RADICAL CURATION : (E)MOTION AND AFFECT IN

“A WORLD AT STAKE”

Geografisk institutt, NTNU, Trondheim

Plan

• En verden på spill

• Teori

• Konklusjoner

• Implikasjoner – forskning og praksis

Stikkord

• Representasjon

• Barns perspektiv

• Affekt og følelser

• Ansvarlighet

• Kuratering

UNs Millennium Development Goals - MDG

1. To eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

2. To achieve universal primary education

3. To promote gender equality and empower women

4. To reduce child mortality

5. To improve maternal health

6. To combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases

7. To ensure environmental sustainability

8. To develop a global partnership for development

www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ (UN 28.02.2014)

© Experimentarium

© Experimentarium

(postcolonial) exhibition critique

Politiken chronicle:

«Aren’t there any men in Africa?»

Richey & Fredriksen 25.02.2010

Forskningsspørsmål:

“[…] explore children’s embodied experience of ‘A world at stake’. In

particular we are concerned with the affective and embodied encounters

offered within the exhibition space, and the ways they make children relate to

‘poor others’ and reflect upon their responsibilities.”

Hvorfor studere dette?

• Tema: Fattigdom og ulikhet

• Ansvarlig medborgerskap på tvers av kontinent

• Kontroversielt og eksperimentelt (?) utstillingsformat

• Politiske dimensjoner: -inkluderende format? -museets samfunnsansvar? -publikums ansvar? -representasjonen og relasjonen mellom oss og de fattige andre

Barn og virkningsfulle media

• “If the differentiating power of media, its active, positive and generative

effects, and its insights and implications for children's agency are to be

adequately grasped, movements away from representation as an

explanatory device and movements towards the body's capacity for being

affected by and ability to effect difference must be explored.”

Curti, Aitken & Bosco (2016, pg 14)

Position

• Geographies of practice, power and politics

• Poststructural departure; affect – (e)motion

• Understanding the world from a set of power relations but not

suggesting that those power relations are fixed.

• Counterweighting poverty studies. The dominated isn’t only

dominated.

Teori og konsept

• Affects and becoming

• The role of the body

• Ethical encounters of ‘poor others’

• Children – openness, becoming, differentiation

• Responsibility and participation

• Haldrup, Koefoed, Simonsen (2006), Lorimer (2008), Massey (2004),

Moosa Mitha (2005), Simonsen (2007), Simonsen (2010)

What are affects?

• […] properties, competencies, modalities, energies, attunements, arrangements and intensities of differing texture, temporality, velocity and spatiality, that act on bodies, are produced through bodies and transmitted by bodies (Lorimer 2008, p. 2)

• Can cause events (choice of opinion or choice of action) or come as a result of events, encounters, contact zones and relations.

• Emotions [and affects] primordially function at the pre-reflexive level.’ (Simonsen, 2007, p. 176)

• Not the easiest to grasp

• Thus critizised – how is this empirical?

Everyday affects

• take place in people’s everyday lives, and not just any place…

• comes as a result of an event, or is the cause of an event.

• constitute transformative moments in people’s lives

• (often) reason people’s choices, actions

• matter and thus important to understand.

Lorimer 2008, McCormack 2003

Terms engaged to

activate «the affective» • Emotion/affect

• Performative

• Encounter

• Relations

• Practice

• Contact

• Differentiation

• Body politics

• Intensity/vitality

• Becoming other

• Childhood/adulthood

• Confronts: «conventional» notions of experience «conventional» forms of citizenship «conventional» forms of curation

Children

– openness and becoming

• “Children’s play can refuse and rework established meanings and relations” (Katz 2011, 56)

• Re-enactments can “[…] open up possibilities, to rethink, and to make new” (Bærenholdt, Haldrup, Larsen et al., 2008, 181)

• Encounters may anticipate “the possibility of facing something or somebody different.” (Simonsen 2010, 235)

• “[…] small tentative moments of inclusion, recognition and rethinking [...] matter because they enable the possibility of a more inclusive poverty politics.” (Lawson and Elwood 2014, 220)

Barn og ansvarlighet?

(medborgerskap) Liberalt medborgerskap

• Barn blir ofte behandlet som på vei til å bli voksne, og passer dårlig inn

i tradisjonelle/liberale former for medborgerskap, som tradisjonelt

fokuserer på medborgeres rettigheter og plikter (Rawls).

Medborgerskap og barn bør snarere forstås i termer av

• “Differently equal." Yuval-Davis (1999)

• Relasjonelle subjekt. Jeget oppstår i møte med steder, folk og

begivenheter.

• Children are responsive as opposed to responsible (Moosa Mitha 2005)

Barn

• Ikke nødvendigvis ansvarlige i et voksen-

perspektiv

• Men heller responsive ut fra eget ståsted

Introduction

20 min

Photo: Sigurd Nielsen 2014

Intensfications

A world at stake

Play 20 min 15 sec

Repertoires of ‘poor others’

Photo: Sigurd Nielsen 2014

A world at stake as

a relational space • Attaches

• Draws attention

• Focus

• Connects

• Encounters

• Intensifies cognition

• Offer contact zones and relations

• Create relations (with what?)

• Exchange of relations

• Interactive exchanges with the mechanical and the social

• Releases dialogues

• Plays

• Displays difference

• Releases affects

• Movements

• Unfold bodies and their positions

• These relational approaches can help us understand some of the ways A world at stake may offer disruptions and challenges to hegemonic understandings of global poverty.

Photo: Ketil Haug 2014

Photo: Ketil Haug 2014

Photo: Ketil Haug 2014

General observations of affective play

• Pupils:

• Before starting, pupils eager to initiate the game (and to be engaged and affected)

• Game initiation unfolded expectations built up through the 20 minutes primer. This energy were spent on recalling rules and performance instructions, communicating within the team,

• Stress and frustration. Pupils were aware of the time limit which intensified many team’s efforts.

• High energy level exertion

• Students rushed more than walked between tasks

• Often yelling more than talking

• Alarmingly high sound levels

Discussion

20 min

Photo: Sigurd Nielsen 2014

Aftermaths

•

•

•

•

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Implikasjoner forskning og praksis

• Hvordan ser vi på barn? Barn/voksen dikotomien

• Er museer arena for læring eller arenaer for eksperimentering? (Weibel & Latour 2007)

• Stor detaljgrad

• Konfronterer: konvensjonelle former for erfaring konvensjonelle former for medborgerskap konvensjonelle former for kuratering

• Forskningstid er knapphetsgode

• Forskningsagenda er politisk valg

• Hva bestemmer ditt bidrag til museet?

Utstillinger + publikum ny mening

• Forskning Formidling

• Formidling Forskning

Implikasjoner praksis

• Hvordan tenker vi om barn og ansvarlighet?

• Kuratere følelser og affekt?

• Rammeverk / scaffolding (Simon 2010, 2016)

• Utstillinger som eksperiment (Weibel & Latour 2007)?

• Kjennskap til

-tilgjengelig forskning (ressurser)

-forskningspraksiser

Referanser

• Anderson, B., & Harrison, P. (2010). The promise of non-representational theories. In B. Anderson & P. Harrison (Eds.), Taking Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography (pp. 1-34). Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing.

• Curti, G. H., Aitken, S. C., & Bosco, F. J. (2016). A doubly articulated cartography of children and media as affective networks-at-play. Children's Geographies, 4(2), 175-189.

• Haldrup, M., Koefoed, L., & Simonsen, K. (2006). Practical Orientalism – Bodies, Everyday Life and the Construction of Otherness. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 88(2), 173-184.

• Lorimer, H. (2008). Cultural geography: non-representational conditions and concerns. Progress in Human Geography, 32(4), 551-559.

• Olsson, L. M. (2009). Movement and experimentation in young children's learning: Deleuze and Guattari in early childhood education. London: Routledge.

• Rose, G. (2012). Visual methodologies: an introduction to researching with visual materials. Los Angeles: Sage.

• Simonsen, K. (2007). Practice, Spatiality and Embodied Emotions: An Outline of a Geography of Practice. Human Affairs, 17, 168-181.

• Simonsen, K. (2012). In quest of a new humanism: Embodiment, experience and phenomenology as critical geography. Progress in Human Geography, 37(1), 10-26.