Dear Reader: Editor’s Letter

Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke & Nienke Scholts Dear Reader: Editor’s Letter

Dear reader,

Welcome to Hinterlands: How to do Transdisciplinarity?

As a very real imaginary that playfully points to how, at ARIAS, we try to listen to the outskirts of research parameters and look for space outside the epicentre of dominant research practices, to experiment and move slower, ‘Hinterlands’, the title of this book, grounds us in time and geography as we tune into the invisible in-between knowledge that emerges from hybrid collaborative research practices; practices which, in other words, are transdisciplinary.

We asked a cross-section of artist-researchers that we have been working with in the ARIAS network over the past years to reflect on ‘transdisciplinarity’ through the lens of their research practice(s)1 . Rather than posing the question ‘What is trans- disciplinarity?’, we thought it more interesting to ask how practices of research come into being, how one deals with differences of many kinds in collaborations; and how the work is actually done together. The subtitle ‘How to do Transdisciplinarity?’ should therefore mainly act as a guide, a rhetorical device, to incite the authors and editors – and hopefully you as reader too - towards different corners, atmospheres, and viewpoints in the Hinterlands; towards the different ways in which research is practiced.

The book contains contributions that address a multitude of dynamics within transdisciplinary work in relation to, for example, language, listening, risk, pedagogy, world building, expectation, care, transmedia, curation, writing, intersectionality, and practicing medicine. These contents come in

different forms: reflective and/or poetic in style, narrated by single or multiple author(s), written out conversations, interviews, and a graphic story.

Sher Doruff and Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca discuss artistic research supervision and reflect on the missing yet crucial elements needed. What’s utopian is not necessarily impossible, they say. In another conversation, curator Imara Limon and Professor Eliza Steinbock approach transdisciplinarity through an intersectional lens in relation to new museology. In the contribution ‘Listening to the Birds’, the Visual Methodologies Collective move through their inspirations which form a basis for their collaborative projects with learning machines and climate fictions. Miha Turšič’s interview with physicist Raoul Frese, biologist and artist Špela Petrič, and curator Alice Smits marks the beginning of the transdisciplinary project ‘Plant Machine’. Their talk taps into seemingly basic issues, though integral to create a common ground and understanding from which to build the project further.

In the middle of the book a graphic from John Miers makes visible the experiences of a patient with Multiple Sclerosis – John himself – and shows how this form of art, graphic medicine, has given doctors better understanding of their patients. While Ilse van Rijn reflects on writing as artistic research and a potential transdisciplinary practice, Maaike Muntinga does so and proposes a combination of essayistic, diary and dreamlike fragments in order to call forth her imagination of the harmful sides of care institutions as ‘Harmacies’. There is more, and we leave it to you to further roam about to see what is of interest to you – you can read the texts in any order – and dive in.

Published at the start of 2022, Hinterlands marks the approximate anniversary of ARIAS’ first five years as a platform for research through the arts and sciences. ARIAS is at once a small team of three people, a vast network of researchers, and a platform for art-research. Together we challenge the parameters and conditions of working across differences. This book celebrates the manifold ways in which collaborative research takes place in the ARIAS network, creating new hybrid forms for engaging with today’s most urgent issues.

Enjoy the journey through the Hinterlands!

1 This approach might suggest that all authors do belong in one way or another to the ‘field’ of transdisciplinarity, which, to make things more complicated, is not how they would necessarily see it themselves. Transdisciplinarity is a collection of crossing pathways in an unmappable area, that perpetually call us to articulate and make visible how this happens.