Editorial

Rehearsing agency

Annelys de Vet

“Agency emerges from the capacity to make informed decisions, born in understanding constraints, recognizing implications, and accepting responsibility for outcomes,” writes Simona Kicurovska in her plea for “Making space for trust”. For me, these words capture what connects the contributions gathered in this issue: they present pedagogical practices as rehearsals for agency; as spaces to exercise imagination, appropriate existing tools, invent new ones, and set situated conditions. Across the articles, it becomes clear that these “rehearsal spaces” are particularly fruitful not within but around the curriculum: workshops, winter schools, international collaborations, and self-organized initiatives function as laboratories for developing pedagogical and research methods. Özgür Ilter and Allan Siegel argue that at a time when higher education faces growing demands for curricular standardization, art education needs to respond by reimagining its pedagogical strategies. It is these ‘around’-sites where alternative approaches are actively rehearsed, tested, and developed. They are spaces where new – and, as the articles will demonstrate, essential – forms of knowledge and methods are fostered.

This issue opens with eight case studies that explore the nexus between education and research, stemming from the collaborative project Landscape Sketch: Artistic Research in Flanders. Initiated by Assia Bert, the project brings together the eight Flemish Schools of Arts in a collective inquiry into artistic research and education, drawing on the specific practices and contexts of each institution to identify broader tendencies across the field. Across these practices, a shift in attention emerges: the focus is less on what is produced than on what kinds of relations, encounters, and forms of knowledge become possible. The outcome is not necessarily the artistic 'work' itself, but rather a prompt, score, script, tool, or programme – a reason to gather, experiment, look differently, enter into conversation, or develop new tools.

All authors in this issue offer truly inspiring examples from within their own practice in which learning, making art, and researching become inseparable. Their situated accounts activate performance as a means of self-exploration (Yuki Okumura); pass on decoloniality through the arts (Laura Nsengiyumva); or suggest contamination as an act of survival (Rosine Mbakam). What stands out are the collective practices like those of Frederik De Bleser, Cèlia Tort Pujol, Myrthe Bokelmann and Lieven Menschaert, who use embodied practices to re-appropriate AI software to gain agency. Yaohan Zhang, Yujing Ma, and Marcel Zaes Sagesser create open-ended informal “low-fi” mediascapes as a contrast to top-down grand narratives of high-tech development in Shenzhen. The dispersed group of curators, based in different geographies (Clementine Butler-Gallie, Kwasi Darko, Luamba Muinga, Nisha Merit, LiLi Nacht and Sofía Steinvorth) trace the often-ephemeral intersections with ‘prompts’. Muinga marched through the Angolan city of Luanda, where his photography allowed a walk to unfold serendipitously – captured on the cover of this issue of FORUM+.

Across these very different practices, a particular value comes into focus: the importance of having the time, space, and trust to wonder, to drift (Ilter, Siegel), to enter a “third space” (Butler-Gallie), to thinker (Billiet). The terms may differ, but they point towards a similar condition: an undefined, yet unknown space in which we can respond to what surrounds us, allowing ourselves to be affected by a place, a situation, or an encounter, and to transform in response. It is within this space that makers, artists, educators, and researchers can develop their own questions, frameworks, prompts, and conditions – against the standardization and consumption promoted by technological systems, markets, and institutions.

The contributions demonstrate, each in their own way – and as far as I’m concerned, in a truly special, personal, and meaningful way – that pedagogy can be a rehearsal for agency, artistic research a practice of collective world-making, and education a space to learn not only what to think, but how to make the conditions for thinking together. These often longer-term trajectories create temporary communities in which knowledge is not simply delivered but collectively produced, inhabited, and transformed. This is difficult to capture in conventional academic language. FORUM+ acknowledges this often immaterial research: to reflect on it, make it shareable, and bring it into conversation with others. We create a scholarly framework on our own terms – not by adapting artistic research to pre-existing academic conventions, but by allowing the frameworks themselves to be shaped, questioned, and expanded through artistic practice.

The capacity to imagine alternatives, to create our own tools, to build communities around shared values is under increasing pressure. This is why I consider FORUM+ such an important platform at this moment in time: an open space to rehearse a plurality of practices that are often sensitive, situated, embodied, and vulnerable; by making them available for exchange across a broader artistic research community. It is with this conviction that I have taken on the role of co-editor-in-chief. I feel fortunate to develop this platform further together with a remarkably professional, sensitive, and generous team – and to nurture FORUM+ as a space where artistic research can remain unpredictable, situated and, above all, capable of fostering space and trust for artistic agency.

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Annelys de Vet

co-editor-in-chief, FORUM+