were forced to reconsider our plans, and chose a "feelings and needs" based methodology, titled: "To do with what is". On a daily basis, we practiced openly, trustingly, uninhibitedly making inventories of our feelings and needs. Each of us would then came up with small and anchored strategies, deciding what to do that day. Elvira's injury also necessitated a new level of reliance on and collaboration with Anne, as it impeded her ability to write, lower her hand when moving in space etc. Here, we present the traces of our everyday “To do with what is” practice, recorded in the residency notebook, along with the art that emerged as a result of it.

Please click on the images for more information
and to explore restorative writing.

Elvira Korman is a multidisciplinary artist. Taking her sensing body as her primary point of origin, she interacts with what exists in the natural and virtual space, experimenting with poetics, coding, dance, games and installation. This, to allow for individual and collective restorative movements from the inside out, in an attempt to reimagine the possible.

Anne Goldenburg (Goldjian) is a transdisciplinary artist interested in relational practices between human beings, ecologies and technologies. Their work creates intimate spaces dedicated to mutual learning and slowing processes. Goldjian embraces media arts, land art, installation and video dance and facilitate collaborative, collective and restorative practices. They travel a constellation of feminist, restorative and decolonial hacking practices, which leads them to roam the Earth, even though many of their emotional ties are located in Tio’tia:ke colonially known as Montreal (QC, CANADA).

Goldjian practices reliance, to oneself, to spaces, to other human beings and non-humans, looking for the conditions needed to activate this quality of presence.

This project reveals a sketch of the art that springs from awareness of one's emotional state, before the art making begins, and the needs one has that may or may not be met, in order to start making the art. This is a very straight-forward way of inventory, which then opens up space for experimentation, and is in line with the ideas of self-reliance and self-care.

During the residency, we explored what restorative art means for each of us, what it entails and how we could practice it in the works we make. A potent tool for that was writing. The simple act of writing emotional inventories before the actual artistic writing already warmed up our hands and got us into the creative writing space.
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This particular "feelings and needs" methodology is inspired by open space technology, an approach that allows participants of a conference to self-organise a collective agenda. It is also inspired by the emotional intelligence of non-violent communication work, in which feelings are seen as important messages from the needs. "To do with what is" is also a practice developed by a Canadian relational artist, Sylvie Cotton, who proposes to work in situ and in spiritu with the landscape, with the surrounding material, with the people who are around and with what is present within us. For us, somehow, after the unforeseen event in the mountains, the outer landscape disappeared a little bit. There were no more mountains to do land art in, just a change of plans, confusion, sorrow and very little space for ourselves. These emotions appear in the feelings and needs chart that we started. And then, from there, we started to work. The landscape of reference became our inner landscape, our ground. It was also a way to connect to each other, to hear where the other was, to hear what was happening with the other, emotionally, and to work from a place where we were listening to our deeper needs. This methodology also works for solo work, and for small group work. It allows us to be grounded in our hearts, in our bodies, to work from there, from precious ground, precious bridges and less from ideas.
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During the course of the residency, we also developed a practice/methodology of "restorative writing" and have continued the explorations long after the residency was over. We have involved artists and makers from many more countries into our online restorative writing sessions. Many beautiful, inspirational pieces were written on the topic of restorative art. Furthermore, the practice of making an emotional inventory has proven to be a wonderful every-day technique, to be used at any time, during the day or when a specific, confusing situation arises in daily life. We've found it to be an exceptional, invaluable and empowering tool in our art making endeavours and life.

Linnea Kristensen
Jamie Maule

Title: For some time now. Soon there. When was? And the crow who killed a pigeon.

This collaboration is an ongoing, performative, live synthesis of abstract narrative and experimental sound. It began as research into the question: “How can the emotional responses to a text, expressed through spoken word, be translated into sound?”.

The sound is created by a computer programme that reacts to the speaking voice in real time. The voice in return answers to the sound and the responses become a conversation between the two. The sonic material is a combination of synthesised sound and live samples from the vocal performance. The text is a stream of emotional responses to the immediate environment and state of mind at the time of the writing. Each new sentence is generated from a word or image from the previous sentence. Like the sound and voice are generated from each other. This method of creating foregrounds how our state of mind affects the experience of the world around us. Valuing this kind of knowledge production.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE (RIGHT) TO BEGIN.

Title: For some time now, soon there, when was? And the crow who killed a pigeon
This collaboration is an ongoing, performative, live synthesis of abstract narrative and experimental sound. It began as research into the question: “How can the emotional responses to a text, expressed through spoken word, be translated into sound?”.

The sound is created by a Max/MSP patch that reacts to the speaking voice in real-time. The voice in return answers to the sound and the responses become a conversation between the two. The sonic material is a combination of synthesised sound and live samples from the vocal performance.

The text is a stream of emotional responses to the immediate environment and state of mind at the time of the writing. Every time a new sentence was written, it was generated from a word or image from the previous sentence. Like the sound and voice are generated from each other. This method of creating foregrounds how our state of mind affects the experience of the world around us. Valuing this kind of knowledge production.

Audrey Roger

Title: How Do You Fill The Unspoken?

Audrey Roger works with weaving, writing, drawing and sound.

She is interested in the ways materials speak through the work, visibility and invisibility of personal narratives, and emotional labour.

She has shown her work at Flat Time House, the Dorich House Museum, Christie’s, Somerset House, The Print House Gallery, SPACE Gallery and Sameheads Gallery,
amongst others.

She lives and works in London.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO READ MORE

Eda Sarman

Title: reflex
‍(Click on image for video, password: tea)
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Slowly boiling water, a subtle smile, I feel the warmth in my hands, the vapor gently misting my face as I take a sip...

Reflex unfolds the tea bag, a universal bonding tool, to recognize the chaotic cycles the tea bag goes through before it becomes a comforting mechanism for us. These hidden yet audiovisible cycles present in a tea bag are shot in Loolecondera, Sri Lanka, the birth place of Lipton. It was a reflex to start tea plantations in Sri Lanka for its convenient ecology, it was also a reflex to bring Tamil workers for cheap labor, and a reflex to make a cup of tea for warmth.
An invitation, an opening to the silent realities, this installation documentation presents this particular place with its wind, humidity, nature, history and people, projected on a screen made of the industrial object it has become. Following the words of Laura U. Marks: “If every object and event is irreducible in its materiality, then part of learning to touch is to come to love its particularity, its strangeness, its precious and inimitable place in the world.”