Abandoned Practices: Online Academic Arts Study at SAIC

I will be enrolling in the 'Re·Abandoned Practices' online intensive through School of the Art Institute Chicago (SAIC) which is running 27 July - 14 August 2020.

In early 2018 I was offered a place on the MFA Performance Program at SAIC, based on a performance I presented at 'Queering/Ritual' Conference at York St John University, UK in 2017. Mark Jeffery, Associate Professor at SAIC, invited me to apply, and is so keen for me to attend he will hold a place for me indefinitely, a program that only accepts 10 students per year. 2 1/2 years later, I am still saving enough money to attend, and expect to enrol in about 5 years time (thanks COVID-19!).

In the meantime, I have been undertaking research and arts practice as and where I can, and as my work-life allows. When I found out that this summer course is being offered online and as a 3-week intensive, I was eager to participate. The course constructs itself as a weave of practices of performance, writing, installation, and documentation, with projects in varying degrees of individual and collaborative engagement. The course will operate between remote shared platforms and technologies for the sake of public safety. The instructors will deconstruct those platforms in order to imagine and actualize the creative possibilities within them. Teachers and visiting scholars will lecture on related subjects.

Re·Abandoned Practices will research and enact practices that have been disregarded in the wake of progress, relegated to the archives of history. The course does not propose that we share a mutual past, but rather that we might mutually discover a shared strategy of thinking about varied pasts, a strategy of re-imagining and re-enacting the different abandoned practices that at some time in some place defined the ordinary.

In this opportune moment, this course will ask a new set of questions. Do we accept that we must abandon the practices that we have rediscovered as provisional, to return to an unsustainable, unethical normal? Must we sacrifice reduced air travel, pedestrian streets, and the resurrected drive-in movie?

We have seen the public return of the plague doctor mask, and the private democratization of access. We witness the annihilation of scale in the frame of the screen, the microscopic virus appearing equal beside the planetary nebula. What constitutes practice now, individual and collective? What does isolation subtract from creativity, and what does it add? What renewed practices become endangered?

Instructors:

• Matthew Goulish: Writing
• Lin Hixson: Performance
• Mark Jeffery: Performance

Visiting Lecturers:

• Jorge Lucero, Artist and Associate Professor of Art Education in the School of Art = Design at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Kélina Gotman, Writer and Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies at King's College London