Eccentric Pedagogy - Pablo Martinez-Zárate by Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten

ECCENTRIC PEDAGOGY

ARTISTIC RESEARCH IN TIMES OF CRISIS

Pablo Martínez-Zárate

FOREWORD Eccentric Pedagogy – Artistic Research in Times of Crisis. The book in front of you is one of the outcomes, or expressions, of the residency of Pablo Martinez-Zárate at the Netherlands Film Academy in 2022 and 2023. We invited Mexican filmmaker, media artist and scholar Pablo Martinez-Zárate to join the Research Group of the Film Academy because we share the same, urgent interests in artistic research, practice and pedagogy. Thanks to the Artist in Residence programme of the Amsterdam University of the Arts, we could offer Pablo the time and space to continue his research with us. Eccentric Pedagogy documents the lectures and workshops he gave, the international research group on ‘critical pedagogy’ that he initiated, the studio experiments he did and the films he shot. But Eccentric Pedagogy is much more than a document. It is also an artistic research project in itself, an experiment at the intersection of form and content. Writing the book meant pushing the boundaries and taking the idea of ‘eccentricity’ also to the making of a book. To writing it, designing it and now to reading it... As a result, Eccentric Pedagogy is a rich experience, weaving text and images. It offers challenging reflections on the state of contemporary arts education, delves deep into questions of methodology of artistic research and generously shares workshop ideas and exercises. It’s an expression of voice and vision... I wish you an exciting read. Mieke Bernink, Head of Research Netherlands Film Academy Netherlands Film Academy

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: A MAP OF EXPLORATIONS

p. 8

MANIFESTO: I. freedom II. trust III. tenderness IV. value

p. 15 p. 16 p. 18 p. 19

DEATH TO THE REAL! LECTURE ON TECHNOLOGY, ARTISTIC RESEARCH AND HORIZONS OF POSSIBILITY

p. 22

MANIFESTO: V. memory VI. time VII. mystery VIII. discipline

p. 28 p. 29 p. 31 p. 32

Table of Contents

Eccentric Pedagogy

DEATH TO THE REAL! WORKSHOP ON DOCUMENTARY ART AND RADICAL THOUGHT

p. 36

DEATH TO THE REAL! EXERCISES.

p. 88

MANIFESTO: IX. nomadic X. artistic research

p. 96 p. 97

NOTES ON THE CAMERA-BODY AND THE BODY-CAMERA

p. 100

WORKSHOP ON THE CAMERA-BODY AND THE BODY-CAMERA AS A METHOD FOR FILMMAKING p. 106

MANIFESTO: XI. discovery XII. experimentation XIII. crisis

p. 116 p. 116 p. 119

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND ARTISTIC RESEARCH IMAGINATION GROUP

p. 122

MANIFESTO: XIV. body XV. ritual

p. 130 p. 132

STUDIO VARIATIONS

p. 134

OBLIQUE TAKES. MEDITATIONS ON ART AND CRISIS

p. 136

Table of Contents

Eccentric Pedagogy

MANIFESTO: XVI. care

p. 138

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

p. 142

BIOGRAPHY

p. 142

COLOPHON

p. 143

Eccentric Pedagogy

INTRODUCTION: A MAP OF EXPLORATIONS As part of the Artist in Residence programme at the Amsterdam University of the Arts, I came to the Research Group (Lectorate) of the Netherlands Film Academy with a personal quest: explore some of the roles that artistic education plays (and can play) in a world in crisis. The Lectorate was an inspiring space to expand my research, mainly because of its willingness to experiment and its openness to enter unknown territories. During a year-long exploration of what presented itself as a rather sinuous landscape, I

Eccentric Pedagogy

engaged in conversations, gave workshops and lectures, produced audiovisual pieces and texts - all exploring different challenges and urgencies facing artistic research and pedagogy today, under the framework of what I call eccentric pedagogy. This publication is a cartography of these explorations, undertaken between October 2022 and October 2023. Conceptually, what I call eccentric pedagogy is grounded in the long tradition of critical pedagogy in Latin America. It provides a political understanding of education, while conveying my conviction that teaching is a journey of discovery that entails aesthetic and ethical commitments. As a method, eccentric pedagogy seeks to open up questions rather than provide answers. It is thus an invitation to find new ways to embody our educational and artistic practices. Coming to

Introduction: A Map of Explorations

the Netherlands Film Academy was a way of investigating alternative appropriations of my creative and teaching methods. To this end, during my two research stays as artist in residence (one in October-November 2022 and another in March-May 2023), I conducted several lines of enquiry. During the first visit, I gave a public lecture and a workshop under the overarching title Death to the Real! This idea has been a guiding provocation behind my practice for a few years now. As part of the AIR project, I tested this notion by reassembling my earlier work: literally, I recomposed ideas and images into new assemblages that could unveil alternative understandings of my trajectory as a maker. Thus, the public lecture reviewed my work through a set of critical questions on artistic research, while

Eccentric Pedagogy

the simultaneous composition of over 50 collages reorganising the visual universe of my works, inaugurated new readings of my artistic corpus. The questions are included in this book, along with some of these collages. The workshop, on the other hand, is a project I have been developing since 2021. The subtitle following the Death to the Real! provocation indicates its focus on documentary practice and critical thought. The fifth edition of the workshop was held with the second-year master’s students of the Film Academy. It was the first time that I taught this workshop in English, which in itself involved a re-articulation of ideas. It was also the first time I did this with a small group characterised by a strong orientation towards artistic research. This helped me emphasize the methodological insights that form the main axis

Introduction: A Map of Explorations

of the workshop. For the purpose of this publication, I further developed these methods and included a series of newly formulated exercises that can help artistic research processes. At the end of this first period, together with the Lectorate of the F i l m Academy, we started what we called the Critical Pedagogy and Artistic Research Speculative Group. This group consisted of more than a dozen artists-pedagogues from different countries. Together, we engaged in a collective dialogue on the main challenges and opportunities facing artistic education today. We held six sessions between November 2022 and April 2023. With the documentation, I composed a collective stream of ideas that is included in this publication. It was fascinating to find so many intellectual and affective resonances across borders

Eccentric Pedagogy

and research cultures. In general terms, they pointed to fostering “safe and brave” spaces for artistic education, especially after the pandemic. T wo more act i v ities were carried out during this first period. In Studio 5 of the Film Academy, I produced the first video work from the Studio Variations series (a hands-on inquiry into different ways of inhabiting the artist’s studio). This initial exploration opened a series of works that continued during the second stage and will continue in the coming years. This series of video works, which simultaneously gives name to the concluding exhibition of my AIR research, opened a grounded reflection on the artist’s studio as a space and a process of study, intervention and possibility.

Introduction: A Map of Explorations

In 2022, also in Studio 5, I undertook a series of closed-door experiments for a second workshop, dedicated to what I call the dialectics of the camera-body and the body-camera. It wasn’t until the second stay, in April 2023, that I had the chance to implement the camera-body & body-camera workshop with master’s students from both years, now in Studio 7 of the Film Academy. The students were so engaged that they suggested organising a second day of experimentation, this time outdoors. The results are documented in an immersive video piece included in the final exhibition. As a result of both experiences, I designed exercises that feed the workshop included in this publication (along with the conceptual notes written as a preparatory text for the workshop).

Eccentric Pedagogy

It was during this second stage that I filmed the first part of the essay film that compliments my AIR research. Called Oblique Takes, the project was shot in the Netherlands, Mexico and Cuba. The film poses a series of questions about the relationship between art and horizons of possibility, especially during times of crisis. During the residency, I conducted a series of film experiments that were technical explorations of the conceptual questions behind the work. The most challenging one was the attempt to fracture the image of the horizon on the coast of the Netherlands, which I did by multiple exposure techniques using one of the Film Academy’s Bolex cameras.

Introduction: A Map of Explorations

Finally, the most conceptually dense piece of writing that I undertook was the Eccentric Pedagogy Manifesto, which can be considered the pillar of this publication (it literally cuts through the entire book). The manifesto is the condensation of many insights that germinated even before coming to the Netherlands Film Academy, but only came to life while walking the streets of Amsterdam, infused with all the experiences I have described so far. It was therefore during the second phase that many of the ideas I had developed during the residency crystalised. Some of the most inspiring in my understanding of eccentric pedagogy were the idea of pedagogy as ritual and pedagogy as a practice of care. These two insights that emerged from the AIR project opened up a new research path consisting of finding strategies to foster

Eccentric Pedagogy

spaces and practices of care within artistic research and pedagogy. This publication, like any map, is incomplete. But, as it is with maps, it serves as a guide for others to unveil new territories. This is one of the reasons behind opening up documents like the workshops so that anyone can appropriate them and take them to new creative horizons. In a challenging global scenario for artistic education, I hope that the questions and provocations contained in this book can inspire new ways of embodying pedagogy and research through the arts.

Introduction: A Map of Explorations

Eccentric Pedagogy

Introduction: A Map of Explorations

Eccentric Pedagogy

ECCENTRIC PEDAGOGY MANIFESTO

Manifesto

I. freedom

Eccentric Pedagogy

Pedagogy is a communicative act. Communication has political and poetic implications. It is fundamental to question the mediums and codes of interaction that sustain pedagogical encounters in order to preserve the transformative potential of education.

Manifesto

Eccentric pedagogy takes communication as a platform for collective realisation. Communication is never a completely transparent interchange; it can be affected by noise or interference. Noise can be destructive or creative; a lot of times, pedagogy is all about transforming noise into creative opportunities for discovering new ways of being together. Eccentric pedagogy embraces the creative potential of noise and interference. Eccentric pedagogy is a humbling process of communication, it fosters the recognition of impossibilities, and it challenges those hierarchies and power structures operating within educational institutions that hinder mutual understanding and freedom of expression. Eccentric pedagogy understands education as the collective practice of freedom1. Education is not a means to 1 control. Not freedom as the Control of individuals, groups, individualistic isolated path of realization, but freedom experiences, thoughts, ideas, as a communal responsibility methods, actions, passions, that involves us all in the fight interactions, desires, and against oppression. expressions of all sorts. 2 Laura Rita Segato invites us Control as the preservation of to imagine counter-pedagogies a structure of authority. of violence that can resist such Control as a mechanism of patriarchal tendencies (2018); eccentric pedagogy weaves a violence2.

dialogue with her ideas and tries to put them in dialogue with other domains of practice.

16 Eccentric Pedagogy

Such authoritarian education suppresses free transformation. It limits the autonomy and potential of groups and individuals. It goes against an entangled embodiment of our coexistence with other human and more-than-human agencies. Control is inevitably dependent on fear. Fear infused into the participants, but mostly, fear felt by those faceless agents sustaining institutional stagnation. We live in an age of fear.

Manifesto

Fear spreads all over education. Students, professors, managers, parents, and institutions are constantly dealing with fear, as if it was a bargaining chip in exchange for surviving the living environment of pedagogy today. Eccentric pedagogy is a site of loving resistance. Pedagogical encounters can restore trust and mutual support as a struggle against the paralyzing effects of fear. Eccentric pedagogy is a heartfelt effort to transform fear into hope, to mobilize bodies and imaginations towards more livable worlds. *** II. trust Pedagogy and art hold the potential of inspiring hope3; in doing so, they are spaces where we can reconfigure the horizons of what’s individually and collectively possible. For these singular events and collective opportunities to happen, it is important that every participant of the pedagogical encounter trusts the process —that of being together, sharing questions and experiences, whatever

3 Gerhard Richter, in his notebooks, wrote that “art is the highest form of hope” (2004). Since I read this, it has followed me everywhere I go. I believe that pedagogy holds a similar potential, especially if we are to understand pedagogy as a way of questioning and strengthening our individual and collective potential.

their disciplinary frameworks and dispositions.

Eccentric Pedagogy Manifesto

Eccentric pedagogy is built on trust. Trust in oneself and those around us. Trust in the possibility of mutual understanding. Trust in dissent. Trust in difference as a way of recognizing our own vulnerability. Trust in sameness as an opportunity to heal together. Trust in the images and sounds and words weaving our dialogue. Trust in the institutional networks that we navigate, and in our capacity to assure that these institutions stand against violence and injustice within and beyond their own operational structure. Trust in the unknown and all the things that escape our control. Eccentricity in eccentric pedagogy is a driving force. Eccentricity in eccentric pedagogy refers to the perennial dislocation of the power forces that operate within pedagogical settings. Power forces can be imagined as trajectories. Trajectories are traced by bodies in movement, but also by ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and other intensities that in-form the bodies that are involved in the pedagogical encounter. Alternative inhabitations of our bodies are possible if we exercise imagination as an emancipatory force. Eccentricity is a liberatory practice. Education as the collective practice of freedom assumes that every participant is autonomous and responsible for hers/his/theirs own actions. ***

III. tenderness

Eccentric Pedagogy

The eccentric pedagogue never settles. The eccentric pedagogue is therefore anti-settler or anticolonial by nature. The eccentric pedagogue gets inspiration and strength from the history of the struggles fought by the oppressed and transforms them into lovable action4.

Manifesto

The eccentric pedagogue seeks alternative readings/ writings of collective experience, rejecting the primacy of “storytelling”, shifting not 4 The Epistemologies of the only to “historytelling”, or even South developed by Boaventura to “herstorytelling”5, but to de Sousa Santos and his “themstorytelling”, an intricate thinking on the role of the university and knowledge web of multiple tales that production (2009, 2017, 2018) is constitute human and morean obligatory framework for the than-human time. proposal of eccentric pedagogy. The idea of resisting colonial A “themstory” involves my structures of violence operating stories, your stories, their on most of our territories, stories—therefore, it lacks a bodies, and imaginations, is a centre of narration. motivation that sustains the efforts of eccentric pedagogy.

The eccentric pedagogue challenges her/his/their own ideas constantly. The eccentric pedagogue is not afraid of revealing her/his/ their own fragility. The eccentric pedagogue is driven by radical tenderness6 and an unrestricted love for life. Tenderness can be a creative drive that is inspired by love7.

The shift from “history” to “herstory” is contained in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “A Critique of Postcolonial Reason” (1999).

6 Radical tenderness is a concept that saw the light through the manifesto of the Mexican performance collective La Pocha Nostra, integrated by Dani D’Emilia and Daniel B. Coleman. 7 In her Nobel Lecture “The Tender Narrator”, Olga Tokarczuk claims tenderness as a deeply engaging way of relating to others (2019), intimate and political at the same time.

19 Eccentric Pedagogy

Tenderness is a way of recognizing our vulnerability without renouncing the spiritual strength that is needed in every artistic and pedagogical encounter. Tenderness is a way of opening our sensitivity to all the affective resonances traversing pedagogical and artistic events. By introducing tenderness as a way of engaging with other human and more-than-human agencies, participation in the pedagogical encounter is always an opportunity of renewing one’s own gaze. ***

Manifesto

IV. value Under the current economic and political ecosystem, education is frequently subordinated to the mandate of the market. Market pedagogy is a by-product of the neoliberal school/ university8. Market pedagogy reveals the corporatisation of education. Market pedagogy is sterile. Market pedagogy is a consequence of necropolitics. Market pedagogy deprives innovation of its liberatory potential. Market pedagogy is centripetal pedagogy. Market pedagogy standardises imagination. The pedagogical capacity to resist and reshape the market’s imperatives is a core drive of eccentric pedagogy. Eccentric pedagogy is inspired by collaboration and rejects the market imperatives of competition, which follow the logic of the survival of the fittest.

8 Boaventura de Sousa Santos locates the different structures of violence operating behind the neoliberal university and invites us to imagine ways of decolonising education and challenging what he calls “the cognitive empire” (2017, 2018).

Eccentric pedagogy is enlivening, it nurtures the vital energy needed by participants to carry on with their own explorations and life struggles.

Eccentric Pedagogy

Pedagogy as an eccentric practice builds community by fostering critical engagement9. Eccentric pedagogy distributes its energy among all the participants of the pedagogical encounter. Eccentric pedagogy is an open path of sharing and becoming together.

Manifesto

Eccentric pedagogy inhabits educational spaces with ritualistic fervour, yet with a mischievous childish spirit. We are the children running around the temple, while the sermon is being preached upon our parents, who are shamefully reddened by our freedom. We are also the children that apologise and learn from their mistakes. We are the children that love our parents, yet uphold our freedom to dissent. Eccentric pedagogy is wild pedagogy10. It goes against the norms of Western-patriarchal civilisational programmes. It resists the impetus of control and of vertical impositions that characterise the 9 I understand eccentric hierarchies within traditional pedagogy as an heir of Paulo educational institutions. Freire’s critical pedagogy (1970, 1996) and bell hooks engaged It embraces the unknown as a motivation behind pedagogical pedagogy (1994). 10 explorations. This idea comes from Jeroen Eccentric pedagogy is an enactment (and not only a conceptualisation) of freedom and autonomy11. Enactment means putting mind and body into pedagogical practice.

Fabius, artistic director at DAS Choreography, AHK, who at the same time evokes Jack Halberstram and Tavia Nyong’o proposal of a Theory in the Wild (2018). Education “is the practice of freedom” (hooks, 1994), and autonomy (Freire, 1970, 1996).

21 Eccentric Pedagogy

It is impossible to distinguish thought from feeling, feeling from thought. Pedagogy is a practice that involves both sensibility and intellect. Eccentric pedagogy is NON ANTHROPOLOGORATIOHOMOGENDERCENTRIC

***

Manifesto

DEATH TO THE REAL! TECHNOLOGY, ARTISTIC RESEARCH AND HORIZONS OF POSSIBILITY Lecture performed on November 10, 2022 Netherlands Film Academy

Eccentric Pedagogy

During my first visit as Artist in Residence, I performed a lecture that reframed my artistic production through a set of questions related to artistic research. Being invited to transform this lecture into a space of research, I took the opportunity, instead of delving into each project from a descriptive angle, to rethink my artistic research processes by inquiring about the issues that transcended each project, and invited the audience to join me in my reflexive thinking process. Each question was related to a project, yet the focus was more on the reflections that the questions opened up than on the description of what the project implied. The lecture became a critical revision of my work for which I also made a new display of visual material from my film and interactive projects as ‘memory-collages’ that fragment the original frames of the

Death to the Real!

Lecture

images and renew our looking at them. I selected a few of these collages to accompany the questions. The video recording of the lecture is available online, follow the QR-code to access it.

Death to the real? What is technology without ritual? How can we reinvent production methods?

Why a film (or an installation or a book or a sculpture or a choreography)?

What does each medium give us?

Which conjunctions emerge through our research? Which forces operate upon or condition our research?

Eccentric Pedagogy

Death to the Real!

Lecture

How can we envision post-disciplinary territories? Is it possible to intervene in hegemonic info-flows? How to create something out of nothing? Are we able to escape our ways of inhabiting the world? Is liminality a condition of research? Can debris be a source of creation? What does our research commemorate? What are our politics of memory?

What, when, where, why, and how to preserve? Why do we need to explore tradition to innovate? How can we produce an autonomous technical corpus? 24

Eccentric Pedagogy

Death to the Real!

Lecture

How does our body merge with the landscapes around us? What and how and when and where are the archives of the body?

Which are the events that define us indirectly? Why do we need to recognize the more-than-human complicities that constitute our being in this world? 25

Eccentric Pedagogy

Death to the Real!

Lecture

Where and when does our research iterate? Why is it urgent to avoid exploitation as a principle of creation? Is our life monopolised? Is our expression monopolised?

What images precede us? What images will succeed us? How can we open cracks in our intelligence and sensibility? How many strangers inhabit us? Why is it important to foster eccentricity? What do you feel-think? 26

Eccentric Pedagogy

Death to the Real!

Lecture

When-where-how do we perform our images?

In what ways is our research a palimpsest?

Are there modes and levels of censorship in our research?

What are the names that emerge from the fragments of our research? 27

Eccentric Pedagogy

Death to the Real!

Lecture

V. memory Memory is at the heart of education.

Eccentric Pedagogy

Education can be understood as the flow of trajectories — forces that are at play within institutions and the spaces that constitute them. Layers of order and discourse that shape our relational architectures.

Manifesto

The classroom is a space where multiple trajectories coexist. These trajectories precede the pedagogical encounter and some will succeed it. Embodied memory is the inhabitation of these trajectories. Our understanding of memory is closely related to our relationships with discipline (both as a method of control and as a field of practice). Norms depend on the convergence of memory and action. Memory lives in a constant tension between the familiar and the unknown, between tradition and innovation. Eccentric pedagogy understands memory not as repetition, but rather as sensible appropriation, embodied remembrance and creative intervention. Pedagogy exists in our bodies. Our trajectories alter the paths of tradition, of disciplinary fields. Radical embodiments of memory do not deny tradition. Radical memory grows from the roots (radix-root). Instead of promoting a passive retelling of past learnings, eccentric pedagogy as a mode of radical memory promotes a reinvention of tradition through acts of intervention. ***

VI. time

Eccentric Pedagogy

Memory is a way of embodying human and more-thanhuman time. Memory shouldn’t be understood as the remembrance of grand accomplishments, the sterile repetition of dates, names, and masterpieces. The perpetuation of traditions. Memory is the activation of architectures of meaning. Memory is the embodied reconfiguration of the past and its projection (and therefore transformation) into the future.

Manifesto

Art and education both deal with memory in an intense and intimate way. Art and education are history in the making. When working in art and education, we are called upon to take a political stance on our approach to memory, on our relationship with the archive, and on our practice as an intervention in the dynamics of history. Memory is a way of surfacing spatial relationships with other beings, things, and presences. A free embodiment of memory involves the questioning and undermining of disciplinary forces. Art and education are vehicles for the embodiment of memory. A right to memory has been the subject and drive of many insurrectionary and resistance movements around the world. Memory connects bodies and 12 spirits with the marks of the Lee-Anne Betasamosake Simpson has a beautiful article land12. Communities work on memory entitled “Land as pedagogy”, where she invites us to imagine as a common good, something alternative ways of relating to to hold on to, even if only knowledge and understanding that are not necessarily unconsciously. related to academic settings or protocols (2014).

Memory is a way of belonging, the archive a territory of communal appropriation, a public site of encounter13.

Eccentric Pedagogy

The action of disciplinary forces remains somewhat engraved in the architectures of the archive, and not only the documents that contain it. Art and education can either reproduce traditions or reinvent them. In both cases, the study of the past is an unavoidable terrain of practice and a necessary task for the projection and inhabitation of more livable futures for human and more-than-human agencies.

Manifesto

The archive is an implicit domain of art and education. In both practices, the horizons of the archive are expanded through new inscriptions and new architectural relations. Eccentric pedagogy understands the archive as a site of creative intervention. The archive as a critical event14. The inscriptions sustaining the archive are combined with relational architectures that give meaning to the documents and their possible narratives. These architectures are in perennial instability, they are themselves sites of confrontation, emergence, and emergency. The ways in which we inhabit the world may translate into the intervention of the archive. To inhabit the archive we need to transform it. Bring the archive to life. ***

13 Ariella Azoulay’s work has been of crucial influence in my thinking and making, especially her ideas on how artists and researchers can exercise their rights to intervene in the archive as a public space (2014). human presences surrounding us.

This is a core concept of my proposal of the Practical Critique of Communication and a method for artistic research contained in the workshop Death to the real!, also shared in this AIR publication. 14

VII. mystery

Eccentric Pedagogy

Eccentric pedagogy resists ministerial forces in memory15 by cultivating mystery as a source of discovery. Memory as mystery is anti-programmatic. Memory as mystery embraces the unknown. Memory as mystery is a war machine, it weaves lines of flight.

Manifesto

The Ministry of Memory operates within bodily and discursive arrangements. The Ministry of Memory co-opts individual and collective creativity while dealing with historical narratives. There are no missing images for The Ministry of Memory, its force constitutes it as a centripetal, prohibitive, enclosed scheme of historical relations. Eccentric pedagogy submerges in mystery as a terrain of discovery. Eccentric pedagogy believes that art and education can introduce Mystery in The Ministry of Memory. It is through creative acts of intervention of documents, categories, and relations that one can envision new dispositions of the archive. Emergent configurations as manifestations or consequences of mystery are, in a way, alternative diagrams for acting within and sometimes beyond the scope of The Ministry of Memory. ***

The distinction between memory as mystery and ministry comes from Raul Ruiz’s Poetics of Cinema (1999). I have appropriated this distinction and taken it further.

VIII. discipline

Eccentric Pedagogy

Eccentric pedagogy understands disciplinary fields as territories of exchange and experimentation.

Manifesto

Discipline for eccentric pedagogy is paired with (co) responsibility, commitment, sacrifice16, and freedom. Discipline for eccentric pedagogy is porous, liquid, mutant. Discipline for eccentric pedagogy is both technique and discourse. Discipline for eccentric pedagogy is a synonym of incompleteness, and therefore transdiscipline is a condition of coexistence among humans and as humans with our environment and other critters. Eccentric pedagogy bridges disciplinary traditions in order to push the frontiers of common understanding. Eccentric pedagogy believes that the encounter of disciplinary fields is an opportunity to transform ourselves and the world around us. Eccentric pedagogy challenges disciplinary frontiers as part of an ongoing process of renewing the possibilities of common understanding and knowledge production. Eccentric pedagogy is not about information transfer but about existential transformation of the pedagogue and every participant in the pedagogical encounter. The eccentric pedagogue is constantly inspired and transformed by those who partake in the pedagogical experience.

16 Andrei Tarkovsky’s ideas on art as sacrifice and freedom have been of capital influence on my approach to both art and pedagogy (1984, 2009). This understanding invites us to imagine freedom as a territory of responsibility and commitment, imagine how our actions resonate with the world and at the same time affect those human and more-thanhuman presences surrounding us.

33 Eccentric Pedagogy

Those that under banking education17 are understood as mere recipients of previously produced knowledge are here conceived of as co-creators of whatever flourishes through the pedagogical experience. More importantly, the youth is taken to be a source of renewal and discovery, a conveyor of emergent forms of expression and new languages, and not as a population that lacks experience and needs to be in-formed/ re-formed. It is by means of these intergenerational bridges, which are characteristic for pedagogical encounters, that tradition is re-con-in-formed18. Paulo Freire defined ‘banking education’ as the process of information transfer from those who possess knowledge (professors, who at the same time are the authority) to those who don’t possess knowledge (the students) (1972, 1996).

Manifesto

Eccentric pedagogy builds on the in-formation processes sustaining human and morethan-human entanglements. Eccentric pedagogy defines in-formation as the emergence of form. Generating new in-formation involves the translocation of the sensorial and intellectual possibilities for creating meaningful relationships. Shared understandings of our coexistence are born from emergencies within in-formational processes. The intervention of forms is a core practice of eccentric pedagogy. ***

18 This idea suggests the perpetual reimagination of reality, I address it through the notion of the Poetics of Information, which I define as the perpetual reconfiguration of our entanglements with form and the experiential meanings we take out of these encounters with bodies and inscriptions. The Poetics of Information is the first stage of my methodological framework called a Practical Critique of Communication, of which Centrifuge or Eccentric Pedagogy was the last. This was part of my PhD and it came out as a book entitled “Machines to see and listen beyond the limits of time: Towards a Practical Critique of Communication”, edited by Universidad Iberoamericana at the end of 2020.

Eccentric Pedagogy

DEATH TO THE REAL! WORKSHOP ON DOCUMENTARY ART AND RADICAL THOUGHT

De/script/zone This workshop emerged during the pandemic as an attempt to systematise my artistic practice and pedagogical approach after a decade of making experimental and interactive documentary works while also teaching documentary and photography classes. The workshop approaches the idea of documentary practice from its broadest perspective, understanding it as a set of research strategies for investigating reality that can aid the creation of very diverse works, including fiction pieces. The documentary mode is one the most powerful platforms for creating discourses and perceptions across the globe. In its many manifestations, from the use of social networks to document our everyday lives, via documentary series on streaming platforms, all the way to works of expanded cinema, journal-

Eccentric Pedagogy

Death to the Real!

Workshop

ism, and contemporary art, documentary practice has emerged as a necessary territory for the affirmation, questioning, and renewal of our societal coexistence.

The structure of the workshop Death to the Real! is organised in a way that it shares theoretical insights that ground my practice as well as artistic methodologies and research strategies. The workshop can be of aid for people working in projects as diverse as fiction or non-fiction film, expanded cinema, video art,

Since the first edition in 2021, the workshop has become a living platform for the ongoing interrogation of my practice. Each time, the workshop changes shape, embodying the dislocating principles of eccentric pedagogy. The version documented here is based on the workshop given to master students at the Netherlands Film Academy, 7-9 November 2022. The adaptation of the content for this publication consisted of summarising the main ideas and references shared with the group, leaving out many of them but adding exercises that, due to the timeframe of the workshop at the Film Academy, could not be carried out. These exercises, that you can find at the end of this text, are mainly reflexive attempts to look at our practice from a critical angle, one that can stimulate the constant reframing of our creative positions.

Eccentric Pedagogy

Workshop

A call for a Death to the Real! rejects a representational approach to human and more-than-human phenomena. Based on a perspective of radical thought, it takes documentary art as a deployment of our imagination towards the intervention of our horizons of coexistence. In the sense that it resists power forces operating within centres of hegemony, it is an eccentric practice.

photography, journalism, contemporary art, transmedia projects, or more.

Death to the Real!

The Case Against Reality Reality is violent. Reality is precarious. Reality urgently calls for critical intervention. Artistic practice is fertile ground for intervening in the horizons of the real, reshaping what’s imaginable, and projecting new worlds for us to inhabit. This is the power and responsibility of the artist. *** I want to share an anecdote that happened just after finishing the first session of the 3rd edition of this workshop, in June 2022 at the Centre of the Image in Mexico City (the Netherlands Film Academy’s version was the 5th). This event changed my relationship with the workshop. I was sitting on the pavement just a few meters away from the museum’s

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entrance, putting on my rollerblades to skate back home. I was talking to a workshop participant when he suddenly said “Watch out!” and pointed in the direction behind me. When I turned around, still on the ground, I saw a young, homeless man coming at me fast and violently, hurling incomprehensible insults. Before having any chance to react, he hit me on the right side of my face with a piece of wood. I had never seen this person before, not even made eye-contact before the blow. After his blow, he continued on his way. In an instant, my face was covered in blood, and I was totally confused. I went into the museum where they helped me clean the wound. Why was I attacked by this man? After deep musings that afternoon, it occurred to me that this young and enervated individual did not hit Pablo. His universe and mine were completely different, but somehow these two realms clashed vio-

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lently. I saw in this singular and delirious collision of realities an allegory of what the workshop was trying to provoke. In a way, this event was an incarnation of my Death to the real! provocation. A dose of my own medicine. ***

is forced to reshape the boundaries of reality itself (see Martínez Zárate, 2023). Killing the real refers to a questioning of the structures of order that sustain reality, this with the objective of visualising other possible configurations for our coexistence.

We live in a world where drawing the boundaries of what’s real is a huge challenge. Take technologies such as deep fake or something less sophisticated like selfie filters that effortlessly alter our appearance. It would be naive to deny that such filters affect the way we build our identity, form a community, and inhabit our shared world. Reality is now constantly expanded and transfigured. As artists, people dealing with images and imagination, we are active agents in this ongoing mutation. Under this context, any artistic practice that aims to investigate reality

If we are to intervene in the horizons of what is real at a specific moment of our existence, we need to recognise the technological platforms at hand. The Death to the Real! workshop is an invitation to acknowledge the connection between media and memory as a foundational pillar of the configuration of reality. What emerges amid such a bond is our own way of seeing, our embodied inhabitation of time and space. This requires us to locate the chains of production to which we are linked.

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***

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The technological scaffolding of contemporary images invites us to “distrust” them. This is a paraphrase of the title under which a collection of writings by Harun Farocki was published in Spanish. Farocki’s work is a direct inspiration for the artistic approach shared during this workshop. His films and installations dismantle the operative configurations by which we articulate meaning since the invention of moving image technology (and beyond). Farocki’s work can be described as a critical archaeology of modern and contemporary ways of looking, the production chains behind them and the implications for memory and meaning-making. It also displays multiple research strategies that serve as an introduction to critical thinking through making. Depending on the time we have for the workshop, I usually use at least three of his films as introduc-

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tory examples of different strategies for articulating radical takes on reality. His first film, Inextinguishable Fire (1968), opens with a young Farocki reading a testimony from a Vietnam War victim. He then asks us if it is possible to show such violence. If we saw the images of a body burnt by napalm, we would close our eyes, he says — close our eyes first to the images, second to the memory of the images, third to the events that they portray, and finally, to the context of that violence. So instead of bringing us closer to the events we are communicating, showing literal images will move us further away from the realities we want to tell and question. Farocki concludes with a radical film rhetoric: he burns his hand with a cigarette so that, from a familiar sensation (or at least a familiar element like a cigarette) we can imagine the unfamiliar feeling of being burnt by napalm.

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Farocki’s introduction to his film allows me to reflect on several important issues for documentary art and radical thought in this context. First, we have Farocki occupying the centre of the composition and incarnating the testimony of violence through his voice. The artist is always present in the work. Every aesthetic gesture implies our positioning within that reality we are working with. This positioning is not neutral and there is an attachment to that position. We cannot remain indifferent to the realities we are investigating. Farocki burning his hand is a rather simple yet eloquent gesture that embodies such complicity between the artist and reality. In only a few minutes, Farocki presents a genealogy of looking. He opens our eyes to the intricate entanglements that define the mediation of images. Images and sounds reach us through chains of production which inevitably have strong

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implications for our ways of making sense of the world. The final sequence of this film reinforces the idea of a complex, intricate network sustaining chains of production. One and the same actor occupies the centre of the frame enacting three different personalities: worker, student, engineer. Each one suggests how the production of vacuum cleaners and sub-machine guns are deeply connected. The last sentence, uttered by the engineer, projects our own complicity with these chains of production: “What we manufacture depends on the workers, students, and engineers”. Another of Farocki’s projects that seems to illuminate our position as artists is his research on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of film technology. From this he produced his seminal work Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), which analyses the first film by the Lumière brothers, a

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film that portrays the Lumière’s employees leaving their factory. Farocki departs from this film document to unveil the relationship between film, factory, labour, and value all along the 20th century. More than a single work, it was a research process that culminated in multiple pieces (an essay film, an installation, and several texts). An interesting aspect of this work is the fact that one and the same research can have distinct outcomes, each exploring different facets of the reality being investigated. Additionally, this project was framed by Farocki as an attempt at a “new kind of cinematic thesaurus” (2001), a proposition that relates directly to the idea of the death to the real! as an eccentric practice that confronts orders of meaning, while it projects new strategies for making sense of our experience. Finally, during the workshop at the Netherlands Film Academy I used Farocki’s

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film Still Life (1997) to exemplify a subversion of the shot - counter shot dialectic which, according to Farocki, is one of the fundamental principles of film language, against which only “real authors” rebel (Farocki, 2013). Such aesthetic revolt is not only poetic but also deeply political. My interpretation (rather loose, I must admit) of how Farocki addresses this in Still Life is by using two different styles of filmmaking (essayistic versus observational) that converge for the purpose of his argument – a critique of image making methods at the end of the 20th century. A few months before his death, I had the chance to interview Harun Farocki when he visited Mexico City for a retrospective of his film and installation works. His final response to our questions revealed his openness to technological transformation and, at the same time, his willingness to take a critical position towards it:

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“In recent years, I have a hard time judging all these digital images and all these codecs that are coming up. I don’t know what to say about colour correction, because it no longer looks like a photographic image, it’s more like a chalk painting, it has no luminescence. So there are a lot of changes that have confused me in my aesthetic judgement about how I would like to have an image or whatever. But that’s also liberating, because you must question your standards again, and that is what I’m trying to do.” Even at the end of his days, Farocki was still questioning his own way of seeing and relating to images. I think this dislocation of his own gaze accompanied his entire life’s work. So it seems that it was important for him not only to question the hegemony or industrial procedures for making images, but also to install a reflexive approach to our own position

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as artists. I can say that Farocki is one of the most influential figures behind the design of the Death to the Real! workshop (and my own approach to filmmaking and artistic production). *** How do we produce and consume images? How does this production-consumption cycle relate to reality as a space of coexistence? Can our practice have any influence on the configuration of the horizons of possibility? The Death to the Real! workshop invites the participants to perform a collective inquiry into how artistic research can reshape our communal experience. The aim is to accompany the participants in the questioning of their participation in the round-the-clock writing of history.

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While performing artistic research (artistic research is always performed in and through the bodies), we redefine the horizons of what we consider real. In this recomposition, technology plays a crucial role. I usually take different images, such as sand seen through a microscope or X-rays, as a metaphor for this idea. For example, what can we see through an X-ray? The severity of an injury, for example (here you can see my broken ankle). In addition to making a diagnosis, X-rays help both healthcare professionals and ourselves to take action regarding a specific condition or circumstance. The x-ray is a metaphor for how documentary art can intervene in the horizons of the real. It is a way of revealing what remains invisible if we do not use the right tools. What methods are required by the realities we are exploring? These technical solutions are not always ready in advance, we need to take into account the context of exploration

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and discover which solutions best fit our objectives.

Here’s a simple example: during the second stage of my residency in Amsterdam, I went to the coast to shoot a 16mm roll for the short film that is part of the AIR project. The narrative objective of this film is to reflect on the relationship

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between art and the horizons of possibility. My intention was to split the image and create a multiple exposure of the sea’s horizon, with the horizon shifting on the left and right sides of the composition, suggesting that multiple possibilities can emerge from a single standpoint. The technology chosen was a Bolex, as it allows me to rewind the film and shoot again on the same section of the footage. With digital technology, this is technically impossible.

Technological appropriation has both aesthetic and ethical implications. There is always a political programme behind the technologies that we use, but this does not necessarily mean that our creations are determined by such genealogy, which is commonly linked to control and oppression. We can always subvert technological programmes. That is the purpose of critical technological appropriation. *** Trinh T. Minh-ha is also an obligatory reference for this critical take on documentary art. Her film Reassemblage (1982) contains one of the most eloquent maxims of contemporary documentary ethics: “I do not intend to speak about, just speak nearby”. Inevitably, we immerse ourselves in the realities we are exploring; by recognising how we position ourselves, we can also dis-

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cover new political and aesthetical possibilities. As Trinh Minh-ha suggested in her well-known article “The Totalizing Quest for Meaning”, every closure is an opening (1993). What paths do we open with our research? How do we inaugurate new routes of exploration? How do we inhabit them? *** According to Hito Steyerl, there is a “documentary mode” that has become a kind of “transnational language of practice” (2009, p. 145). The documentary sound-image is now deeply rooted in our ways of producing and consuming information about our realities. When embarking on artistic research processes from a documentary art perspective, this condition is both an opportunity and a threat. An opportunity because it allows us to communicate

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using what are today’s natural ways of interaction. A threat because it can flatten our expressive possibilities through aesthetic and narrative norms that are reproduced almost unconsciously. A Death to the Real! calls for experimental strategies to defy such standards. It does so, firstly, by identifying and naming them, and secondly, by subverting their influence. Radicality as Method There are several meanings of the word radical. The most common one refers to drastic changes in a political or social situation. The etymology of the word also evokes the notion of “root”, and thus radical also refers to the fundamental nature of something, as well as referring to “far-reaching or thorough”, as in digging deep down to the roots. Connecting these two facets of the word (the transformative and the rooted) I propose that when

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we use radicality as a method for artistic research, we have two core practices to perform when conducting our inquiries: on the one hand, we need to delve deep into tradition (where do we come from, what are the trajectories that mark our path, how is our practice informed by the phantoms of the past?); and on the other hand, we need to ask what are the possible directions these trajectories can take, in which direction do we want to steer them, what needs to be transformed? Furthermore, radicality as method seeks to identify some of the urgencies we face today and asks how artistic research can help us intervene in them, change their course? *** Radical art is excessive. It pushes the limits of what’s imaginable, it reshapes the conditions of possibility. Critical art is a manifesta-

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tion of radical art, it immerses itself in the crisis at hand in order to establish a position within it. It recognises itself (the artist, the research, the works) as part of the crisis. The Death to the Real! workshop focuses on radical strategies for articulating artistic research under this perspective of critical art — that we are immersed in the crisis, that it is our responsibility to act within it. *** The idea of the Ministr y of Memor y as opposed to the Mystery of Memory, taken from Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz (2000), has marked my thinking about art and memory since more than a decade ago. I have pushed Ruiz’s approach further to understand the Ministry of Memory as the hegemony corroding our poetic language and its political potential. The

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Ministry of Memory represents the architectures of control and oppression that sometimes grotesquely, sometimes discreetly, condition our sensibility and intelligence and limits our expression. The Ministry of Memory is responsible for the standardised reproduction of artistic narratives. Against The Ministry of Memory, I turn to Mystery as a guiding force of artistic research. Mystery is whimsical, it works against control. Mystery is a source of discovery. Radicality evokes a sense of Mystery in that it presupposes a leap of faith into the abyss of the unknown. Mystery as method thus forces us to question the limits of our practice and constantly push them. Mystery as method equals radicality: it questions the fundamental nature of our own practice while it challenges and transforms the ministerial forces conditioning it.

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In this sense, I believe that there is always a politics to our poetics. This politics of poetics determines our position in the history of our disciplinary fields. It also demands an engaged relationship with the contexts of our actions, the ways in which we want to participate in this historical flux, and what commitments we are willing to make. Our positionings within our fields of practice are ever-changing (could they be otherwise?) depending on the contexts of our action and the interactions we engage in. *** There are three words that I use to locate artis tic research within our personal and profes sional trajectories as artists: existence, experience, and expression. They all share the prefix ex-, which suggests a jump outside of ourselves, an inevitable

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entanglement with the outside world. Existence is our being in relation to other beings, to the times and spaces of our being together. Experience, conversely, is the construction through time of a mind, body and spirit in relation to our learning processes, which come from our relationship with other human and more-than-human forces of life, from the encounters we experience between the outside world and our inner world. Expression, finally, refers literally to applying pressure outside of ourselves, changing the conditions of our contexts, making ourselves present to others, manifesting our will through various media that we have at hand; projecting our inner voice onto the external world, and making it visible (or perceptible) to sensibilities and intelligences other than our own. I relate these three concepts to opera tional levels of artistic research. Exist

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ence is experimentation, always trial and error, learning as we go. Experience is research, direct or indirect documenta tion of our life’s journey. Expression, for me, is expanded montage, the recomposi tion of intellectual and material elements into manifestations of our feelings, ideas and insights. Montage is taken here not as an equivalent of editing but as an operational level of artistic research (to be dealt with extensively in the last section of the methodological inventory). From these ideas, we can understand artistic practice as a deeply relational activity. We relate to materials, technol ogies, individuals, groups, institutions, and other domains of reality. We are always in tension with forces pushing in directions that may or may not coin cide with where we want or think we are going. In these entanglements, we can discover the paths of our practice. *** Workshop

It is never easy to map the evolution of our creative projects. Artistic research is rhizomatic, non-linear, sometimes opaque and it works against our will to control it. I have used a very basic simplification of the path that our ideas follow in becoming a concrete manifestation that others can perceive and relate to. This involves recognising that there is a plethora of possible trajectories between ideas and reality. Ideas are also never self-contained. They are interdependent, fragmentary, porous, evolving, and contingent to many factors, both external and internal (from the resources we have at our disposal, to our competencies and even to how we feel at a specific moment of creation). I have identified two operational levels that we deal with when walking this path: a technical level, which refers to the tools, codes, languages, and styles that we

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implement; and a narrative or discursive level, which refers to the themes or aspects of the reality that we are dealing with. Both are equally decisive for the tracks we take and the results we achieve. Technical and narrative domains of our practice are manifold. There are always different creative choices we must make, each altering the course of our artistic research enterprises. Instead of implementing fixed methods for each project, we encourage a process-based approach that invites us to listen deeply to the realities we are exploring, as well as to make decisions in resonance with them. For my own artistic practice, my interest in pedagogy has allowed me to critically review and systematise my research process. From this reflexive approach, several intuitions have emerged that are of aid to map out the journey from ideas to reality.

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One of them is summarised in a model that, like any model, oversimplifies the artistic research process. Even if it reduces the complexity of the creative process, it can help us organise and understand the possibilities and limitations of our research projects. The model traces what could be labelled as “layers of reality”, which refer to the domains we work with when we document our investigations. As such, they can also be referred to as stages of our explorations of reality. I will explain them below. The Unknown Reality The first and most ample layer of reality is always the “unknown reality” — that is, those aspects of reality that escape our capacity to understand or explore them. Once we recognise such boundaries to our explorations, we can locate our research. Of course, part of the motivation behind artistic research (and research in general) is precisely to push

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the boundaries of what’s knowable. If we are willing to immerse ourselves in the mysterious, we might discover new possibilities for our investigations. Technical and narrative strategies can help us push our capacity beyond our original expectations, yet there will always be limits to our practice. In a way, recognising these limits is a humbling process and a way to acknowledge areas of opportunity for us to keep developing further. The Documentable Reality Only some aspects of reality that we can explore are documentable. We need to ask ourselves what techniques (tools, codes, configurations) we have at our disposal to document aspects that we are looking for and aspects that emerge during the process. This last particularity is important because much of our documentation is beyond our ability to anticipate it. If our research is a process of discovery, we need to be willing to overcome our fix-

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ations on subjects, topics, characters or aspects of reality. If we are open to what each reality has to offer, we can succeed in pushing the limits of what we initially thought was possible. Working with our documentation as an archive is fundamental, as we will see later in this workshop. What architectures can we use to organize our documentation? How is that reality transformed by our recategorisation of the inscriptions we generate or appropriate? The Narratable Reality Not every document that turns up during our research can become part of our narration (I use narration as a sign for any artistic expression, even if it doesn’t strictly follow the structure of a narration). The main activity here is selection: what is included in our narration, what is left out? Sometimes, for example when working on transmedia projects, we may use different inscriptions for different

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outlets or modules of our project. We should then ask ourselves, which media are best suited to express what moves us or interests us about the reality that we are exploring? The Reality and Horizon of the Project Every project is determined by many factors, some of them internal to our disposition and capacity, others to the context of their realisation. In recognising this contingency, I identified what could be called ‘the horizon of the project’ — that is, the potential that a project has at a specific moment in time and space. The horizon of the project will sometimes coincide with the reality of the project, yet not always; we may exceed our expectations, or we may fall short. The objective of identifying such potential is to push it as far as we can. This effort is precisely where new realms of expression become attainable. When we push the limits of our expectations, often in dialogue with

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creative teams or external interlocutors, we can inhabit unsuspected territories. It is here where new conditions of possibility become perceptible. Media Design: Technique & Narrative At the core of our projects is what I have defined as media design: using technical and narrative strategies to address the creative challenges we encounter. Within technical and narrative media design, I refer to different levels of craft that we need to work on constantly to discover our own narratives. These levels lie beyond the horizons of the project, meaning that they connect different research processes, bridging different moments in our artistic experience. • The first of these is experimentation, understood here as our engagement in research as a practice of discovery. Contrary to preconceptions that would reduce experimentation

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in artistic practice to free or careless exercise, experimentation here refers to critical iteration and reflexive observation of our methods. Do they work? What are their limitations and how can we overcome them? What is the degree of success in relation to what we want to explore? Should we adjust or look for technical or narrative alternatives? • The second level of craft is writing, not just as in traditional written language, but all those inscriptions that emerge during our process in the form of notes, sketches, drafts, prototypes. Writing is a way of organising our artistic research process, of engaging in dialogue with ourselves and with the research we’re doing. Organising our writing activities in notebooks or process archives is of great help to understand our situation during specific stages of our research. At the same time, this organisational

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task helps locate a research project in a life trajectory and artistic corpus. • The third and final level is montage, again as an overarching operation of reorganising a life experience into concrete insights, ideas, and expressions (manifestations of our inner vibrations) that are perceptible to others, be it as artistic works or as fragments of an artistic process. The last method shared in this workshop is dedicated to a theoretical matrix of montage.

constitute the territory of craftsmanship, where our technical and narrative abilities are practised and developed. Even more defining is the fact that experimentation, writing, and editing are ways of exercising power. As such, they have political resonances for which we as artists are responsible. Finally, even though they are strongly grounded in concrete actions, they are informed by our imagination. They are territories where imagination finds its way into reality, where imagination manifests itself....

There is constant feedback between experimentation, writing, and montage. Our experiments nurture our writing and both inform the different assemblies we perform (this also works the other way around). Moreover, as mentioned before, these operational levels transcend any one specific project, they connect different projects as part of an artist’s or collective’s existential trajectory. They Figure 1. Modelling documentary art practice. 54

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To address such questions, I have adopted a modular approach to media design. This perspective organises our narrative universe into different narrative modules, narrative units, and narrative links that articulate our artistic research and the resulting manifestations. The narrative universe contains all the spheres of our narration or expression, the different manifestations that emerge from a particular research process. Within the universal boundaries, we can organise our research into different modules. This model is completely flexible and adaptable to the needs of each project or artist. Modules can refer to topics or subjects of exploration, to mediums or formats we are working with, and to different manifestations or pieces that emerge from our inquiries. Units, on the other hand, are concrete narrative elements: audios, videos, images, texts, and any other media objects associated with each module. Finally, the narrative

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links are the main layer for articulating compositions among units and modules; these are possible connections that reconfigure the expressive potentials or montages of our research. I have taken the previous modular approach further, making it not only a way of designing projects, but also of archiving and preserving them. I have been working with expanded documentary for a few years now, a process where I constantly encounter the enormous challenge of preserving transmedia projects such as web, interactive or immersive pieces. I have used the narrative universe as a way of documenting, through a text-based matrix, the universe of each project and, at the same time, the universe of my production. ***

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Inventory of Methods

Poetics of Information

Methods are always variable. They need to adjust to the realities that we are working with. Even while conducting the research project, methods tend to metamorphose due to different unpredictable conditions we face during our explorations. Contrary to norms that often guide creative practice both in industry settings and in academic contexts, critical appropriation of technology demands a constant adaptation of the methods that we use to explore, document, and narrate the labyrinths of reality. If reality is fugitive, we are always looking for new ways of approaching it. In that sense, the following methods are merely methodological insights or pointers that are meant to help in the design of artistic research, but need to be adapted each time we implement them.

For several years now, I have been working with Poetics of Information as a conceptual framework for media art practice and pedagogy. I understand it as an overall design principle for dealing with the complex networks of relations that are inscribed in artistic research. We could say that every artistic research project is a process of weaving relations, connecting separate elements to the same universe of inquiry. These relationships that we are interlacing are dependent on architectures of meaning. At the same time, the relationships that emerge throughout our research are testimonies of the ways we exercise power and interfere with, or participate in, historical trajectories. This ever-evolving process is what I call a Poetics of Information.

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I take in-formation as a process, the continuous emergence of form. The Poetics

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of Information is the art of making sense, of communicating forms in meaningful ways. It is a practice of invention, the reconfiguration of transmedia entanglements. Forms are understood here as condensations of expressions, human and more-than-human, whose duration and character depend on their organic and inorganic embodiments. Artistic research deals with multiple mediums, regardless of the disciplinary paths taken by the artist. We are constantly immersed in vast corpora of inscriptions where pieces emerge not only as crystallisations of knowledge, but more as ways of understanding our relationships with ourselves and the world. The Poetics of Information sees artistic forms as maps of experiences, as concrete manifestations (expressions) of an existential trajectory. To approach the Poetics of Information, we can identify several domains of practice.

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Thematic Research One way that I have approached the Poetics of Information is from the perspective of Paulo Freire‘s Thematic Research (1970). Freire suggested that if education was to face some of the urgent problems of the reality lived by those participating in the pedagogical encounter, we can perceive them more clearly by thematising everyone’s relationship with the challenges that we are analysing. This thematisation presents itself as an unfolding narrative universe in constant movement and adaptation. It starts from the position of the participants of the pedagogical encounter in relation to each other, to the contexts we study/explore, and to the tools and resources at our disposal. From the initial moment of recognition, different lines of enquiry emerge, depending on the process itself. The final stage is not necessarily the conclusion of the research since every research opens

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new questions. From the perspective of The Poetics of Information, thematisation is an anticipatory and adaptive practice. It implies a reflexive enacting of our embodied relationship with our research. Efforts such as Waburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne embody this critical reflection quite eloquently - in his case as an attempt to challenge the canons of art history through alternative associations or conceptual constellations. Critical Intervention The Poetics of Information conceives of artistic and pedagogical practice as critical intervention. It believes that artistic creation is an act of intervention in the conditions of possibility, partially inspired again by Freire, but also by voices from critical pedagogy such as bell hooks, John Dewey, Laura Rita Segato, and many more, primarily spanning from film and artistic practice in the Global South. 58

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There are thousands of works we could use as examples, yet I feel that very few projects embody this relational complexity as well as The Atlas Group does. This is an artistic research project that was led by Lebanese artist Walid Raad between 1989 and 2004. Alongside materials produced by Raad, the project included historical documents and collaborations in the attempt to narrate contemporary history in Lebanon, particularly the wars that took place between 1975 and 1990. The project generated hundreds or perhaps thousands of items. I keep using this quote by Raad to illustrate how he framed this abundance and complexity: “We are not concerned with facts if facts are considered to be self-evident objects always already present in the world. Furthermore, we hold that this common-sense definition of facts, this theoretical primacy of facts, must be challenged. Facts have

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to be treated as processes. One of the questions we find ourselves asking is: How do we approach facts not in their crude facticity but through the complicated mediation by which facts acquire their immediacy?” (The Atlas Group, 2003, p. 179) When approaching a specific reality or aspects of reality, we are always dealing with several layers of mediation. Each mediation involves the participation of different agencies; the presence, appropriation and/or intervention of materials; the applications of codes for interaction and communication; the confrontation with and potential diversion from noise and interference. The mediations underlying our artistic research will determine the character of our explorations and the outcomes. Again, we will face not only aesthetic and

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narrative challenges, but above all ethical and political ones that demand that we take responsibility for our decisions and their consequences. Making ourselves responsible for such decision-making and its echoes does not mean implementing a fixed ethical code. As it happens with our research methods in general, each reality presents us with different ethical challenges. Architecture of Expression The Poetics of Information ultimately refers to a way of understanding the architectures of our expression. How do we spatiotemporally display the manifestations resulting from our research? What strategies do we use to organise the relationships between the elements that make them up? I like the idea of “peripheral thinking” proposed by William Kentridge (2016) to

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address the architectures of our expression. It implies that most of the time our thoughts and their connections escape a preconceived plan or a linear narrative. In a sense, artistic practice is a mode of embracing the rhizomatic nature of imagination and memory. The Poetics of Information as a way of mapping our expression not only helps us to organise our practice, but also to critically approach the development of our professional trajectories as journeys of discovery. A personal project that reflects this complexity is Dissections over Planes. Essay(s) on Tlatelolco, a transmedia exploration of a very important historical site in Mexico City. The digital platform we produced condenses texts, film poems, and immersive 360° essays that question different aspects of this site’s history. In addition, the project iterated as a VR installation, a live cinema performance, a book, and a

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touch-screen installation that is now part of a site-specific museum in Tlatelolco. Each of these outcomes addressed the reality of Tlatelolco from a different perspective, raising questions through both technical strategies (such as the integration of hand-processed super 8 films into immersive compositions) and narrative ones (such as a thematisation of aspects of this reality). The Archive as a Critical Event The archive, understood as a site of events, is a place of encounter. Much has been said about the archive and its relationship with the public space (see, for example, Ariella Azoulay’s essays in Potential History, 2014). The archive is a place of coexistence. It is a space where shared understandings of our reality emerge. The archive is a site of memory, both individual and collective.

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The archive is not just piles and piles of documents accumulating dust. Rather, it is a space of contention about what is historically possible. The archive as a critical event calls on artists and researchers to intervene in both the material configurations and the architectures that sustain the archive. The archive is immersed in all kinds of tensions. We can occupy the archive as a contested territory. The dislocation of archival site(s) at our reach, their operational decoding and recoding, can open new understandings of our shared realities, new approaches to the emergencies of our time. Artistic production, small or large, mainstream or marginal, always affects the archive of humanity. Both pedagogy and art have an intimate relationship with the archive. Not only because it is a source of discussion and creation. In art and pedagogy, the archive is also subject of reflection and writing,

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and on top of that, our own research is always inscribed in an archive of sorts (what architectures do we deploy in our practice? what crises and multiplicities emerge?). Moreover, art and pedagogy are both spaces where tradition and innovation constantly overlap. We established that the archive is a site of possibility, a territory of “potential history” (Azoulay, 2014). As such, we can project imaginable futures by means of intervening in the territories of the archive. Through a critical engagement with archival dispositions, art and pedagogy can literally materialise new world orders. The conceptual proposition of the archive as a critical event emerged while working on a project called These Images are Truth. A Microarchive of Ignominy. This work started as a very personal way of dealing with the cynically violent politics of memory of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and his

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team (2012-2018). One of the events that I revised was the world-infamous case of the 43 missing Ayotzinapa students in 2014 (whose murder was confirmed a few years later). The attorney general of his team, Jesús Murillo Karam, issued a statement at a press conference that became the epitome of the government’s cynicism regarding how this administration dealt with public memory. He said, regarding the official version of events (later refuted by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team): “This is the Historical Truth, proven by the data provided by science.” For me, this Historical Truth represented every other Historical Truth, all those ministerial versions of history written from the centres of power. To tackle such shameless lying, I started identifying moments like Murillo Karam’s frontal deceit. I downloaded the communications from the federal government’s

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official Youtube channel, cut out the exact moments where such falsehoods were uttered, and slowed them down three or four times. Then, I projected the slow motion versions to recapture them in different analogue formats (super 8 and 16 mm in moving images; 35 & 120 mm still images). With this analogue corpus I created multiple variations in different mediums, including silver gelatine prints, fine paper digital prints, and, the most incisive intervention, three super 8 rolls developed by hand using different processes (one positive of the reversal b/w film, one that solarised and overexposed the film material to illustrate a statement on the obfuscation of reality, and one film roll scratched and dyed with cochineal, an ancient Mexican dye of red colour, to make an aesthetic comment on the violence performed both on the bodies and on memory). The project travelled around in a small archive that contained all the inscriptions and could

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be displayed in different ways. People could then approach the documents of this governmental lying and touch what the government aimed to bury. This technical emergence was a manifestation of other versions of history that were already latent in the official ones. Building a Research Archive Our own production constitutes an archive. There are power forces that traverse our decisions, our questions, our objectives, the mediums we work with and the ways we organise and navigate our research. To catalogue the documentary universe that we assemble during our research (either produced by us or found in different archives), we can begin by locating the material, technical and discursive components of our research. The sources and correlations that they entail. The documents (texts, videos, sounds, images),

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the approximations (sketches, drafts, rough cuts, prototypes), the final pieces (and all the considerations regarding documentation, exhibition, circulation, and preservation of the works), as well as their incorporation in our corpus of production (themes, mediums, locations within our creative trajectory), and consequently, their inclusion in the archive of art history. These are all levels of our relationship, as artists, with the archive. The act of locating the sources of our work is one of the most important activities of archival work. Locating documents and inscriptions involves questioning the institutional horizons of our archives. Where do the documents come from, how are they inscribed and archived, do they belong to other institutions, agents, or only to us? Also, while working with our archives we shall consider preservation issues. Each media materiality responds differently to the passing of

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time, so we need to ask: why and how do we want to preserve such documents? If our works live in different mediums, we might want to consider strategies to archive and preserve not only the works but also the technologies needed for their circulation. In addition, we can also transcode our works to new standards whenever there’s a shift in technology. If we want to intervene in the documents’ materiality (either physically or digitally), we also need to consider their material and institutional state and how feasible it is to work with them. Very relevant too are the possibilities of disseminating the contents of our archives. What do we need to publish our works, what are the legal and technical requirements for their exhibition? These questions are complex and require a high degree of self-organisation, one that is constantly evolving with our practice and the media context of our professional fields.

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Along the path through which we shape our life trajectory as artists, the architecture of our work archives is of great importance. Especially if we want to think critically about our ways of embodying research. There are different coordinates we can occupy. We can change positions, bring new dimensions to our artistic praxis. This can become a lifelong journey of discovery, transforming our whole production into a map of our evolving gaze. His/Hers/Theirstories I have always found it difficult to relate to the notion of storytelling. In its best form, I associate it with the millennia-long tradition stemming from Greek tragedy, which on several occasions has been identified with a dispositif of control (see, for example, Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed); in its worst form, I associate it with a market obsessed with “conquer-

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ing” audiences. In opposition to storytelling, then, I began drafting the idea of historytelling. In Spanish we have one word for both concepts (historia). Referring not to storytelling but to historytelling implies recognising many narrative layers that are invisible in oversimplified stories, making our approach to narrative a much more complex one. Of course, this approach resists entertainment as the sole objective of narrative creation. As the song Next to the Road (A un lado del camino, 1999) from Argentinian musician Fito Páez goes, “I am not here to entertain your family whilst the world falls apart.” After reflecting for a while about this idea of historytelling as a multilayered, non-linear relationship with narrative, I came across the concept of “herstory” in Spivak’s Critique to Decolonial Reason (1999), which articulates a feminist critique of the way we have told history from a patriarchal, colonial perspective for the course (and curse) of thousands of years.

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This notion immediately sparked a shift from historytelling to herstorytelling, and later, to themstorytelling. Themstories are eccentric (without a centre or a central conflict). Themstories are queer, polymorphous tales that can open new paths for understanding our overflowing reality. The perspective of “themstories” entails a complex understanding of the archive as a site of embodied narratives. A brilliant example, in all its simplicity, is the film The Dreamed Ones (2016). Directed by Ruth Beckermann, the film shows us actress Anja Plaschg and actor Laurence Lupp reading out loud the lifelong correspondence of poets Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. They do this while walking around a sound studio in Vienna. Alongside this incarnation of the intimate exchange between these two important voices of European 20th-century literature, the actors have daily exchanges that begin to cut across the

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poets’ relationship and their own. This is what happens to us when immersing ourselves in the archive, we transform ourselves through our contact with the documents of the past. Such transformation is never just a matter of the past or even the present, it is something that projects our bodies and spirits into the future. The archive is the ultimate site of public imagination, the place where we reconfigure our political potential (see Azoulay, 2014). In my own work, many projects have explored the idea of the archive as a critical event and a site of embodied themstories. One of the most representative is the research I did with a photo archive from the 1968 student movement in Mexico. The archive arrived at Universidad Iberoamericana in 2017, a year before the 50th anniversary of this historical milestone for Mexican modernity. The university library allowed us

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to explore the archive and imagine the possible appropriations of the archive for our own creative purposes. One outcome was an essay film called The Monopoly of Memory (2018). For this work, the first step was to re-categorise the over 1300 photographic documents that made up the archive (press prints, negatives, contact sheets). This moment illustrates the previously mentioned relocation of the documents we are working with as a core activity of archival-based art: they were part of a library catalogue and we needed to create new categories for them to be incorporated into our own research corpus. With the new organisation of the documents, we then distributed the photographs according to the 9 chapters of the film, each of which explored an aspect of memory as narration. In tandem with this film, I was commissioned by a museum to develop a video piece for an 18-metres 360º screen. The name of the project is The Body is an

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Archive. A game for ten cameras. For this piece, I used only 61 of the photographs and designed a “game” to be played by a butoh dance collective and the filming team. It consisted of placing the 61 photographs in a box inside a film studio. Each member of the collective had to approach the box, take one photograph, show it to a designated camera and then show it to her colleagues, who then improvise for a few minutes based on the image. The actions were filmed and photographed by 10 cameras, including digital and film technologies. The result was a three-hour performance that ended up as a 15-minute piece that first lived in the museum installation, and then in a 360º version available online (this has also been presented as a piece on VR headsets). This alternative aspect of the research allowed me to work with the same archive but from a different perspective. The discursive nature of the film was transcended by a more

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affectionate approach, which manifested itself in the trembling of the bodies as they incarnated the historical scenes in the photographs. This research is a clear example of how a single archive can serve multiple creative purposes. It is also an example of different ways of embodying the archive, incarnating the themstorytelling approach both from a technical and a narrative perspective. Another work in which I explored alternative approaches to the archive was Mexico 2021. Foundations and Conquests. This was a commission with the premise of narrating more than 700 years of Mexican history in a medium-length film. The challenge was enormous. The path I took was to work with a voice-over and video collages. The collages were made with images from important works in Mexico’s art history, yet I didn’t use them in their original form. I shot fragments of paintings, buildings and historical doc-

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uments, which I then recomposed thematically using various techniques such as reframing, juxtaposition and digital tinting. This procedure transformed the works into new images that were assembled in 7 chapters (to match the historical trajectories the commissioner wanted to explore). This project illustrates how, once we appropriate documents for our creative purposes, we change their character. New images emerge from the previous ones, as if the new reference points were always hiding behind the surface of the original compositions. By recomposing historical documents, alternative interpretations of history become possible. These shifts in the perspective of past events can, as Ariella Azoulay suggests, open new ways of imagining the future. Camera-Bodies and Body-Cameras For some time now, I’ve been collaborating with choreographers to imagine

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radical approaches to filming bodies in movement. During our creation of cinedances and installations, the notion of the ‘camera-body’ emerged as a methodology that introduces the filming body as participant on the stage, rather than seeing it as a body that does not take part in the choreographic event. The camera-body then becomes a dancing body, one that records reality with all its senses, beyond the exclusive guidance of the eye. I expanded this methodology to filming conditions other than choreographic pieces. This led me to frame the camera-body as an ethics of filmmaking, where the camera-body is always in relation to one or several body-cameras, bodies that become images but that also affect the presence of the camera-body and its expressive potential. The camera-body and the body-camera weave a poetic and political entanglement that is always conditioned by the technologies that we use in filming. How do dif-

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ferent camera setups alter our capacity to relate to other bodies and the realities we explore? This focus on cameras and bodies has become a workshop on its own, contained in the next section of this publication along with some conceptual notes underpinning the proposal. For this section of the Death to the Real! workshop, I only use a simple exercise that serves as an example of how we can expand our gaze by consciously stimulating our imagination while filming (more in depth exercises are contained in the Camera-Body workshop). The intuitions behind this method have been embodied in different projects. After doing the previously mentioned project with the 1968 photographs (The Body is an Archive. A game for ten cameras), I started a creative partnership with Aura Arreola, then leader of the butoh collective that participated in the piece. This relationship has evolved as an ongoing conversation on the potential of the

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camera-body within choreographic settings. In 2020 she received a commission to honour the life of renowned Mexican choreographer and dancer Guillermina Bravo. We created a film where the camera gradually moves from outside the stage to the very centre of it, weaving an intimate complicity with the bodies in motion. The piece is called In the Memory of the Bodies. Speculative choreographies and incarnated vestiges after Guillermina Bravo, and it was built through the principle behind the camera-body and body-camera as a method for filmmaking pushing me, as the cameraman, in the turmoil of the intimate correspondences that the dancing bodies were having on stage. I have done a couple of other pieces with Aura, yet I want to refer to a different collaboration with Ángel Méndez, a theology scholar and dancer who in 2021 was developing his research under the concept of “planetary eco-kinesis”. Accord-

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ing to Ángel, who took the concept from Kimerer L. LaMothe, this concept has allowed him to set to dance the individual body with the planetary corpus. In parallel to his writing, he wanted to do a couple of what he called microdances as improvisations inspired by the contact with natural environments during the time of social distancing due to Covid-19. The experience, filmed on a mountainside near the Mexican town of Tepoztlan, allowed me to take the principles of the camera-body and the body-camera to the interaction between human and more-than-human bodies. The outcome are two hypnotic meditations on the relationship between human and morethan-human entanglements, an aspect that heightens the ethical implications of the camera-body and the body-camera as a method for filmmaking. This is something that I am currently developing with much interest.

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Forensic Imagination This line of work is inspired by forensic anthropology and thus involves a deep excavation and reconstruction of our research subjects and an understanding of the creative process as a journey of discovery. Forensic Imagination as a methodological insight started after my collaboration on the interactive documentary Forensic Landscapes. This was a project led by researcher Anne Huffschmid, documenting forensic work against state terror in Mexico, Guatemala, and Argentina. Anne refers to images as “contact zones” with other realities (2020), in the sense that the production of images (and I add, sounds, texts, and all kinds of narrative elements) can help discover new ways of understanding and producing knowledge about social phenomena. Both her thinking and that of Eyal Wizeman (see 2016) of Forensic Architecture, sparked in me the need

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to develop Forensic Imagination as a strategy that can be applied not only to forensic-related projects, such as Forensic Landscapes, but also to other projects by bringing in forensic research modalities. Thus, during the process of making Forensic Landscapes we consciously and unconsciously replicated a kind of forensic procedure to unearth the aesthetic and narrative proposal of the web documentary. For example, when trying to identify the original approach, I worked with a selection of film stills as a sample of the main scenarios and re-coded them using chromatic criteria. The result was a colour map that eradicated the social and political reading of the images to reveal a more aesthetic character, which was always present but very hard to see as the political weight of the images occluded other readings. Similarly, we discovered several elements such as the 360-technology as a tactic to immerse the user in the forensic voyage; the eye-shaped

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mouse pointer to suggest keeping our eyes open and making navigation a quest on its own; the soundscapes evoking the phantoms of the search; the changing colours of the animations and the navigation map as a way to track the progress of discovering the webdoc content, just as traces found during the search work for forensic experts and relatives of disappeared people. These were only a few of the elements that transformed the whole narrative universe into a forensic excavation (something that was highlighted by several people when we presented the project). Studio Studies The artist’s studio is a place and a space. It involves various acts of occupation and appropriation that constantly reconfigure what comes in and out of the studio; the boundaries of the studio itself are in constant flux.

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The studio as study is both poetic and political. It involves ethical entanglement and dialogic imagination. The studio feeds itself from points of contact and exchange with the outside world, including from solitary confinement. The studio is a process of opening and closing, of veiling and unveiling ways of understanding our life’s work and the world around us. The studio is often our home. Activating the studio through a reflexive practice involves the perennial revision of the structures of our work and our ways of occupying the studio. How do we label or categorise our practices? How do we inscribe these fragments of our research? What are the concrete features of our praxis? Here the word occupation acquires a particular relevance. When speaking of occupation and art, there are several ways in which we can relate to the concept. Hito Steyerl has

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talked about the different implications of art as occupation (2014). Occupation is not only the neutral positioning in a specific place, but there is also a martial connotation as in a military deployment over a territory. On top of that, when we think of occupation, we can also imagine a disciplinary aspect of the word, one that connects our occupations with specific fields of practice, traditions and crafts. Furthermore, a transdisciplinar y approach to studio studies is fundamental to embodying emergent modes of occupying our study spaces. What are the similarities and differences, for example, between studios for dance, film, design, visual arts, design, and theatre? How can each of these disciplines learn and transform their own occupation of the studio by being in contact with these alternative understandings of the studio space? The studio as a conscious occupation of the times and spaces of creation,

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the critical appropriation of tools, and the open exploration of other sources of experience and expression, is a way of constantly reshaping the possibilities of our work. As part of the creative work done during the AIR project at the Netherlands Film Academy, I worked on a series of video works that explore some aspects of the studio as a site of study and occupation. The name of the series is Studio Variations, which also names the exhibition or open studio that concludes the residency. One of the videos, Take 2. Some things that one can do in the studio, consisted of an improvised production design based on what I found at Studio 5 of the Netherlands Film Academy during my first visit in autumn 2022. Using the elements I found in the studio, I started to sketch out an improvised reflection (take 1), which then was shot the day after with a bit more structure. While doing basic activities in the

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set, I used text on screen to invite the viewer to think about a number of things that can happen in the studio: you can clean the studio, you can exercise in the studio, you can dream in the studio, you can move walls in the studio, you can open the studio windows, you can change perspectives in the studio, and so on. For example, another version of the variations consists of my son Teo and I studying at the studio in Amsterdam Oost, during my second visit in spring 2023. He is a 5-year-old, so we were working on numbers and letters. This observation of basic learning processes evokes the fundamental nature of studio practice as a space of perpetual study. Both works are also available online (see references). Expanded Montage I identify montage as the overarching domain where our practice is constantly reshaping itself. I understand montage

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not as the editing or putting together of the fragments of a film, but as the reconfiguration of the world into sequences of meaning. Montage, then, begins and ends in our imagination, even if it depends on concrete manifestations or expressions that make these meaningful sequences visible and perceptible to the world. This is what I mean by expanded montage. For more than a decade, I have been working with different strategies inspired by montage to solve different creative challenges. These approaches have been informed by a constant review of some creative traditions of film editing, though I have applied them to works that transcend traditional film formats. From the use of conflicting theories in a single film (e.g. associative montage and distance montage in my film Ciudad Merced, which connects and separates elements to compose a symphony of the urban rhythms of Mexico City’s La Merced neighbourhood)

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to multimedia montages that include immersive 360º videos combining super 8 and archival footage, sculptural elements and live cinema performances, as in Dissections over Planes. This section of the Death to the Real! workshop is then an attempt to summarise some of the key references that guided my explorations and to share them as a general scheme or diagram on the possibilities of montage as a research strategy. To try to create a sort of theoretical-methodological matrix for approaching montage, I have built a corpus of references from the history of film-thinking that are anchored in practice (by this I mean the ideas of filmmakers and not of cultural analysts or scholars). In this written version of the workshop, I will share some of the most seminal references, with the disclaimer that there are many more that I’m leaving out for reasons of space. Before sharing these ideas, let me first

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establish the conceptual framework that supports my understanding of montage.

whole experience a kind of spiral reading).

If montage is a way of organising our experience of the world into meaningful sequences (expressions), then it is also a way of recomposing time and space. I have dealt with this idea of spatiotemporal (re)composition from the notion of chronotopography, which means the writing or inscribing of the spatiotemporal dimensions of our practice. Every artistic work displays certain combinations that organise the narrative in different diagrammatic schemes. For example, my web pieces all have different chronotopgraphies: Ciudad Merced follows a circular structure, Poema Panorama a linear one from right ot left, Santos Diableros consists of 4 circular chapters, Dissections over Planes is conceived as a rhizome, and Forensic Landscapes is composed as a spiral (8 scenes that are themselves spheric compositions, making the

These configurations depend on the media we work with, meaning that each medium of our choice allows for specific configurations of time and space. We must then ask ourselves which mediums and codes of expression facilitate the spatiotemporal characteristics we want to explore or discover during our artistic research journeys.

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To tackle the difficult task of recomposing time and space (perhaps the essence of any artistic practice) I have been working with the notions of intensity versus extension, as a way of representing the time-spaces of our montage diagrams. Intensities are forces that work vertically, extensions work horizontally. This means that we are dealing with specific ideas and emotions (intensities) while occupying concrete spatiotemporal configura-

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tions (extensions). The tensions between verticality and horizontality, between intensity and extension, are explored in many of my works. Here I’ll briefly comment on my most recent film, Memory Drained Down a Crack, 2022, which is an essay film that reflects on the urban transformations of Mexico City’s valley through a portrait of Xochimilco, one of the few areas of the megalopolis that preserves the ancient lacustrine landscape that has almost disappeared from the valley. In this film, shot on 16mm and with significant archival footage, I used different strategies such as split screen, superposition of images or slow motion to highlight different intensities and extensions in the argument. In collaboration with co-writer Oswaldo Hernández Trujillo, the idea of liquid montage emerged in the voice-over script as an opposition to Farocki’s idea of soft montage. The film weaves a dialogue with the territory, but also with filmmaking as a way

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of exploring memory, bridging a dialogue with Harun Farocki and Chris Marker. Our proposal is that liquid montage is a fleeting montage, one that always opens cracks in our imagination from which we can see new possibilities. This idea of liquid montage could be a way of assembling the theoretical intuitions that follow in the next subsection from an adaptative, flexible perspective, rather than trying to fix the references as rigid and impenetrable frameworks for dealing with creative challenges. The reader should therefore be warned that my intention is to see all these perspectives, some of which film theorists say are opposed to each other, as practical strategies for dealing with our artistic research endeavours and not as philosophical or conceptual premises.

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Theoretical Insights for Expanded Montage Alexander Kluge proposed that there are two personalities in art: the beast tamer and the gardener. Kluge claims that montage resembles the context of a garden; he invites us to be devoted gardeners (2014). In contrast to the will of control embodied by a beast tamer, a good gardener accommodates himself to the times and spaces of vegetation, demanding that we do not trim for “mere thirst of pruning”, but rather out of the knowledge that something will grow on its own. This conception of montage resonates deeply with my approach to art and pedagogy. Montage as a method affects our perception of reality. Our expression can take a semblance of truth when we connect elements of composition in a certain order, thus “conferring a particular reality upon the people or objects we are portraying”, as Robert Bresson suggests in his Notes on the Cinematograph (2016). This implies

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a strong sense of responsibility, because concepts of truth can emerge from our work and then be communicated to the public. *** One of the first artists to explore the reality-potential of montage, Lev Kuleshov, suggested in his 1935 text The Principles of Montage, that montage is “inextricably linked to the artist’s world-view and ideological purpose” (2016). In a way, montage reveals an inner understanding of life. What happens to these revelations and their poetic forces when many of the imperatives that define contemporary expression are linked to industry standards and market demands? Kuleshov is also responsible for the famous “Kuleshov experiment”, which proved that the meaning of any film shot depends on the shots that come before

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and after it (his experiment showed that the same expression of a man will change if we intercut it with a plate of soup – hunger -, a girl in a coffin - grief -, and a woman on a sofa - attraction). Another exercise he did was what he called “creative geography”, in which he hypothesised that the spaces of film can transcend geographical order (we can “glue” together a shot from Mexico City and Amsterdam, we create an illusion of continuity, therefore inaugurating a new world map). One insight that I relate to the principles of interconnection and transtextuality that sustain film language and that we can take from Kuleshov’s experiments, is that history is a primary force in filmmaking (Schub, 2016). This idea comes from a luminous editor from the early days of Russian cinema, Esfir Schub, who in addition to being a brilliant film editor was also a poignant thinker and one of the pioneering women of documentary filmmaking. History as a compositional

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force also evokes my proposition to move from storytelling to his/her/themstorytelling. *** Contemporary to Lev Kuleshov and Esfir Schub, and considered one of the founding artists of montage as the basis of film language, Sergei Eisenstein wrote numerous texts on montage and its conceptual and operational implications (1949, 1957, 1988). There are a few theoretical propositions that are of interest here, which I will try to summarise in the following paragraphs. Coming from theatre, Eisenstein was interested in what he called “montage of attractions”. This involved working with “aggressive moments” that could create shocks in the audience, resulting in specific emotional or psychological reactions. The ultimate purpose of this sort of

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shock art was to convey or communicate a concrete ideological aspect of what was shown in order to reach a final ideological conclusion. This ideological orientation of Eisenstein remained until the end of his work, with the exception of his unfinished last film (¡Qué Viva México!), which comes across as less ideological and even more sensorial. To better understand the way Eisenstein claimed to “mathematically calculate” audience reactions, I will look at his wellknown structure of montage, which consists of five operational or compositional levels. Each of these levels points towards an aspect of organising our narratives, making it a highly formalistic approach to film language: • Metric Montage: the absolute length of our shots / scenes / sequences / film. • Rhythmic Montage: the relative length, which is the result of combining elements to alter the raw duration

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into a more subjective or expressive one. • Tonal Montage: the emotions portrayed or represented in each fragment of our film. • Overtonal or Associative Montage: the overall or underlying emotions that, regardless of the specific emotional intensities presented in each fragment, prevail after the viewing experience. • Intellectual Montage: the context and juxtaposition of ideas that shape our film (or artwork, for the purpose of our workshop). To simplify the interpretation of Eisenstein’s levels of montage, I like to cross it with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s idea of two levels of montage: denoted and connoted. Denoted montage evokes all the elements that can be perceived in the sequence (what is shown and spoken), connoted refers to the ideas or intentions that these

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elements summon up or imply. For me, it is easy to identify Metric and Rhythmic Montage as levels that are attained through denoted elements, whereas Tonal, Overtonal, and Intellectual levels relate to the connoted universe or all those messages that we want to convey. One strategy Eisenstein also used to achieve his ‘attractions’ was the idea of conflict. He didn’t understand conflict in the way hegemonic American film theory does (as a central conflict that organises the structure of the narrative and around which the life of a hero revolves); rather, Eisenstein understood conflict as a way of dealing with all the tensions emerging in film. He identified several levels of conflict and formal strategies to address them. The levels of conflict are based on: social mission (the cultural or societal aspects of our stories), nature (constitution of the realities we are working with), and methodology (actions performed

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by agents in our narratives). The formal strategies include a conflict of graphic directions, scales, volumes, masses, depth, luminosity, and pace. Finally, he listed complimentary conf licts from which we can compose tensions in our narratives: between theme and point of view; between theme and spatial nature; between event and its temporal nature; between the whole optical complex and a totally different sphere. *** It is common to read interpretations of a confrontational perspective between the approaches of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, the creator of Kino Pravda and author of one of the most influential films of all times, Man with the Movie Camera, 1929. While Eisenstein pretended to direct or control audience reactions

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based on specific ideological goals or messages, Vertov believed in filming life ad lib, in responding to the forces and intensities of life as they presented themselves to the film crew. In contrast to Eisenstein’s author-centered vision, Vertov usually wrote about montage, or filmmaking in general, as a collective practice, which also indicates a profound difference in their artistic ethics. Vertov’s understanding of montage is therefore not so much conceptual as operational (see, for example, Vertov, 1978). Therefore, it seems an appropriate addition if, as I mentioned earlier, we do not take these insights as self-contained theories, but rather as a porous constellation of creative tactics that we can turn to depending on the different lines of exploration we follow during our artistic research. For Vertov, then, it is not so much about layers or levels, as about stages or moments of montage, facets we

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go through while exploring a particular reality: • Montage in the moment of observation: the orientation of the naked, unarmed eye (without a camera or, for the context of this workshop, any other device). • Montage after observation: the mental organisation of the themes based on clues that emerged from our initial observation. • Montage during filming: the orientation of the “armed eye” (that is, armed with the camera) and our adaptation to unpredicted situations. • Montage after filming: the organisation of what was filmed based on initial insights or clues; in this stage, we begin a search for the missing fragments of our piece. • The gaze: the most poetic of all stages, this is where our own way of looking at the reality we are explor-

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ing emerges; it manifests itself as an instantaneous orientation of our chosen media to capture the ‘link-images’ or the connections between the parts of our film. • The final montage: the manifestation of all the minor themes within the plane of the major themes (a resonance with Eisenstein’s tonal and overtonal montage levels); this stage implies the reorganisation of all the material in the best possible assemblage, the underlining of the piece’s objective, drive or intention. To complement these stages, Vertov refers to three grand periods of montage that, in a sense, summarise the previous stages: 1. Montage Evaluation (analysis of all our research items into a thematic map that guides our explorations); 2. Montage Synthesis (the concrete realisation plan emerges, with concrete images, sounds, texts, or other elements that we

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need to produce to achieve the goals we’re aiming for); 3. General Montage (the organisation of our thematic groupings, the unification of the different sections of a work, and the best possible distribution of our narrative elements across the different manifestations that our research puts forward). *** Two creators from this lineage are worth mentioning here to conclude this section. The first is Artavazd Peleshian, who proposed the concept of “distance montage”. For him, montage was more about separating the components than joining them. He expressly contrasts his idea with both Vertov and Eisenstein, who paid more attention to joining the elements than to the space in between. If we combine both approaches, we can relate them to

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the early idea, defined by Kuleshov, of montage segments or the configuration of the sections that make up a narration. When putting sequences together, we build tensions that result in the rhythm of our projects (a spatiotemporal frame for our expression). This manipulation of the sense of the passing of time evokes the idea of Andrey Tarkovsky of “sculpting in time” as the essence of filmmaking (2003). In short, we can imagine montage as the creative reinterpretation of reality, an idea similar to Maya Deren’s proposition that creative cutting, as opposed to the “seeing” camera, has the function of “thinking”, an “understanding mind” that creates “emotional value of individual impressions” (1947). Expanded montage is thus a way of thinking and feeling reality from very different perspectives. We can use tactics such as the ones listed here to address the tremendous challenge of reorganising the world, and in

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doing so, making perceptible alternative configurations of coexistence. A recent example of this way of thinking-feeling through creating is the work of the Mexican collective Los Ingravidos, who have published several texts, including the Thesis on the Audiovisual, which put forward a set of ideas regarding audiovisual practice as a political practice that has the potential to enact what they call Shamanic Materialism, “a Mesoamerican spell unleashed” (2023). Final Remarks: Ethics, Aesthetics and Research Narratives Referring to the agitational position adopted by Los Ingrávidos and also to a long tradition in Latin American cinema that emphasises the political aspects of film and art, I understand montage to be a political act. This implies that montage, as the reorganisation of the world, is an act of occupation. It projects not only

Workshop

the worldview of the artists involved in a given manifestation, but also the way this worldview is embodied and intertwined with other historical intensities. Every aesthetic gesture is then an ethical gesture. This ethics does not correspond to a code of good conduct, but rather to making ourselves responsible for the artistic works that we are putting out into the world. If our expression is, quite literally, the application of pressure beyond ourselves it is inevitable that our works influence the world around us. How are we altering the conditions of what’s real?

ity that need to be transformed. As an eccentric practice, the motivation behind this radical approach to documentary art is to intervene in those aspects that are oppressive or unjust within the setting of our personal and professional development. This summarised version of the Death to the Real! workshop aimed to show a set of methodological insights to achieve this. Hence, these insights are not just conceptual constellations, but primarily practice-based intuitions aimed at cracking the ministries of meaning production.

The Death to the Real! workshop seeks to reflect on how artistic research can question world orders that govern our coexistence and thus inaugurate new horizons of possibility. Beyond the specificity of a particular critical context, such as the one we are living as I write these lines in 2023, there will always be aspects of real-

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Workshop

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Workshop

DEATH TO THE REAL! EXERCISES Research Map of Correlations. 0. Select a finished piece that you like, ideally one of your own. The idea is to create a research map of how that piece came to light. You can use any format you like, but you have to present some sort of cartography of your research universe. This format-free map will be shared with other participants at the end of the exercise. 1. Describe the material and narrative composition of the work (media, formats, technologies, discourses, subjects, etc.). 2. Make an initial list of thematic relationships that emerge from the composi-

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tional description. You can be as detailed as you like. 3. In your preferred writing style, describe the process of making the piece, the different stages and procedures you went through (from conception to circulation). Trace the different moments of your research, the points of contact with reality, the documentary corpus produced, the way you organized and navigated your archive, how you incorporated the different archives that you consulted, your main references and inspirations, and the insights, sketches or rough-cuts that emerged. 4. Describe the technological configurations of your practice. Identify the political trajectories that traversed your research and the ways you engaged with them through technologically mediated expression. 5. Identify core themes of the research: both at the technical level and at the narrative level. It is good to start by locating

Exercises

the agents and interactions that sustain the piece. This process involves organising, in whatever way possible, the research questions and methodologies involved in the realisation of the work. 6. Make a map of correlations based on the topic with other works of your own or with works of others that in some way are related to your own production. Describe the correlations or architectures of information you used to navigate the composition of your research (this could be how you organised your files and configured the archive of your work, either in consulted materials or inscriptions produced by yourself). 7. Exchange the resulting insights with other participants.

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Archival Index of a Project. 0. Select one of your current or recent projects. 1. Build an inscription index: gather fragments representing each of the different media you use or used during your research process (notebooks, sketches, printouts, files, etc.). Describe each formal corpus according to its format and technological configuration, noting the origins and transformations of the materials (what media do or did you use and what forms emerged — general thoughts and questions, practical tasks, sketches, rough cuts, approximations, prototypes, failed attempts, etc.). 2. Identify the relationships that sustain these materials (the architecture of your research archive); what relationships do you weave, how do you connect them, what do they give you? 3. Identify the methodological directions you take or have taken to deal with the

Exercises

documents’ materiality, as well as the technical and narrative strategies for working with your materials. 4. Identify key themes: position your research through a critical review of your technical and narrative intentions/ drives/directions. 5. Write a critical review of this process of archiving the work. Our Investigation Through the Images of Others. 0. Select an artistic research process on course or finished. 1. Identify the main topics touched on by your research. 2. Write one sentence for each one of the main topics of your research. 3. Go to a free archival database, such as Prelinger Archives (https://archive.org/ details/prelinger), and find audiovisual footage to illustrate these main topics. 4. Edit the footage along with the sen-

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tences that you wrote. Render and screen with the group. 5. What new ideas did you get in relation to your research? How does your research transform itself when it interacts with other imaginaries? The Gaze of Our Fellow Critters. 0. You need a mobile phone capable of recording video. 1. Choose an animal, don’t share it out loud, keep your choice to yourself. 2. Visualize in your mind how that animal moves depending on where it lives, and how it configures its perception (the shape of its eyes and its interaction with other senses). By the way, it does not have to be a land animal. 3. Find a spot in the room that inspires you to imagine your animal’s abode, settle there, and wait for the exercise to start. 4. When everyone’s ready, start recording (all participants record one of you

Exercises

clapping for synchronisation purposes). Explore the area while recording everything around you. Move your camera as if it was the creature’s way of looking (or the way you imagine it). React to the other creatures around you. Be sensitive to the way they move and look, imagine how your chosen creature would react to those stimuli. We will do this for 5 to 10 minutes. 5. When finished, put all the mobile phones together, with the screens facing forward so that everyone can see them, sync the timeline to the clap and press play at the same time. While watching, try to guess the other participants’ animals. 6. Exchange impressions after observing. How did you feel? What were the biggest challenges in translating a creature’s way of looking into your way of filming? Did you discover anything interesting during the process?

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Exhumation and Identification of Underlying Narratives. 0. Select a specific topic or theme you are working on in your research that you have not yet explored in depth. 1. Identify what you consider the “surface” of the topic, the most recognisable layer of meaning. Describe it in a simple way. 2. Try to go further and imagine other implications of this topic: what actors, situations, inscriptions, institutions, or agencies do you not see in your research. 3. Trace the connections between the unseen layers, how are instances intertwined, what of these interactions surface, and how is this made visible (what are the inscriptions that you can detect and collect)? 4. Make a visual map of this dragnet. 5. Try to reframe your topic after the findings, how has it transformed? Are there new ways of naming your research, new categories, new structures?

Exercises

Studio Occupations. 0. Situate your practice in a specific space-time frame. 1. Answer the following questions: How do you occupy those space-times? What actions do you display? What mediums do you use? What is the political programme behind those technologies and to what extent do you replicate or subvert them? 2. Trace a diagram of the last activities that you’ve done inside the studio (literally, draw a simple blueprint of the studio and draw lines that resemble your movements inside). Can you perceive a specific pattern? How do the emergent forms relate to your practice? 3. Write a list of words that define your practice in the studio. What traditions do you identify with? What aspects do you think define your practice and which others come from learned trajectories? 4. Try to sketch alternative occupations

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of the studio, both those that you would like to inhabit and those that you would like to avoid. Different Montages of One Piece. 0. Choose an artistic research project of your own, ideally one that is currently in development. 1. Describe your intentions and motivations behind this research. What are your objectives at the time of this reflection? Where do you want to go with this research? What specific outcomes do you imagine (publications or artworks deriving from the research)? 2. Make a visual representation of that research as a series of montage intervals, using the timeline of your research as the basis of your map. 3. Imagine alternative montage structures for your research, including different outcomes from those you originally imagined. Alternate the segments in dif-

Exercises

ferent orders and imagine the outcoming rhythms. 4. Think about how each of these possible lifelines of your work deals with the questions you are exploring. What other possibilities might you incorporate that were not initially considered? What other worlds emerge that you could not anticipate?

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Exercises

Readings Azoulay, Ariella (2014). Historia potencial y otros ensayos. México: t-e-eoría y Conaculta. Atlas Group, The (2003). “Let’s Be honest, the Rain Helped”. In Merewether, Charles (ed. 2006). The Archive. Documents of Contemporary Art. EUAReino Unido: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press. Boal, Augusto (2008). Theatre of the Oppressed. UK: Pluto Press. Bresson, Robert (2016). Notes on the Cinematograph. USA: New York Review of Books. Deren, Maya (1947). “Creative Cutting”. In Movie Makers Magazine, May 1947, pp. 190-191, 204-206. USA. Eisenstein, Sergei (1949). Film Form. Essays in Film Theory. USA: HBJ. Eisenstein, Sergei (1957). Film Sense. USA: Meridian Books. Eisenstein, Sergei (1988). Selected writings 1922-1934. UK: BFI Publishing. Farocki, Harun (2013). Desconfiar de las Imágenes. Argentina: Caja Negra. Farocki, Harun (2001). “Towards a New Cinematographic Thesaurus.” In

KW Magazine 01(01) 14-15. Germany: KUNST-WERKE BERLIN, Institute for Contemporary Art. Freire, Paulo (1970). Pedagogía de la oprimido. México: Siglo XXI. Kuleshov, Lev (2011). The Principles of Montage. In Corrigan, Timothy and White, Patricia (eds.). Critical Visions in Film Theory. Classic and Contemporary Readings. Huffschmid, Anne (2020). The Human Remains. Forensic Landscapes and Counter-Forensic Agencies in Violent Presents - The Mexican Case. Alemania: Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung. Kentridge, William (2016). “Peripheral Thinking”. In Bashwick, Iwona and Brietwieser, Sabine (eds.). William Kentridge: Thick Time. UK: Whitechapel Gallery. Kluge, Alexander (2014). 120 historias del cine. Argentina: Caja Negra. Los Ingrávidos (2022). “Thesis on the Audiovisual”. In Non-Fiction, Issue 3, Open City London, retrieved online on 01/07/2023 at: https://opencitylondon. com/non-fiction/issue-3-space/thesison-the-audiovisual/ Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2020). Máquinas para ver y oir al límite del tiempo. Hacia

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References workshop

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una crítica práctica de la comunicación. México: Universidad Iberoamericana. Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2023). “Radical Interventions. Archaeology, Forensics and Montage.” In Fowler-Watt, Karen and McDougall, Julian (eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Media Misinformation, pp. 79-98. USA: Palgrave MacMillan. Mihh-ha, Trinh (1992). Framer Framed. USA/UK: Routledge. Minh-ha, Trinh (1993). “The Totalizing Quest for Meaning.” In Renov, Michael (ed.). Theorizing Documentary. USA/UK: Routledge. Steyerl, Hito (2009). “A Language of Practice.” In Stallbrass, J. (ed., 2013). Documentary. Documents of Contemporary Art. USA/UK: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press. Steyerls, Hito (2014). Los Condenados de la Pantalla. Argentina: Caja Negra. Ruiz, Raul (2000). Poética del cine. Chile: Editorial Sudamericana. Spivak, Gayatri (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. USA: Harvard University Press. Schub, Esfir (2016). “Selected Writings.” In Feminist Media Histories. Vol. 2, Num. 3. USA: University of California.

Tarkovsky, Andrey (2003). Sculpting in Time. Reflections on the Cinema. USA: University of Texas Press. Vertov, Dziga (1978). “Selected Writings.” In Sitney Adams, P. (ed.), The AvantGarde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. USA: Anthology Film Archives. Weizman, Eyal (2016). “On Forensic Architecture: A Conversation with Eyal Weizman.” In OCTOBER 156, Spring 2016, pp. 116-140, USA: MIT.

Films Beckerman, Ruth (2016). The Dreamed Ones. Farocki, Harun (1968). Inextinguishable Fire. Farocki, Harun (1995). Workers Leaving the Factory. Farocki, Harun (1997). Still Life. Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2013). Ciudad Merced. Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2018). The Monopoly of Memory. Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2021). Mexico 2021. Foundations and Conquests. Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2022). Memory Drained Down a Crack. Martíenz-Zárate, Pablo (2023). Oblique Takes. Meditations on art and crisis. Minh-ha, Trinh (1982). Reassemblage.

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Artworks Raad, Walid (1989-2005). The Atlas Group. Huffschmid, Anne and Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2020). Forensic Landscapes. Kentridge, William (2015). More Sweetly Play the Dance. Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2014). Santos Diableros. Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2015). Poema Panorama. Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2018). The Body is an Archive. A Game for Ten Cameras. Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2018). These Images are Truth. A Microarchive of Ignominy. Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2019).Dissections over Planes. Essay(s) on Tlatelolco. Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2023). Studio Variations.

IX. nomadic

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Eccentric pedagogy is nomadic19. Eccentricity is a synonym of queerness. Eccentric pedagogy fosters fugitivity20 in bodies, spaces, names. Being off-centre implies living as a fugitive of imposed beliefs and learned behaviours, it implies the perpetual questioning and dismantling of our heritage and an amorous reconstruction from its ruins. Being off-centre implies a constant displacement of our own body-centre-gaze.

Manifesto

Eccentricity is a never-ending remapping of our so-called world. The world is mirrored in the archive and sometimes we need to break the mirrors of oppression to reveal new images of ourselves. Eccentric pedagogy resists repression and domination performed in institutional and cultural centres of power. Repression and domination are inscribed in the bureaucratic programmes of our institutional coexistence, including the archive. Repression and domination emanate from a patriarchal intolerance to difference. Repression and domination are the projection of a deep fear of change.

19 The notion of eccentric pedagogy as part of my proposal for a Practical Critique of Communication, is rooted in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s nomadology, more specifically, in their proposal of a centrifuge science (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980)

20 The fugitive space is a concept that has been present in my research through two interlocutions with fellow scholars, one with Chris Harris, a media scholar working in Nevada State College, and one with Jeroen Fabius, from DAS Choreography at AHK.

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Para-institutional practices are sometimes a more effective means of resistance than a total alienation from institutional life. In this sense, eccentricity is strategic and antiprogrammatic21.

21 This distinction between strategy and program is inspired by Edgar Morin’s method of complex thinking and is also an important part of The Practical Critique of Communication’s theoretical inquiry into what I call the machinist program of meaning (Martinez Zarate, 2020).

Manifesto

*** X. artistic research Pedagogy is an artistic practice. Artistic practice involves technique and expression. Eccentric pedagogy was born as a proposal for professional artistic education, but it can be taken to other fields and levels. Eccentric pedagogy guides personal and collective realisation as opposed to career development. Eccentric pedagogy understands profession as a way of making a living –a living together. Eccentric pedagogy does not prepare artists for professional success but promotes art as a space for personal and collective realisation. Eccentric pedagogy recognises the paradoxes of artistic education. One cannot transfer the capacity for artistic creation. Artistic creation deals with existential incompleteness. Artistic creation can be fostered through communal support. Artistic research, under this perspective, presents itself as a series of complicities and entanglements.

Eccentric Pedagogy Manifesto

Eccentric pedagogy is the art of navigating these affective networks. Eccentric pedagogy is dedicated to artistic education22. The liberatory power of artistic education rests in imagination23. Imagination is a force of reality. Reality is our shared ground of coexistence. Reality is shaped by human and more-than-human manifestations. Artistic practice constantly reshapes the world. The world is a messy mashup of physical and spiritual trajectories. Artistic practice transforms materialities and ideas into manifestations that did not exist before the artist’s intervention. Eccentric pedagogy is insurrectionary imagination24. Eccentric pedagogy is a human force but codependent on more-than-human sources of life. Eccentric pedagogy promotes a sustainable approach to artistic production. Eccentric pedagogy understands art as research and intervention of reality. Eccentric pedagogy focuses on artistic processes and not on artistic products. Eccentric pedagogy resists the academization of artistic research.

22 Eccentric pedagogy understands every pedagogical practice as art, so it could be practiced within different disciplinary fields. Nevertheless, my proposal deals with the horizons of artistic education.

Maxine Greene reflects on imagination in the context of education as the power of introducing within our communities the “as if” as part of our reality, which allows us to expand the horizons of possibility; she also claims that imagination can constitute the very texture of our experience (2005).

24 The proposal of imagination as an insurrectionary force is inspired by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination conceived by Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan and my reading of We Are Nature Defending Itself (2021).

For eccentric pedagogy, artistic research is a condition of production and not a conceptual framework.

Eccentric Pedagogy

Art as research escapes categorisations. Instead of teaching fixed methodologies for artistic research, eccentric pedagogy cultivates sensorial and cognitive experimentation through the critical intervention of reality. Eccentric pedagogy understands artistic methods as concrete manifestations of existential trajectories. Eccentric pedagogy sees in art a perpetual (re)discovery of ourselves and the world around us.

Manifesto

Eccentric pedagogy believes in the perpetual recomposition of reality. Through opening new windows to contemplate life and inhabit the world, art has the power to renew the horizons of possibility. Art and education share the poetic power to reshape reality. Artist residencies are fundamental for the evolution of art education as a way of reimagining our horizons of possibility. Artist residencies promote a dislocation of our own gaze and the discovery of new sites of occupation. Artist residencies within an educational context foster new ways of relating with each other and the world around us. Eccentric pedagogy understands the artist’s studio as a site of study. The artist’s studio is a site of occupation. A space and a process. A set of intensities, affections, trajectories. Study requires sacrifice. Study demands commitment. Study is both political and poetic. ***

NOTES ON THE CAMERA-BODY AND THE BODY-CAMERA These notes were written in 2022 as part of my preparatory research and reflection towards the workshop of the Camera-body and the Body-camera that was implemented with the master students from the Netherlands Film Academy in April 2023 as part of the AIR programme.

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our embodied experience, and the relationships we endlessly weave The camera is a device of percep- with all the matter, energy, and tion. information surrounding us. Introspection and projection operate simultaneously. The camera is a device that organThe camera is a machine of inscrip- ises perception by questioning pertion defined here by two dimen- ception itself. sions: At the same time that it is an artithe imaginary-sensory qualities of fact of perception it is also one of introspection and projection, expression. and the mediated relationships of Ethical, aesthetical, erotic entangletechnographic nature that sustain ments compromise our relationship human expression. with the camera and its expressive potential. The camera takes form in technological chains of production. The camera deals with matters of Every technology has a political his- life and death. tory. The camera has an intimate affair Every human technology has affec- with memory and its diverse matetive resonances both in human and rial domains, depending on the more-than-human bodies. mediums we’re working with. The evolutionary force of technol- There are different material and ogy is still (perhaps?) dependent on informational diagrams for inter-

1. The camera

Notes on the Camera-Body and the Body-Camera

acting with the camera, and many more intuitions that emerge through and within experimentation. Experimental camera experiences are existential virtualities with differentiated expressive and political potentials.

2. The body The body is the condition of perception as we know it. Introspection and projection exist in and through multinatured bodies. Introspection and projection weave perception and expression.

Our body is a multi-natured hybrid that combines organic and inorganic architectures. Our dependence on technological extensions alters our potency of perception and expression. Both sensation and imagination are qualities of our bodily existence that are affected by our technological complicities.

3. The camera-body The camera is in itself a body. A body that senses and writes the world. The camera can assume multiple bodily forms, and in such mutations its perceptive potentials vary. The camera-body f lows beyond sight. The eye is the ear is the tongue is the hand and foot and skin that revolve, restless, and not only an eye seeing through the looking glass. Introspection and projection coexist in the act of writing with light. The camera-body lives through acts of perception and expression that are manifested simultaneously, with multisensory affections.

Our body is in constant change. Our body dances naturally, yet disciplinary forces coerce its movement. Technology can be both a disciplinary force and an emancipatory agent. Autonomous technological approOur body is an affective maelstrom. priation has the political potential Introspection and projection are of transforming the control provehicles of affection. grammes that precede the artifacts we work with and our bodily rela- Filming and photographing involve tionships with them. our whole body, especially when we

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are working with other bodies and forces in movement. To film dancing bodies seems a natural environment for exploring the limits of the camera-body, yet it is not the only field of exploration. In any case, it is worth investigating the choreographic implications of the camera-body.

tilayered nature of perception? How can we activate other paths for the production of images and sounds?

To dance with the camera is to forget sight as the guiding sense of the photographic act. How can we communicate the mul-

The camera-body cannot exist without the body-camera. The camera-body records the body-camera and the body-camera records the camera-body. The camera-body trusts instinct There is always a dance between and intuition as primal forces that both manifestations of the self and its imprints. guide our sensing of the world. We need to transfer the powers of multilayered perception into the The body-camera can exist in the visual and sonic sensors that enable same human body as the camthe act of filming. era-body. Other human and non-human bodies can coexist with the cam4. The body-camera era-body, and then they become The body is a camera. body-cameras themselves. It senses and records. The camera manifests itself in them It transforms external stimuli into as it records, and they perceive and new forms of knowledge and expe- imagine the act of being filmed. rience. The body is a camera and its exist- The technological determinations ence unravels beyond its own bodily of the camera-body affect the frontiers. bodies as cameras. The presence of the camera-body

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Our machines will invariably determine our ability to move. We need to understand the science and magic of our machines and their assemblages in larger dispositives and environments of interaction. In this sense, the camera-body activates political intensities.

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gets amplified and intensified depending on the modes and levels of inscription that define the cameras we choose to work with. The character of the camera-body is also dependent on our acts of critical appropriation of technology. The body-camera has the power to transform the expressive potentials of the camera-body. The relationships between the camera-body and the body-camera can be explored through montage.

5. Montage Montage expands and intensifies the affective and expressive resonances of the camera-body and the body-camera. Montage is an act of political intervention that deals with the potenti-

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alities of the camera-body and the tion of multilayered relations with body-camera. expressive means. Montage is an expressive force of introspection and projection. Montage is an act of occupation that activates perception and expression. Montage is a device of devices. An apparatus. It has ethical, aesthetical, technical, and affective implications. Montage does not pretend to explain these implications, but expresses them with the technical means available at any given moment of creation, while inhabiting a particular history, a particular time, and all that remains unknown.

T he c a mer a-b o d y a nd t he body-camera are present in all the stages of montage, from the imagining of an artwork to its exhibition. This means: the camera-body and the body-camera resonate throughout the imagesound-making processes that we decide to operate, their performance depends not only on scenic and filming happenings but also on the stages of writing and finishing a media work.

T he c a mer a-b o d y a nd t he body-camera are part of an open research process that finds its perMontage activates memory through ceptive and expressive manifestamysterious and ministerial forces. tions in the powers of montage. Montage draws on contradictions. Montage focuses on the explora-

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suggests that we do not take our practice for granted, but question it and propose alternative ways of interacting with our tools and their codes of expression. Each technological configuration has different effects and consequences for filmmaking. When we take a critical stance towards our technical infrastructures, we can subvert the technological programmes behind them and usher in new possibilities for our mediated coexistence. By doing so, we can enhance our physical and spiritual presence through these technologies, expanding not only film language, but also the life evoked by these acts of creation.

The idea behind this workshop was born through my ongoing dialogue with choreographer and dancer Aura Arreola. Our collaborations on several cine-dance pieces served as an opportunity to question the position occupied by the camera within a choreographic event. Instead of

imagining the camera as alien to dancing interactions, we envisioned a camera that is immersed in the movement and the composition. An interesting insight emerged from these experiences: every body is a camera (each body senses the world), and every camera is a body (it occupies a place and changes the spaces occupied by bodies). When we operate a camera, we become camera-bodies; those being filmed become body-cameras. I was able to develop this choreographic premise and apply it to other contexts. It then became clear that when bodies communicate with each other through cameras, there is a human-technological entanglement from which power relationships emerge. Consequently, I identified in the camera-body and the body-camera a sort of ethical-aesthetic dialogic of filmmaking. This notion implies a critical appropriation of film technologies. It

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WORKSHOP ON THE CAMERABODY AND THE BODYCAMERA AS A METHOD FOR FILMMAKING Description

Eccentric Pedagogy

The camera-body and body-camera workshop aims to make us more aware of other possibilities than those imposed by some industrial and canonical imperatives that govern audiovisual practice. As part of the AIR project, I developed this

workshop in three moments. The first was a prototype in which I tried out a number of exercises with two collaborators (Raphael Reichl and Annelieke Holland). The resulting exercise from this first exploration is included in this publication as part of the Death to the Real! workshop. The second iteration was a more structured workshop open to all students from both years of the Master’s in Film at the Netherlands Film Academy. In it, we tried out a version of the exercises described below. After the workshop, the students asked for an extra day of practice, preferably outdoors (we decided to do it in Flevopark, Amsterdam Oost). This became a third moment to further develop the workshop. The structure of the workshop can be adapted to the circumstances in which it takes place. During the implementation at the Netherlands

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Film Academy, we did three exercises, plus a variation of the third one, which was the one we took to the Flevopark. Here, I present these three exercises as they were performed during the AIR project (in the space of 1 day with 4 to 6 hours of work, excluding the time spent on the Flevopark variation). Before starting the exercises, it is important to share with the participants the ideas behind the notion of the camera-body and the body-camera as an aesthetics and ethics of filmmaking. Some of these ideas are described in the Notes on the Camera-Body and the Body-Camera contained in the previous section of this publication, which can be used as required reading for the participants.

0 Warm-up Our Body and Our Gaze

Introductory note: As with any physical activity, it is important to take time for a warm-up. This can involve basic stretching exercises, either directed by the person guiding the workshop, or left to decide on by each participant themselves (by doing what makes them feel most comfortable and safe). What is important here is that we take time to stretch and warm up our bodies, both to get the best out of the workshop and to avoid injury. There is also a moment of collective reflection. This exchange of ideas takes place while the body activity is performed, which is why it is suggested that people read the Notes on the Camera-Body and the Body-Camera in preparation.

Workshop on the Camera-Body and the Body-Camera

Steps: → Stand in a circle and find your centre. → Try to feel comfortable in the space and with everyone around you. → Start by stretching and warming up your bodies. → Breathe deeply, start at your own pace, and try to work towards a collective rhythm of breathing. → Consider that you’ll be holding a camera (or different cameras) and will be moving around for quite a while, so make sure you stretch your whole body. → Once you have established a stable rhythm, take time to exchange thoughts on your relationship with cameras. → Here are a few questions that you can take as a starting point: what audiovisual technologies do you feel most comfortable with, how do different camera technologies affect the way you

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move in space, how do different cameras affect your relationship with the filming environment, how do people react to the different technologies? → You can use the Notes on the camera-body and the body-camera as a reference for this discussion. This text refers to two crucial movements that define the camera-body as an operational proposition: introjection and projection. They talk about how we interiorise (or introject) stimuli from the environment and how we exteriorise (or project) our reactions and manifestations externally. The following exercises are dedicated to these interiorisation and exteriorisation processes. Try to translate these movements to your warm-up. → Before finishing the warm-up and move on to the first exercise, gather your energy and give

yourself time to take three final deep breaths.

1. Opening-up Our Gaze

Introductory note: This exercise starts in the same position (a circle formed by all participants). There are no technologies involved; the objective is to open our imagination and our senses to the atmosphere of the moment. It is important that participants use this exercise to build their confidence and trust both the space and the other participants. Steps: → Remain standing in a circle, everyone facing the centre. → Relax your body and focus for a few moments on dissolving the boundaries separating you from everyone and everything around you.

Workshop on the Camera-Body and the Body-Camera

→ Do not focus your gaze on anything or anyone. → Try to connect with the space and the energies flowing around you. → Now focus on what is in front of your eyes. Identify the limits of your field of vision, look around, and see how far you can see with your eyes without turning your body – your feet should stay in the same position throughout the whole exercise. Feel how other senses apart from your eyesight inform the way you look. → Once you have looked all around as an initiating act of recognition, return to the centre of your field of vision, look straight ahead and try to keep your gaze fixed. → Now the challenging part begins: imagine that both of your hands are a camera, your palm being the photo-sensitive surface. These cameras can see with a similar

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range to that of your eyesight, which is approximately 200º on the horizontal axis and 130º on the vertical axis. → Split your mind into the three image sources you have now (your eyes and your hand-cameras). Exercise your imagination to be able to switch between these three cameras: what images do they show? → Discover those around you with your hand-cameras: do not touch each other; as you project your movements, introject the imaginary picture from each of your hands in your mind. → Concentrate on distinguishing the different frames inside your mind, try to react to the other people’s movements by using only your hand-cameras (not your eyes). → Close your eyes and try to see only with your imaginary hand-cameras. Do this for a few minutes. → Open your eyes, come back to

your centre of vision, looking straight ahead. → Lower your arms and put them in a neutral position. → Turn off the hand-cameras and recognise each other with all your senses. Take a few deep breaths before returning to the group. → Exchange impressions, feelings and ideas. What were the main challenges? What images came to mind? What sensations took hold of you? Did you think of anything in particular? Was anything hindering your work?

Workshop on the Camera-Body and the Body-Camera

2. Camera-bodies and Body-cameras

Introductory note: All of the participants should have a mobile phone capable of recording video (ideally non-stop for around 10 minutes). This is the simplest exercise to approach this method and intends to make us aware of the camera-body and the body-camera. Steps: → You need to define a centre of gravity; this position can be occupied by an object or a camera (in the latter case, the ideal technology would be a 360° camera). → The centre of gravity can be defined by all the participants or by the person guiding the exercise. This centre pulls on all of you during the exercise, as if it were exerting a gravitational force on the camera-bodies. Generally this

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centre is the centre of the space where the workshop is taking place, so that there is as much space as possible in each direction for everyone to move around freely. → Find a spot furthest from the centre and take it. Try to keep some space between yourself and the others. The aim of this exercise is to move from your chosen position to the centre while reacting to everything and everyone around you. → Once all participants have found their initial spot, you can start recording. Someone needs to clap for all the cameras so you can sync the footage. → Start slowly, without moving forward at first. Recognise your autonomy within the space. The space needs to be safe for everyone and still allow you to push the limits of your movement and perception. → The basic rule is to keep on

moving constantly, at a rhythm of your own choosing. This rhythm can change depending on the evolution of the event. → The prevailing gravitational force is the chosen centre, but other camera-bodies will also act as (minor) gravitational centres that will affect your trajectory. Each body will move in a different way, each person will perceive in a different way. Let your own movement and perception resonate with those around you. → Free your sight from the screen. Move around while filming on your mobile phone without depending on it. This is a technology you’re familiar with, you can anticipate the image without looking at it. Use your eyes to instead register what escapes the lens of your mobile phone and take advantage of this separation to guide the frame and anticipate your shots. Use all your senses to guide your movements,

Workshop on the Camera-Body and the Body-Camera

including those that direct the camera. → Make sure you heighten your senses to enhance the potential and scope of your body as a sensing being, as a camera-body. Don’t forget the premise of this exercise: keep moving forward to the gravitational centre. → Once you have all reached the centre, you can stop recording. → After you have stopped recording, you can take a few deep breaths before excha ngi ng impressions. → What did you feel and think during the exercise, what did you discover, what was easy or hard to perform? These are just some of the many questions that you can share. → The last part of the exercise invites all participants to look at the materials. You need to place all the cell phones on a table so that every screen is visible. Find the moment

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of the clap and pause the video on each phone. Once you are all ready, start playing the footage as synchronously as possible. → Exchange ideas about what you’re seeing while the footage is being played. → After the videos are over, take a moment to reflect together on what were the key insights, challenges and questions that emerged from the experience.

3. Exchanging Cameras, Exchanging Perspectives

Introductory note: This exercise is an evolution of the previous one, but is much more flexible. The main difference is that there is now no equality based on the devices participants use (that is, not everyone will be using a mobile phone, they can choose their own camera; still, they can choose to

use their mobile phone). Ideally, each participant brings their own camera to the workshop. The person leading the workshop is responsible for bringing two cameras. One for his/her/their own use, and another to guide the energy of the exercise. If there are participants that don’t have a camera, it is important to consider bringing more cameras so everyone has a choice. The camera guiding the exercise is a special camera that will be passed around among all participants; it could be a 360° camera to record all possible angles. Another nice device to use is an analogue film camera, such as a 16mm or 8mm camera, as that can be a way of keeping time of the filming event (distributing the total footage among the participants). As with the second exercise, it is important for the organiser to anticipate what technologies are needed to watch all the images at the end of the exercise (cameras with displays, screens

Workshop on the Camera-Body and the Body-Camera

or computers). The time needed to transfer the materials, as well as the recording formats, should be taken into account, as this will affect the overall planning of the workshop. The guiding rule for this exercise is that each participant uses the special camera at least once. This camera will be alone, without no one holding it, both at the beginning and at the end of the exercise, but it will be passed from hand to hand until everyone has had a chance to record with it. If there’s time, this exercise can be given another iteration in which everyone is invited to define a rule for the others to follow.

Steps: → Each of you starts at a spot you’ve chosen, which can be the same spot as the one in the previous exercise or a different one. The initial position of the special camera can be decided by the group, but it is recommended to

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place it in the centre of the room. → Once everyone is at their starting position, it is important that you sync all the cameras with a clap. The group doesn’t need to decide who grabs the camera first, you can either leave it open for the first to go for it or decide who will be the chosen one. In any case, it is fundamental that before the first person grabs the camera, you all give yourselves some time to get into the rhythm of the exercise. → When recording with the special camera, you can keep your camera with you, leave it unattended or lend it to someone else. It is important that all cameras record the whole exercise (unless the special camera is an analogue film camera). → There is no defined centre of gravity here, react to what everyone around you is doing and what catches your attention.

→ Each camera-body can move freely around other body-cameras and the space. → W hen handling the special camera, it is important to feel the rhythm of the event. There is no specific amount of time to have the camera with you, but pay attention to the energies flowing in the event. If you are using an analogue film camera as the special one, you can define a specific number of feet to be shot by each participant depending on the size of the group. → Whenever you feel that you need to pass the special camera along, find the person that you feel needs to have the camera (or the person that you would like to give the camera to). → Only those who haven’t had the camera can take it. If you are offered the camera and have already held it, you should not take it; this maintains the flow of the exercise

Workshop on the Camera-Body and the Body-Camera

and prevents the exercise from taking too long. → You can also swap your own camera without restraints. → You can approach anyone and suggest an exchange of cameras, but you must respect the will of those who have their camera if they decide not to let go of it. Consequently, you have to give it back if they ask you to. In other words, because the camera is a sort of extension of the body, each participant has power over their own camera. Conversely, the special camera is a collective responsibility. → Once the special camera is passed to all of you, the last person has to leave it somewhere in the space. This doesn’t have to be the same place where it started. → When this final stage is reached, you should all notice it and progressively start gravitating towards the special camera.

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→ Once everyone has gathered around the special camera, leave the other cameras unattended for a few moments before turning them off. This final instant of coexistence with the camera-bodies, is an opportunity to decompress and let the exercise settle in your hearts and minds. → W hen everyone is ready to continue with the revision of the materials, find a setup that helps you view all the images of what you shot in all cameras together (you may need several computers depending on the technologies that you’ve chosen). Reflect again on the experience. As a final moment, reflect on the experience of the whole workshop and what you’ve experienced based on your own relationship with audiovisual practice. Exchange impressions and ideas that you can apply in the future.

Workshop on the Camera-Body and the Body-Camera

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XI. discovery

Eccentric Pedagogy

Eccentric pedagogy trusts in dialogue and mutual discovery as sources of inspiration.

Manifesto

Eccentric pedagogy sees education as a space for creating community and at the same time a refuge for intimate excavations. Finding one’s voice is not an endpoint but an open voyage of search and encounter. In this quest, solitary meditation is as fundamental as collective experience. There is no value in isolation nor in total devotion to public relations. Our body spirits transit between both of these poles of existence. The question is what rests in between. *** XII. experimentation Artistic expression is dependent on technique and narrative25. The level of technique refers to the tools, codes of expression, and mediums that we employ during our creative projects. The level of narrative refers to the aspects of reality we are dealing with, the multiple trajectories that overlap within our research contexts. Through pedagogical encounters we can open new windows for the development of the technical and narrative domains of our practice.

25 This is also a component of the Practical Critique of Communication. One of the things that I love about teaching, beyond total selftransformation, is having the chance to reflect on my creative processes and open them, as much as I can, to all of the participants of the pedagogical encounter. It has allowed me to trace back into my own production, and realize that in the end, it all comes back to the same two practical challenges: the what and the how I am, or rather, we as a team ARE dealing with the creative obstacles of solving a piece.

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We can share technical and narrative knowledge through pedagogical encounters and foster a critical appropriation of such tools and codes.

Eccentric Pedagogy

Technology and technique are at the heart of both art and pedagogy. The evolution of technology has constantly reshaped artistic expression and pedagogical encounters. Technology not only affects the spatial and temporal aspects of the pedagogical encounter but also impacts changes in the character of communication and understanding.

Manifesto

Technique and technology are fetishised constantly. Critical appropriation of technology is fundamental for articulating art and pedagogy as political practices. Critical appropriation of technology supposes the emergence of technique as the enactment of autonomy. Critical appropriation of technology recognises the political programmes behind technological development. Critical appropriation of technology derives from the emergence of style, the manifestation of an existential trajectory. Eccentric pedagogy revolves around the experimental potential of expression. Expression is the manifestation of existential forces. Experimentation in eccentric pedagogy refers to the exploration of the limits of expression. Experimentation is performed at both technical and narrative levels. Eccentric pedagogy is experimental by nature. Pedagogical settings are ideal for experimentation, they have much more freedom than more industrial or marketoriented environments.

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Experimentation in artistic education implies the constant questioning of the limits of expression.

Eccentric Pedagogy

Experimentation can be understood as the perpetual dislocation of practice. Experimentation is a liberatory force. Experimentation requires discipline. Experimentation demands systematisation.

Manifesto

Under eccentric pedagogy, experimentation is a way of embodying methods. Eccentric pedagogy rejects fixed approaches to methodologies. Experimentation is a way of questioning these methodological territories and expanding their frontiers. Experimentation reveals new formal configurations. Form in eccentric pedagogy refers to the convergence of content and continent. Content and continent are inseparable. Eccentric pedagogy rejects the primacy of concepts. Eccentric pedagogy rejects an agenda of relevance regarding the issues explored by the participants of the pedagogical encounter. Both socially relevant topics and intimate tribulations can share importance for the pedagogical event. Eccentric pedagogy rejects the hyper-discursiveness of artistic practice. Eccentric pedagogy is not concerned with impact as an indicator of pertinence. ***

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XIII. crisis

Eccentric Pedagogy

Eccentric pedagogy is critical in the sense that it recognizes being immersed in crisis. Critical intervention in eccentric pedagogy means working with others to detect the manifestations of crises in our daily lives.

Manifesto

During artistic and pedagogical processes, crises manifest themselves on different levels of individual and shared experience. Some crises belong to the space of discussion and exchange, others arise and follow somewhere outside the pedagogical space . There is a collective debate regarding our position as participants in the critical scenarios traversing our pedagogical experience. Affect and understanding are two core components of critically engaged pedagogy. Eccentric pedagogy believes in the collective definition and perpetual revision of the codes of interaction that are performed during our pedagogical encounters. Dissent is allowed and fostered, demanding both co-responsibility and mutual respect from the participants. Pedagogy and art are never indifferent to reality. There’s always an implicit or explicit positioning of the pedagogue-artist in relation to the realities and the historical contexts surrounding them. There is no such thing as impartial education. Which positions do we occupy through pedagogical practice? How do we perform those acts of occupation? What are the politics and the poetics of our acts of occupation?

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Critical intervention in eccentric pedagogy refers to how we position ourselves within crises. Crisis for eccentric pedagogy is a call to position ourselves within a specific historical scenario, it implies taking a stance in relation to the realities we are facing. Crisis for eccentric pedagogy is an inescapable condition that demands the action of the pedagogue.

Manifesto

Etymologically, crisis evokes a turning point in a disease. Today, it seems that education is facing a profound crisis that touches all the corners of its practice. Institutions are desperate to understand and even control the current crisis. Some institutions feel threatened by this critical scenario, as if they are being rendered obsolete. Eccentric pedagogy celebrates the crisis in education and sees it as an opportunity for transformation. Eccentric pedagogy aims to unveil critical emergencies in educational settings, it seeks to inspire a constant questioning of our educational principles and their historical relevance. Critical intervention is the conscious and sensible act of positioning ourselves within the educational environment we are working in. Critical intervention is an act of occupation26. Occupation is non-neutral. Occupation can be violent or amorous, destructive or creative. Eccentric pedagogy sees critical intervention as a way of creative, amorous occupation. 26 Eccentric pedagogy sees Hito Steyerl speaks of art as occupation from the work or critical intervention as labor perspective but also refers embodied resistance. to some other meanings, such as military occupation. This idea suggests that there are political implications for occupying our space and defining our artistic practice (2016).

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CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND ARTISTIC RESEARCH IMAGINATION GROUP Participants: Cynthia Ortega Salgado (Faculty of Arts, Autonomous University of the State of Mexico), Côme Ledésert (Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin), Dorian de Rijk (Breitner Academy, AHK, Amsterdam), Edwin Culp (Media Department, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City), Joeny Veldehuijzen van Zanten (Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam), Mieke Bernink (the Netherlands Film Academy, AHK, Amsterdam), Stanislaw Liguzinski (the Netherlands Film Academy, AHK, Amsterdam), Jeroen Fabius (DAS Choreography, AHK, Amsterdam), Joyce Brouwer (Reflect Academy, Amsterdam), Jyoti Mistry (Gothenburg University, Sweden), Kiyoshi Osawa (Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City), Nduka Mntambo (the Netherlands Film Academy, AHK, Amsterdam), Rein Jelle Terpstra (Minerva Art School, Groningen), Szymon Adamczak (In Persuit of Otherwise Possibilities, AHK, Amsterdam), Emilio Santoyo (MA student at the Netherlands Film Academy, AHK, Amsterdam), Jaco van den Dool (Conservatorium van Amsterdam, AHK, Amsterdam), Rafael Rivera (Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City), Pablo Martínez-Zárate (Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City).

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Critical Pedagogy and Artistic Research Imagination Group

As part of the research performed during the Artist Residency at the Lectorate of the Netherlands Film Academy, we convoked a group of artists and pedagogues interested in reflecting together on the potentialities of artistic research and education. From November 2022 to May 2023, we shared our experiences and engaged in dialogues dedicated to diagnosing current tendencies in artistic education, as well as imagining alternative scenarios for the future. It was inspiring to realize that many of our concerns crossed borders and artistic disciplines, resulting in a collective corpus of insights on the poetic and political potential of artistic education in a world marked by violence, fear, and uncertainty. As an individual task of re-composition, the documentation of the sessions was transformed into what can be read as a stream of collective consciousness, where authorship is diluted, forming a communal cumulus of ideas that aim to inspire creative transformations within institutional contexts. These ideas can be read as fragments of this collective body that lived parallel to other activities of the AIR project. ***

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Critical Pedagogy and Artistic Research Imagination Group

artistic education is about creating the conditions of what’s possible | a space of trust, trust both in the process and trust in a non-hierarchical relation with teaching | highlight the importance of an ethos in art education | recognize the power or weight of tradition in art education and imagine ways of reinventing it | how can we foster interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary pedagogical practices both within the arts and beyond? | artistic research is elusive and hybrid | artistic research is embedded in the artistic process itself and in the work itself, sometimes against all odds, against better knowing | challenge your own ideas in unimaginable ways | there is no path, everyone has to create and carve out its own path | pedagogy is also very much about how to work with a crew, how to work with people, how to work with a team | we need to be more attentive to the relationships in pedagogical practice and how to build the possibilities together | the methods actually become the work | to think art pedagogy as a medium of risky research and also experimental practice in terms of challenging the traditional forms of education | stand firmly against liberalization and cognitive capitalism in the universities | imagine autonomy and political possibilities of the university | creating knowledge in relation to the contingencies of our present | acknowledge the communicative dimension, the different layers of information, the stature of the image in current times and the impact of digital technologies on memory and cognition | what are the political and ecological implications of our practices? | bring wildness to pedagogy | foster freedom of the creative process and imagination | ethics of engagement | embrace not knowing & the erratic nature of art | art as a contribution to society is always about invention, about bringing something into the world that isn’t there yet, that cannot be imagined yet, and that has an urgency | create unimaginable spaces | imagining spaces is a collective practice | the different levels of embodied practices (historical and contextual) | the teacher

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as a not-knowing subject | we discover together, we formulate new questions | we need to produce queer environments and environments of care | what are different ways of writing in art? | articulate a resistance against the tendency to make everything a commodity, against the need of imposing monetary value to every aspect of artistic production | heavy and closed institutions that seek speed of results and deny the constitutive non-linearity of the creative process | a rhetoric against colonialism within colonial institutions that resist transformation | there are two contradictory movements: desire for creativity and freedom versus an instrumental approach to problems, which takes impact as a guiding requirement | the fear to change and the need to control were worsened by the pandemic | imagine forms of introducing para-institutional practices that push institutional life to its limits | we need to introduce a slow gaze: slowing the processes as a way to imagine what is supposed to be impossible and creating a sense of community | there is a feeling among students that they don’t need teachers or professors | what are we doing in order to still be relevant to students and to art and to everything? | the pandemic rendered institutions replaceable, how to leverage up to the challenges of our times, in terms of what is expected of education and academia in general? | artistic research can be an opportunity to challenge logocentrism and paralyzing academicism | students are canaries in a coal mine | how to create cracks in the dialogue between generations and hierarchies? | how to prepare ourselves, teachers and students together, for an unknown future? | how to support our learning communities? | it is dreadful when we cannot find trust to start a dialogue | art as a way to introduce hope | pedagogy builds bridges in a society filled with distraction and polarization | pedagogy is a way to restore dialogue | pedagogy is an enlivening engagement | curriculums should also share questions, instead of concepts | negotiating the space of what’s inside

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Critical Pedagogy and Artistic Research Imagination Group

and outside the crisis, what’s in the heart of the crisis, and identifying the location of the crisis as a way to position ourselves and foster transformation | creating a safe space for students requires being empathetic | we need not only a safe space but a brave space | brave spaces are spaces where dissent and critical dialogue is encouraged, where participants can feel uncomfortable, out of their comfort zones and still be motivated to participate | a space where they can learn and experiment and discover | recognizing failure as part of the process | taking a stance in the face of the urgencies of our present | how to challenge the preconception of a distance between teacher and student? | artistic research as an experimental epistemology, something to try things out, repeat | there’s no real right or wrong, failure is a productive way of thinking | the need to think beyond the production of artistic pieces and to embrace the process | academia is filled with people who are afraid of trying new things | take the crisis as a motivator, violence as a way of living | teaching is a way of learning, we should work as an amateur | mental health in students, professors and staff is an urgent concern, especially after the pandemic | pedagogies of healing and imagining possibilities, new possibilities for life (not only education) | recognize the relationship between education and privilege | there is an institutional structure that makes us reconfigure certain structures of art education and research, so what structures and frameworks are possible? | institutional pressures are insisting on “fixing” “problems” in a tangible and measurable way, and there is no room for experimentation and discovery | any form of exploration towards innovative forms of pedagogy is expected to be done aside from regular work obligations | we need to constantly invent more horizontal ways of assessing artistic research | intuitive, open, improvisational approaches to exploring reality | we’re in a very important moment about how to create safe places, how to create daring spaces, how to create queer spaces, how

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Critical Pedagogy and Artistic Research Imagination Group

to create neurodiverse spaces, how to deal with race, how to deal with class, how to deal with gender | it’s very important to underline the experience of the body, we all have different experiences and all of those are horizontal | acknowledge that skills and ideas play an equal part in solving creative problems | technique and narrative are both political and poetic | our shared concerns should lead to creative action | we think about the body, we think within our body, we have an incarnate reflexivity, we have to embody our own reflection and we have to think with our body, with the sensations and emotions and feelings that come from this huge world of knowledge and understanding | take into consideration these transformations of the body that happen in pedagogy as acts of emancipation | if you transform your body, you are changing your reality and you are ta k ing a subversive attitude towards the world and towards the system | we take our powers and all together we create a communal or community power, and that is really strong because we are living in a world full of violence, frustration and a lot of sadness | invite the students to think beyond and outside the discipline | pedagogy as a constant collective invention of research practices | how can we create conditions where we invite everybody not to follow a model, but to propose one ? | we need to be able to collectively be in this space where we embrace the unknown and where we can trust our intuitions and also our actions | a space where we can rely on doing, on touching, on experimenting and exploring | a space that fosters collective intelligence and courage | open up for boredom, for failure, for non-results | there is also a sense of guidance needed and maybe the first guide is that it is an event, it is a proposition that needs to happen | it’s about applied knowledge, about doing and living and letting unexpected things happen and adapting, improvising and giving a life to things we couldn’t anticipate before the class | the class should be enjoyable for students and teachers | we have to manage

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Critical Pedagogy and Artistic Research Imagination Group

a quantity of energy, we turn into a mirror, I am the mirror, we as teachers are empty vessels, we need to look at students and create a human relationship, and be present there with them | the class has to be significant, it has to be like an act of giving | pedagogy has to be enjoyable and the class a space of joy, this system is eating all the flesh and all the experience and all the body, so in a way the class should be a space of returning to a joy of life | encouraging to follow one’s intuition and that which cannot be anticipated but emerges in the moment | there’s a sense of trust, there’s a sense of risk taking, it is a collective condition, it needs to be collectively created, but it’s also an individual thing, recognizing the unique singular qualities of every participant | pedagogy and art are a matter of language, this is why art practices are so incredibly important to the whole society and to politics in general, it is not just an aesthetic practice, it’s also a political practice, it’s an ethical engagement | artistic education can confront social indolence, it can foster new ways of imagining new spatial-temporal coordinates | this critical pedagogy we’re thinking of deals with the contingent in terms of urgency and transformation | we can bring incredible freedom to what we do inside institutions, we are inside institutions to push the processes to their very limits | how do you find ways to communicate the process? when do you publish? what do you publish? how do you keep it engaged? how do you go from individual engagement towards communal engagement? | there is a constant struggle with the language of funding bodies, of institutions, of academia; it’s a language that is alien to artistic sensibility | how do you work with this notion of different forms of intelligence, different forms of knowledge? | introducing this experimental knowledge into the humanities and the arts produces a disturbance to the known epistemologies which tend to have an object that doesn’t move, that is stable in time | the idea of having a result becomes disturbing in artistic research, let’s create a disturbance

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Critical Pedagogy and Artistic Research Imagination Group

to this idea of having a result | is there a solution or are we just trying to sell what we cannot sell? | there never seems to be enough time to do open-ended artistic research and to apply critical pedagogies that may not have a result, that may not have an interesting process in itself; also, the language of institutions seems to go against this will of innovation | we need to question the fashion of the art fairs, the always trying to catch the latest | which are our sites of occupation? | it’s more about the world(s) we live in than the school itself; pedagogy and art can inaugurate different worlds to inhabit | we don’t have to have the same references anymore | we don’t have to stick to a common top to bottom approach | as soon as we categorise, we lose the process | education requires to keep moving, otherwise you stop being creative | our conception of art is changing radically because everyone now has access to technical tools that they didn’t have before and so artistic research is truly looking into the future in that sense | teaching and learning are about creating genuine curiosity, curiosity about each other, about the moment and about the subject that serves as a training tool for thinking and skills | teaching is showing how to learn, teaching also means living things and being honest about your own humanity | we should think of a way in which we could share our way of teaching with teachers in primary schools or managers in companies, so we would infect the world and not the other way around | love can be a guiding force of the pedagogical encounter | pedagogy as a way of healing together and imagining new ways of coexisting among humans and more-than-humans | artistic pedagogy is a force that faces fear and accepts uncertainty as a condition of creativity and innovation | we need to dare to let go of control, dare to fail, dare to disobey | a safe space for artistic pedagogy is one that challenges comfort zones, that is guided by curiosity and discovery | we need more radical approaches in education, be willing to change ourselves in order to change the world around us |

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*** XIV. body

Eccentric Pedagogy

Every pedagogy traverses the body of the pedagogue and that of the participants. All bodies have a space in eccentric pedagogy. This is both an architectural and an ethical challenge that needs to be dealt with openly among the participants of the pedagogical encounter.

Manifesto

Eccentric pedagogy believes in the value of exercising mind and body in tandem. When possible, eccentric pedagogy takes the pedagogical encounter outdoors. When possible, eccentric pedagogy reconfigures the architectures of pedagogical spaces. Eccentric pedagogy works together with institutions to guarantee a safe and brave space for all bodies. Building towards a common understanding of our ways of sharing the space with other bodies and trajectories is a condition of possibility of eccentric pedagogy. Eccentric pedagogy cares for all physical, sensory, and intellectual realms of practice. Body exercises are performed as warm-ups and recesses from intellectual dialogue and creative experimentation. Body labour is involved in our ways of caring for the pedagogical spaces and the human and more-than-human bodies that inhabit them. Different disciplinary conceptions of the studio illuminate the possibilities of our bodily relationship with artistic practice. Practices of cleaning and procuring spaces, tools, objects, and agencies are fundamental for artistic and educational entanglements. ***

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Manifesto

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XV. ritual

Eccentric Pedagogy

Eccentric pedagogy embodies pedagogy as a ritual of care. Rituals evoke the origin. Rituals are a foundational space for individual and collective identities. Rituals can be understood as positive or negative practices.

Manifesto

Negative rituals are based on prohibition, they impose or promote taboos. Negative rituals limit the participant’s capacity, they reproduce existing values and depend on censorship, imposition, oppression, and closed readings of reality. Negative rituals tend to be hierarchical and discretional (there are “elevated” people that are excluded from the ritual). Negative rituals can be seen as a site of penitence. Negative pedagogy is based on discipline and punishment, surveillance and coercion. Positive rituals deal with conservation, renewal. Positive rituals are creative in the sense they open up opportunities for the participants. Positive rituals can be seen as sites of joy. Positive rituals aim towards the renewal of individual and collective potential. Positive rituals are about producing new ways of sharing, being, and understanding. Positive rituals in pedagogy can involve empowerment, criticality, empathy, healing, transformation, fostering collaboration and self-realisation. Pedagogy as a positive ritual is hopeful, inspired by a love for life. Eccentric pedagogy as positive ritual recognizes the pedagogical encounter as a multidimensional critical event, one that can serve various purposes (individually and collectively).

Eccentric Pedagogy Manifesto

If times and spaces of ritual evoke a cosmology, eccentric pedagogy occupies these as plastic, mutable, almost liquid territories.

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Eccentric pedagogy as a positive ritual is transitional, sacrificial, transformational. Eccentric pedagogy uses light and sound to amplify the poetic potential of the pedagogical encounter. Eccentric pedagogy as a positive ritual is deeply passionate, it stimulates sensation and imagination through engaged and embodied encounters. Eccentric pedagogy believes that ritualistic objects can be recreated constantly within our communities of practice (both students and tutors). Some of the functions of these objects are summoning, mediating, expelling, and protecting those participating in the pedagogical encounter.

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STUDIO VARIATIONS At the end of the AIR project, the Netherlands Film Academy organized an open studio to conclude the residency. The exhibition showcased a number of works and processes that I undertook during the artistic research into the challenges of art and art education in a world in crisis. The name of the exhibition — Studio Variations — is taken from the homonymous series of video works that originated during the residency and which I intend to continue working on in the upcoming years. The concept behind this series is that the artist’s studio is not merely a space, but above all a process. A process of study, intervention and imagination. What are the ethical and aesthetic implications of our ways of inhabiting the studio? In this line of thought, the open studio exhibition revealed some of the questions behind the residency as a whole. In addition to the series from which the exhibition takes its name, it unveiled other aspects of my inquiry, such as some of the technical challenges behind the film, the immersive video resulting from the camera-body & body-camera workshop, a series of photographs taken in Amsterdam, samples of the research notebooks, other pieces from the series and working documents. The intention of the exhibition was to display a kaleidoscope of imprints of the artistic research process behind the residency.

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Studio Variations

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OBLIQUE TAKES. MEDITATIONS ON ART AND CRISIS. Oblique Takes is a film of questions. Questions asked through the camera and the text that accompanies the images. Questions asked through the soundtrack that assembled a triad of Mexican sonic artists. Questions that perforate the photochemical material as a way of exploring the limits of artistic expression in a world that seems to be falling apart. The idea started with a quote by Billy Ray-Belcourt that reads, “I don’t want to construct another ship made of poetry. My poems didn’t float, so I didn’t make it to the shore.” The poetic impulse is a leap into the void of existence, there’s always something that’s lost, besides the artistic outcomes. I appropriated this idea to address an always incomplete understanding of artistic production, one that is constantly searching for new frames of meaning. The film was shot on super 8 and 16mm in the Netherlands, Mexico and Cuba. Each sequence presents a series of interrogations that appear between the images. Text, image and sound weave an unstable net of references that, instead of representing our fragmented reality, tries to intervene in its horizons of possibility. In this sense, it is a crystallisation of eccentric pedagogy as a fugitive impulse, one that challenges centres of meaning.

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Oblique Takes. Meditations on Art and Crisis.

Script, photography, direction: Pablo Martínez-Zárate Editing: Martin de Alba José Louis Rangel Pablo Martinez-Zárate Music: Fernando Vigueras and Maricarmen Martínez Sound design: Sharon Aiza Engel

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Oblique Takes. Meditations on Art and Crisis.

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XVI. care

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Eccentric pedagogy as a positive ritual is a practice of care. There is no pedagogy without care. All the participants of the pedagogical encounter are involved in caring for each other and for the space they share.

Manifesto

Eccentric pedagogy cares for the modalities of communication as the basis of pedagogical exchange. Eccentric pedagogy cares for the creation of the necessary conditions for meaningful relationships. Eccentric pedagogy cares for the ideas and the knowledge shared amongst the participants. Eccentric pedagogy cares for the possibilities of knowledge production and understanding. Eccentric pedagogy cares for the exploration of unknown territories. Eccentric pedagogy cares for history and tradition, as well as renovation and renewal. Eccentric pedagogy cares for names, present and absent. Eccentric pedagogy cares for bodies, human and morethan-human. Eccentric pedagogy cares for the concerns, urgencies, and wounds affecting the participants of the pedagogical encounter. Eccentric pedagogy cares for the struggles to make this world a more liveable world for all critters. Eccentric pedagogy cares for the individual and collective dreams shared by its participants. Eccentric pedagogy cares for the fears and anguishes of its participants. Eccentric pedagogy cares for the individual and collective possibilities of realisation. Eccentric pedagogy cares for the world beyond the educational setting. Eccentric pedagogy cares for building better conditions for coexistence among humans and more-than-humans.

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Care is the beating heart of eccentric pedagogy, regardless of the subjects, agents, and artistic outcomes of the pedagogical encounter. ***

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References

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Azoulay, Ariella (2014). Historia potencial y otros ensayos. México: t-eeoría y Conaculta. Betasamosake Simpson, Lee-Anne (2014). “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation”. In Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society (2014) 3 (3): 1-25. Canada: University of Toronto. D’Emilia, Dani and Coleman, Daniel (2015). “Ternura radical es…” On Histeria.mx, retrieved online on 12 May 2023: https://hysteria.mx/ ternura-radical-es-manifiesto-vivo-por-dani-demilia-y-daniel-bchavez/ Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1980). Mil Mesetas. Capitalismo y Esquizofrenia. Epaña: Pre-textos. Fremeaux, Isabelle and Jordan, Jay (2021). We Are Nature Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones. UK: Pluto Press. Freire, Paulo (1970). Pedagogía del Oprimido. México: Siglo XXI. Freire, Paulo (1996). Pedagogía de la Autonomía. México: Siglo XXI. Greene, Maxine (2005). Liberar la imaginación. Ensayos sobre educación, arte y cambio social. España: Grao. Halberstram and Nyong’o (2018). “Introduction: Theory in the Wild.” In South Atlantic Quarterly (2018) 117 (3): 453–464. USA: Duke University Press. hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to Transgress. Education as the Practice of Freedom. EUA/UK: Routledge. Martínez-Zárate, Pablo (2020). Máquinas para ver y oír al límite del tiempo. Hacia una crítica práctica de la comunicación. México: Universidad Iberoamericana. Richter, Gerhard (2004). Gerhard Richter. A Private Collection. Germany: Richter Verlag Düsseldorf. Ruiz, Raul (2000). Poética del cine. Chile: Editorial Sudamericana. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura (2009). Una epistemología del Sur. México: Clacso/Siglo XXI. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura (2017). Decolonising the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice. UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura (2018). The End of the Cognitive Empire. The Coming Age of Epistemologies of the South. USA: Duke University Press. Segato, Laura Rita (2018). Contra-Pedagogías de la Crueldad. Argentina: Prometeo Libros. Spivak, Gayatri (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. USA: Harvard University Press. Steyerl, Hito (2016). Los condenados de la pantalla. Argentina: Caja Negra. Tarkosvky, Andrei (2009). Esculpir el tiempo. México: UNAM-CUEC. Tokarczuk, Olga (2019). The Tender Narrator. Nobel Prize Lecture, retrieved online on 15 June 2023: https://www.nobelprize.org/ prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/lecture/

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIOGRAPHY

Thanks to: Mieke Bernink for inviting, trusting and always challenging me to experiment.

Pablo Martínez-Zárate is a filmmaker, media artist and professor living and working in Mexico City. His work explores the interconnection between memory, body and territory through experimental media practice. He is considered one of the pioneers and foremost exponents of web and interactive documentary in Mexico. His work has shown internationally and he has published several books on the role of artistic research as a critical force for reshaping reality. His work can be explored at: https://pablomz.info

Kris Dekkers for arranging everything during my stays in Amsterdam, saving my life countless times and treating my family like part of her own. The students who joined me on this journey of discovery. The participants in the critical pedagogy group for their willingness and generosity. Raphael Reichl who assisted me as part of an Erasmus scholarship. S†ëfan Schäfer for diving into my narrative universe to design a fantastic publication. My family for their support in what has been a truly transformative experience, without them I could not have done it.

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COLOPHON ON AIR / Results of the Artist in Residence programme are published in the series ON AIR. Publication 9, October 2023

Author Pablo Martinez-Zárate Editor Mieke Bernink Design S†ëfan Schäfer

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Printer Drukkerij Tuijtel Publisher Artist in Residence programme Amsterdam University of the Arts E: air@ahk.nl www.air.ahk.nl

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The Amsterdam University of the Arts invites the Artist in Residence to inspire students, teachers and academies by confronting them with topical developments and issues from the practices of art and research. These tailor-made AIR programmes focus on innovation and connection in an international and multidisciplinary context.