A Rite of Passage, Francesco Ragazzi

CRITICAL REVIEW #4 AND NOTES FOR A PUBLICATION | Francesco Ragazzi | 25.04.2018 BECOMING AN ARTISTIC RESEARCHER: A RITE OF PASSAGE TOWARDS LIMINALITY Scattered notes for a future publication.

INTRODUCTION After almost two years in the masters in “artistic research in and through film”, I realize that I have been wrong all along about what precisely it is that I was researching or doing. Enrolling in this master’s program, I thought I would learn how to use artistic approaches and techniques – film approaches and techniques, more specifically – as methods to pursue through a different perspective the interests as I had been chasing over the fifteen years of my academic life. “Film as method” as I wrote in several of my previous exams and critical reviews. While this objective is still relevant and in fact at the center of my research, what I went through instead is probably best described an anthropological, subjective and corporeal experience of transformation; a proper “rite of passage”. But, interestingly, a rite of passage that doesn’t function like regular rites of passage, because there is no fixed end to it. It took me almost two years, I am still in the middle of it, and I am likely to stay for a big longer. I use this space to write down a few preliminary thoughts for a future publication. I would therefore like to present this longer than usual critical review also as a draft for an auto-ethnographic academic publication about artistic research as a method for the social sciences. The intended audience for this text is thus primarily scholars who are not filmmakers or visual artists. #1 THE RITE OF SEPARATION. Doing things wrong I spent my first year in the master’s program being described by my instructors and my fellow students as “the academic” or “too academic”, a way to distinctively signify that I wasn’t behaving as an “artist” or an “artistic researcher”. While it was natural and light in the beginning, it started taking a toll after a few months, to the point that I had to open myself to the group about it. My first though was: “artistic research”, contrarily to what its name had suggested to me, is not a place for academic researchers to learn about artistic methods – it’s a place for selfcategorized “artists” to do something they call “research” – no matter what that precisely is. Fair enough. I wasn’t an artist per my credentials – I had directed a few documentary films, but none of them could be categorized as “artistic” or particularly “avant-garde”. Most of my professional life had instead been dedicated to a relatively straightforward academic career: research masters in political science at the Institute of Political Science in Paris, doctorate in Paris and in Chicago, assistant professor position in Leiden.

Yet I didn’t understand why I was considered so “academic”: I was trying as hard as anyone else to complete the different assigned exercises, surely with less skill and craft than people who were used to shoot and edit by themselves – but I didn’t think that those were necessary attributes that needed to be mastered by a director. I was, after all, experimenting, putting clips on a timeline, and churning out small exercise films like the others. It could have been called “bad filmmaking”. It was called “academic”, in a binary opposition set up as “not academic/good” and “academic/bad”. That seemed quite irritating to me in a program that claimed to do research. For the first entire year of the program, none of the films I was producing seemed to be well received by my peers or by the instructors.

I was “thinking logically, not emotionally”. I wanted to “privilege text over image”. I was doing things wrong.

Wasn’t this precisely the point of the masters, I thought, to experiment? Why am I consistently told, albeit implicitly, that I am doing things “wrong”? While I was told to “feel free”; to stop “being constrained by my own mental barriers”– which I thought I was doing – I was more often than not receiving polite and embarrassed feedback to my work. None of my strategies worked. “Not personal enough” when I tried to do something close to what I had envisioned, some form of conceptual/visual experiment; “incomprehensible” when I tried to do something “artistic” and “abstract” which I secretly hoped would make “them” happy. Personal? What is meant by that? It was clear to me that the point was not to use the master’s program as a the opportunity for psychotherapy, so what precisely was I supposed to access and to show? Were Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, or Johan Grimonprez personal in their work? It seemed to me that these artists were exploring complex questions of representation, power, politics. Why did they have the right to do that and be considered artistic, but not me? I was confused, frustrated and disappointed. I seemed to be constantly misunderstanding what was being asked from me.

At the end of the first academic year, despite the adversity, I stubbornly presented a film project which I thought would be a good working laboratory for my long term goal of integrating film methods in my academic practice as a scholar of international politics. It had to do with my concerns for the increased securitization of contemporary global 1

politics, focusing in particular on how technologies claiming to predict the future come to govern our present, increasingly curtailing our civil liberties and severely undermining our democratic societies (see exam 3 for more detail). This project has not materialized, but this is precisely what triggered the beginning of my initiation and my process of transformation. This is where I understood why I had been doing things wrong, and how I could take a different direction.

Rites of passage As it appears clearly to me now, the main problem resided in the fact that I was refusing to enter the rite of passage, the “conversion” to artistic research. Since the seminal work of Arnold van Gennep, anthropologists have shown that the passage from childhood to adulthood, from apprentice to master or from unbeliever to believer happens through what are called “rites of passage”. The ceremonial events are necessary for societies to sanction the passage from one social status to another. Rites of passage are traditionally understood to be divided in three moments: separation, liminality and re-incorporation (see fig.1).

Figure 1. A Rite of Passage's Basic Spatio-Temporal Structure. (Source Tomas 2013, based on Leach 1976)

The first phase of the rite, the separation, is necessary so that the group can signify to the person being initiated that their old self must “die” in order to be reborn. This is specifically important in order to make sure those who need to be initiated won’t carry their “old self” (as children, as unbelievers, as uninitiated) into their new role. From inhabitants of the Amazon to differentiated societies living on the shores of the Amstel, social groups – no matter how progressive or advanced – have indeed generally a hard time accepting ambiguous social identities when related to the group they primarily identify with : the artistic field, for example, has no problems accepting ambiguous sexual, gender, or national identities, but the line of what constitutes “art” and who can be considered an “artist” are certainly shifting and contested, but nonetheless symbolically militarized zones.

What I had been doing wrong for the most part of year one of the program became evident: I had been blind to the invitations to enter the rite of passage necessary for my acceptance into the group of artistic researchers. I hadn’t been willing to “kill” my academic identity in order to be re-born into an academic researcher. I stubbornly tried to remain an academic. This entailed two intertwined aspects.

The first one is probably the most obvious one, because it was also the one that all the instructors and students could point their fingers to with ease. It related to what can broadly be called the nature of my artistic practice. As it became evident throughout the workshops, even though I had directed and produced some documentary films in the past, in fact, I had directed them as an academic. In other words, there was something specific about a certain type of film practice that I had been missing: I wasn’t thinking through film but on top of film, I was putting images and sound to the service of words, I wasn’t letting myself be guided by the material, I was using film as illustration of an academic discourse that could exist by itself. What was expected of me was thus to “un-learn” this approach in order to give way to the emergence of an “artistic” practice. This implied being ready to operate a certain numbers of shifts and 2

translations, but most of all it implied acknowledging what the true nature of the problem had been so far: According to the group, I hadn’t been doing “bad films”. I hadn’t been doing films, at all. I had been doing video-illustrated academic articles. This is probably the main reason that my instructors and my fellow students they will easily acknowledge.

There is, however in my view a second aspect of the problem that is probably more subtle, and which might be more difficult to accept for people from the film school, because it is less tangible and subject to interpretation (and also probably because no one likes to be treated as an object of anthropological analysis). But this is probably why it took me some time to understand and recognize it. While I had implicitly asked the group to recognize my position as that of a fellow “artistic researcher” in fact, for reasons linked to both my actual practice (described above) and my social position, I was been confined to the role of “academic researcher trying to do art”. If I wanted to access the recognition of being an “artistic researcher” I had accept to undertake the rite of initiation; the first phase of which is “separation”. In other words, the first step of the initiation was not only learning how “to do films” (in their, not my vision of film) but also recognizing my condition as a “non-initiated” who needed to accept to “kill” its social status as an academic. In other words, I was not being allowed to carry with me my “academic” social status; if I wanted to enter the ritual, I had to commit a symbolic “social suicide”. This symbolic death – be it temporary – could only be performed by an engagement in a radically anti-academic practice, i.e. something that would prove to the group that I had indeed stopped clinging – at least for the time of the initiation – to my social status as a scholar. Learning how to do films meant thinking like a filmmaker, but it also meant proving that I was ready to temporary “kill” my academic self. #2 THE RITE OF MARGIN: SUBJECTIVITY AND LIMINALITY1 Regardless of how frustrated I was and how hard I tried in the first year to gain the recognition of my peers, the turning point of my trajectory happened in great part due to a situation that I hadn’t planned or wished for. As I concluded year one and set out for a week of holidays, I arrived emotionally and physically drained in Italy, at my parents place, where I had planned to take headquarters for the summer writing and film research. A full year of working at the university and following the masters lectures and workshops had taken a toll. I was not able to write, send emails, nor plan anything. Instead, I was feeling the urge to film my parents, and my father more particularly.

In the first days of October of 2016, in the very first months of the master’s, I had received an urgent call from Turin.

My father had had a heart attack in the middle of the night, my mother had spent the entire night in the hospital, not knowing whether he would recover. My brother and I urgently flew to Italy. My father spent an entire week in intensive care, and made it through.

Eight months later, I was with them again, this time in our summer house in the countryside nearby Turin. And while I had repeatedly wanted to film them, this summer it acquired a new urgency. I thus stopped thinking about project #1 – the one I had presented at the end of the first year, and started embarking, without knowing it, in project #2, a film about my father and my relationship with him, which ended up being also a project about filmmaking. Like every child whose parents suddenly appear to be getting one step closer to death, it dawned on me that all of this can be very fragile and can disappear very quickly.

Project #2: Killing the “academic” approach to film The initial impetus for the film about my father is the opposite from film project #1. It doesn’t start from a conceptual reflexion, nor about a conscious choice to be working for the master’s - but from an urgent and primary need to record time with him. My initial idea was to create a film that would have as an audience primarily us, my brother, my parents and myself. Maybe at some point my children – if I have some in the future. It would be a way for us to remember him and for them to get to know who is was and what kind of person he is. I had no idea where to start.

So we discussed about what to do, and I thought a good place to start would be to record his memories of the house in the countryside where we were, and where he spent his first years during World War II. I borrowed some lights, and created a very formal interview setting.

Very quickly, I understood that this was not working. My father was lecturing, talking as if there was a broad audience.

We recorded a first time. I was frustrated, I wanted him to show his natural, and always humorous personality. Instead, I was obtaining a lecture with no emotion or interest. I interrupted the recording a few times, asking to change his tone.

Of course that didn’t work. Retrospectively, it could not work: the setting was formal, the request was impersonal. I was receiving exactly what I was creating – and in fact it was something I would never do with characters for a

1

This section draws in part from the critical review written for exam #3

3

documentary that I would meet for the first time. But because I knew my father so well, I thought I could skip all the other steps. Of course, I couldn’t. I tried to have a second interview. And finally a third interview. At the end of the third interview, I maybe caught some glimpses of authenticity, but really little.

I thus opted for a new strategy: I would ask my father to show me around the house, and in particular the wine cellar, where his father used to make wine with the help of the local agricultural workers. I was recording with a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera: a camera that can record very high quality video, but is known for terrible battery life, and terrible audio pre-amps. I this used a dual audio system: low quality audio in the camera – for reference, and external audio in a separate recorder. As it’s generally done in these situations, the audio is turned on in the beginning of the shoot and turned off at the end of the entire shoot. The camera, instead, only records a limited number of shots, partly to save the battery, partly to avoid huge files. I thus recorded individual shots, and audio of the shots and between the shots. The filming in the cellar was slightly more interesting than the sit down interview, because at least I was recording some useful information about how wine was made in the house – I heard this explanation a few dozen times, but never remembered the technical terms, the exact procedure – and I was glad I now finally had it so I could remember it in the future. As the filming continued, ideas developed.

Accepting to enter the “liminal space” of artistic research practice As I started reviewing the material, I realized that something interesting was happening. While the film I intended to shoot was more or less coming as I expected – a plain, simple and relatively harmless little home movie – the dual audio system set up was capturing all the conversations we were having between the shots. I discovered myself as an aggressive, annoying and presumptuous son/director, insecure and impatient. My father, on the other hand, was understanding, slightly ironic, but mostly patient and willing to follow all the orders I was curtly giving him. I realized I had recorded material that could be telling another story than the very confidential film I had initially planned: that of a inexpert director, trying to make a film about his father, unable to obtain what he wants.

As the holiday came to a close, I didn’t review the material until I presented it to the group and to the tutors. After presenting what I had done during the summer to my fellow researchers, as well as to the different mentors of the master’s I saw a change in their approach to my material. I was encouraged to work on the editing of the film. I asked Albert Elings, who had been one of our tutors in the first year, to help me edit the film – as well as to act as my external mentor. We reviewed the material, and Albert looked perplexed. As I thought he was trying to announce me in a nice way that he thought there was no film there – he in fact told me he saw a third film in there: a film about a son filming his father because of the fear of his death.

Artistic research as a point of view, as a craft and as a social practice Set to work on the film about my father, I felt my initiation was starting, both in my film practice and in the eyes of the students and instructors around me. The responses to the few materials I was screening were radically opposed to the few exercises I had shown the year before. The project I presented in the third exam was well received. I was suddenly receiving the support and approval of my peers. I was starting the “induction”. This went hand in hand with a change of perspective about what my practice as a filmmaker, or “artistic researcher” should be.

In the tradition of anthropological literature on rites of passage, the liminal phase is the one that constitutes the moment of transformation per se. What is interesting for this review, is that the processes of learning (to be an adult, to be a doctor, to be a sorcerer) and the process of becoming accepted socially (an adult, a doctor, a sorcerer) are in fact intertwined, and almost indistinguishable. The liminal phase is precisely the moment in which one will enable the other: because skills are acquired, the status can change, and conversely because the status changes, new skills can be legitimately exercised. The liminal phase is a phase of the ritual in which the candidate of the ritual is neither before or after. She/he is in the middle.

In this critical review, the emphasis I put on social acceptance, change of social status and rite of initiation is only partly meant to be read as a playful take on (auto)ethnographic practice and writing. Indeed, in my experience, the social and institutional pressures, which end up generating feelings of frustration, humiliation, rejection, but also motivation, valorisation and ultimately acceptance are, like in no other educational experience, part of the constitution of the artistic researchers’ subjectivity and therefore fundamental to the evolution of their practice. If what distinguishes the arts from the sciences is the engagement with the realm of emotions, feelings and perceptions, the corporeal processes resulting from the social rejection/inclusion into the group cannot be slept under the rug as if it was a negligible, byproduct of art education. This bodily social process of initiation, which reveals itself in moments of desperation, feeling lost, feeling useless, but also feeling supported, praised and accepted, i.e. the emotional phases of the rite of passage are part and parcel of a pedagogic/initiatory process which requires the researcher (especially if she/he comes from academia, like me) to start focusing on how they put their individual, corporeal subjectivity to the service of the production of artistic research. In other words: what I call the “rite of passage” and what I have described as the evolution of “how to make films” through an artistic research perspective an intimately intertwined, and cannot, in 4

actuality, be analysed separately: Focusing purely on the constitution of subjectivity and the artistic practice itself would risk falling into a reductionism praising values such as “talent”, “vision” or “sensibility” as it they were not themselves the product of social conditioning (during, or prior to the master’s); on the other hand focusing exclusively on the social process, as an anthropologist who wouldn’t know how to make films would probably do, risks falling into a socially deterministic perspective, which risks then either fetishizing the artistic practice as an esoteric practice (because not practiced and thus not understood), or downplaying the actual acquisition of a different perspective, technique and set of skills.

Artistic research and film as a method: notes on the practice itself.

If project #2 is a film, it is, in the framework of the broader initiation to the world of artistic research, the process of making through which I have evolved in how I respond to a set of questions, such as “what constitutes an interesting artistic research question?”; “What are the relevant film methods and techniques that can be mobilized to explore facets of the question?”; and perhaps more importantly, “How does an artistic research approach complement, or enter in dialogue with other forms of knowledge production, such as, in my case, more established methods of social scientific research (ethnography, discourse analysis, statistics)?”. Project #2 has thus (and still is) the process through which I can to test many of the ideas I have been maturing in the last months, as well as a way to incorporate the unexpected in my film practice. I started the research looking for the ways in which film could be used as a “method”.

Yet I came to realize that “thinking through film” cannot be accomplished without incorporating, embodying, practicing the filming gaze and approach.

As it may have appeared more clearly in the last paragraphs, my re-visited research question has thus become: how to acquire and embody a cinematographic subjectivity with the purpose of research? From a research question centred around the narrow question of method, it has transformed into a question of my relationship to choosing a subject, approaching it and making sense of it, a process that is ultimately connected to a bodily experience of transformation resulting from the rite of passage. I try in what follows, possibly in a clumsy way, to draw out the points that have been personally important to my research me in the process so far, and which I think can inform a broader reflexion on the importance and the use of artistic research for the social sciences2.

1. Framing and motivating artistic research If we are to broaden social enquiry – that is to say, maybe in the broadest possible sense the analysis of why and how people behave in society – to include artistic research in the range of available ways to bring to an experience and/or a comprehension of the social then the key question is when does it make sense to “do” artistic research as opposed to ethnographic, textual or quantitative work? Here three points are worth highlighting.

•

•

A first consideration is probably: does this question require to be a film? Can fully exist just as a book or an article? Or, do the various characteristics of film as a specific medium respond to a need to visualize, hear, perceive, interpret phenomena that would otherwise be difficult to communicate to a viewer? I am not making any judgement of value here about film as an “objective method” of audibilization and visualization, but simply about the fact that this should be the starting point of the research. It is clear for example, that my initial project #1 about future prediction was a conceptual idea that did not comprise from the beginning a filmic dimension, and I didn’t succeed in finding the visual point of entry.

The second consideration which lies at the core of artistic research is subjectivity as an explicit starting point.

In my case, two elements were particularly important: First, urgency/immediacy as motivation. Choosing do to a film of its personal importance has been a very different experience than choosing a subject because of my curiosity or intellectual interest. It became a visceral need, and reoriented the research around how to best express this urgency. It therefore provided me with a compass grounded in emotional need rather than conceptual logic. Choosing a subject matter that interests me first, and wondering only afterwards whether it could be interesting for a broader audience has also been a change of perspective. Working on a project such as this one allows me to experience, through my own perception, the type of emotional alleys that I could be sharing with an audience. The personal becomes again a resource which can be tapped into in order to think about the orientation of the material.

In what follows, I cannot distinguish precisely anymore the thoughts that emerged from my own practice which I then found brilliantly formulated in other author’s books and the thoughts that I gathered in the same books and then looked for in my practice. In any case, the following points are heavily if not in most part informed by the reading of, among others, : Van Lancker L (2012) Experiencing Cultures.

Ph.D. Thesis: Hogeschool Gent,. Gent (Belgium); David MacDougal (2006) The Corporeal Image. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Minhha TT The Totalizing Quest of Meaning; Taylor L (1996) Iconophobia 69: 64–88.

2

5

•

Finally, I think that one cannot exclude that artistic research is not only an endeavor aimed at the production of knowledge, it is also geared at the production of an experience; of disgust, fear, contempt, rage or pleasure. At the core of the project of artistic research is therefore also the idea that feeling and experiencing are part and parcel of the experience of knowing, that the two cannot be separated. Experiencing through art produces thus another type of knowledge that enriches the broader process of understanding.

2. Film as a method of data gathering/production: Artistic research is a specific way to make knowledge available for the analysis, what positivists in the social sciences would define as “data gathering”, and which is probably more accurately described, in line with filmmakers – who are generally more aware than social scientists of the construction nature knowledge/images – “data production” (Interestingly, the phase of “data” collection for social scientists corresponds almost symmetrically for the period of “production” for filmmakers).

•

•

•

The project #2 has allowed me to ask my father questions that I would probably never had the opportunity, or the occasion of asking, if not in other specific circumstances. If a project consists in original interviews and/or observation, the camera is a specific enabler of knowledge: I learned things that I would not have learned otherwise, and I learned them only because of a specific technical context that required recording image and sound for the purpose of producing a film. Artistic research is thus a specific form of gaining access, but also establishing a technologically mediated relation to a subject – in this case my father.

Furthermore, the finality of the research – in this case making a film – is an additional way to motivate the participation to the research. The film The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer) is for example a good illustration of how the project of making a film renders available knowledge and information about mass murder that would probably not be possible to produce through other contexts.

Finally, ideas emerge out of the practice of filming itself. While this aspect has been clear to me from the start of the process, as a lab of experimentation the film with my father has provided multiple examples of how the practice of filming has allowed me to derive artistic choices. The idea of the portrait in the house emerged out of the failure of the interview. The idea of the film about the film emerged out of the technical process of recording dual-audio. The idea of working through humor to narrate the relationship with my father has emerged out of the inabilities to obtain what I wanted through the initially planned filmed.

3. Film as a method of data analysis My initial moment of revelation had been in an tutor meeting with Laurent van Lancker, at the end of year 1, in which for the first time I understood practically what is meant to edit through the content of the images, and not, as I was doing before, as an illustration of a superimposed meaning. Working “hands on” on my film with Albert Elings, that is to say, as an experiment, but with the serious finality of showing the film to an audience, let me do the following considerations.

•

•

•

Editing is a method of data analysis because it works as a form of “structured improvisation” (I borrow this term from Laurent van Lancker’s reading of Bourdieu). Contrarily to writing which means assembling and articulating meaning; editing functions through the preparation of the audio-visual material so that meaning can be attributed by the viewer. Yet what precisely will emerge from these juxtapositions is never entirely fully fixed, and the meaning that can be attributed to it, while it can be directed, can never be fully anticipated.

On the one hand the improvisation is “structured”, because as editors say “the material wants”, the material “talks back”. In a language borrowed from the work of Science and Technology Studies and in particular the work of Bruno Latour, there is an “agency” of the film material that constrains the editor and the director to take into account the limited possibilities of organizing and assembling the film clips on the timeline. On the other, it is a structured “improvisation” because no-one can be entirely sure of what precise meaning will emerge from the juxtaposition of clips and sequences. The same images in a different order can come to mean very different things. In the film I present in this exam for example, in a first editing of the film the short black and white animation is used to signify the passage of time. In a second edit of the film, the short animation functions as a metaphor for the heart attack of my father.

This means that editing is a process through which meaning is not only constructed (in the traditional sense of “montage”) but in fact is produced and discovered. The act of discovering meaning through editing is probably what makes it most appealing as a method (this aspect is for example one of the limits of the metaphor of the “camera-pen” (Astruc): writing does not work with such symbolically charged building blocs as its “construction material”) 6

4. Film as a method of presentation: Any edit of a film works finally of course as the method of diffusion of the research. Here lies the key question of the status and the possible choices that are left to the artistic researcher on how to combine the two antithetic aspects of film: “showing” and “telling”.

•

•

In my film project about my father, one of the work with the editor has been to remove that which appears as too obvious, too “on the nose”. Film practice, as opposed to academic practice requires the active participation of the viewer in the process of experimenting the film3. What space is therefore left for conceptual reflexion? Is film the antithesis of analysis, as the anthropologists reviewed critically by Lucien Castaign-Taylor (1996) claim? While this question is at the core of most of the debates in visual anthropology it is also a key practical question that every artistic researcher and filmmaker faces: how much should I tell, how much should I show? How much can I remove until the film becomes incomprehensible?

Here I see an avenue for further experimentation – just as Harun Farocki did in his work, which oscillated between films that “showed” and films that “told” – and exploring the possibilities offered by the different articulations of showing and meaning. Viewers can be “primed”, then shown a more or less wordless experience. Or they can be shown a film without any context – the context being given somewhere else, as part of an installation, as part of a book, or a website.

5. Artistic research as a critical practice of collective authorship As the process of editing has led me to realize, and to the risk of stating the obvious - no matter how autocratic or horizontal in its organization, any project of artistic research is a process of what could be defined as “assembled authorship”: the subject, the camera person, the editor and all the other professions that make it possible to produce a film have an imprint on its final production (a scholar of Science and Technology Studies would add as having authorship: the camera, the editing software, the projector…). This fundamentally destabilizes the author fetishism of the social sciences (in particular the postmodern, cultural criticism version) which in many respect mirrors the author fetishism of the auteur cinema. Artistic research, as a collective form of authorship means destabilizing concepts of “talent”, “gift”, “vision” for a more socially informed selfunderstanding of its practice. This means that “artistic research”, when conducted within an academic field should not aim at being self-sustaining, but should instead look at its practice as the opportunity for various forms of collaboration. I come back to the articulation between the practice and the social conditions of practice of artistic research in the final section below. #3 THE RITE OF REINCORPORATION: SETTLING IN LIMINALITY Settling nowhere, settling in between.

Traditionally, rites of passage result, after the first phase of detachment, and the second phase of liminality, in a third phase of reincorporation into the established social order: the student/child/apprentice has become a graduate/adult/master and can thus incorporate the productive society in her/his new role. The moment of suspended ambiguity comes to an end and the social order can be re-established.

I would like to suggest in this last section that the characteristic of artistic research, because of its currently specific historical position located between fields (of art practice, of art history, of film and cinema, of the social sciences), doesn’t allow the artistic researcher to leave the condition of liminality. There is no easy re-incorporation of the apprentice artistic researcher into an established, socially recognized profession of “artistic researcher”, like say a medical student becomes a doctor, or a PhD student becomes a professor. Because while there might be a multiplicity of techniques, skills, methods and points of view developed in the liminal phase of initiation – as described in the section above – there is no social counter-part to this craft to fall back into. The social category of “artistic researcher” does not exist with the same social currency as that of artist, filmmaker or academic. This very well illustrated in the attempt of the master’s program to bring these categories into existence through the replacement of the label “students” with “artistic researchers”. While the intention and the symbolic benefits of this are clear, the administrative staff, the pedagogic team and the students themselves inevitably at one point or another fall back to the more established categories of “students” and “teachers”. Not because they are against the new label, but simply because it takes more than a change of name to make a social category come into existence: it takes symbolic recognitions (diplomas, festivals, awards), an institutional and social approval (a career, a job, a salary), and a certain historicity.

3

What Laurent van Lancker calls in PhD Dissertation the « triadic » relation between the film subject, the filmmaker and the film audience.

7

Artistic research is instead young, and in the making. It is itself in a liminal stage. So what to do with that? How to move forward?

At this point the question becomes two-fold. It becomes first a question related to the evolution of this relatively young field called artistic research and its relation to the currently political economy of (a) higher education (art academies vs universities) and (b) cultural production on the other (Is it art? Cinema? Research?). A serious discussion of the individual trajectories of the “master’s in artistic research in and through film” graduates cannot leave this question aside. This specific liminal condition of the field itself strongly determines the professional (understood as both getting a job, and being recognized for one’s work) possibilities of future “artistic researchers”. I leave it however to the side in this critical review, in order to focus on the second question, which is that of the question of what precisely are the possible individual choices for the artistic researchers coming out of this rite of passage, including mine.

There are, in my view, a range of possibilities. The first, most comfortable one is of course to seek reincorporation somewhere else. One can ignore or feel overwhelmed by the state of liminality offered by the master’s, and decide to settle into one of the more established categories. For the most part, it means pursuing a “regular” artistic or film career; for me it would be going “back” to being an academic or, encouraged by my positive experience of the last year, abandon my academic career to become a full-time filmmaker. This would however mean the failure of the initiation. While it would ease the recognition from the outside world – being an “academic” or a “filmmaker” doing disciplinarily sanctioned research or regularly produced films is both reassuring for the outside “non-initiated” group of friends and colleagues as well as for the artistic researcher in search of a stabilized social status.

The more risky, challenging and time-consuming alternative route is however to embrace liminality as the process of reincorporation itself. While it is likely the most difficult position to hold and sustain in the long run, it is also likely the more rewarding professionally and personally. A way to find a fruitful mobilization of the experience of the masters could thus be accepting to settle in liminality, to accept that the end of the rite of passage is that of pursuing indefinitely the moment of passage. That is to say, the artistic researcher should thus precisely be the one of the hybrid, the heterodox, the patchwork, the un-classified and un-categorized practice. How does that look in practice?

Three possible strategies to navigate liminality I will graduate from the master’s with a finished or almost finished film. The film will be approximately 30min long, for an audience that doesn’t know anything about it, it will be about a son and his father, and how making a film together might (or might not) have brought them closer. What next? What to do now with this? How does it connect to a broader project of working with artistic research in the field of the social sciences? While I don’t have a precise answer to these questions, I broadly see three strategies to navigate liminality. I don’t see them necessarily as mutually exclusive, in fact they can be pragmatically deployed in various stages of a broader project. I rank them from “weak” to “strong” liminal practices.

1) The first, probably weakest strategy could be defined as segmentation. One can have an academic practice, an artistic practice, and keep them separated, or at least in part separated. Not all productions are destined at the same audience, and that’s fine, it is in fact what I have been doing until now: an academic (my primary activity) doing occasionally documentary films more or less related to each other. Very little is however gained in terms of the relations that could be established between both practices, which is precisely the reason why I started this masters in the first place. It should therefore be seen as a strategy of last resort.

2) The second, middle-way, but much stronger strategy could be defined as the interdisciplinary strategy, understood as discrete practices that are rooted in their established fields, but brought in dialogue. It can relate to forms of curatorial work (bringing heterogeneous bodies of film, photographs, text together) or the actual production of multiple original works, a “multi-method” approach of the sorts. It stems from the idea that multiple methodologies, thus different kind of “knowledge approaches” will produce multiple and thus complementary representations of given social phenomena. This strategy has the advantage of letting each project live in its social field (a film recognized by film festivals and filmmakers; an academic book recognized by other academics through peer-review), but through the act of organizing their finality within one project, it orientates the reflexion towards the similarities, but also gaps, tensions and dissonances that emerge between the different artistic and research practices. In an imaginary world in which they didn’t already exist, one could decide, for example, to explore Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem by setting out to both write Arendt’ The Banality of Evil and direct Sivan’s A Specialist, or to commission both projects to both thinkers/directors with the idea of learning from the encounter between these two different renderings of the trial.

This approach can of course be carried out by a single individual, but lends itself more naturally to collective projects as heterogeneous practices can enter in discussion not only once finished, but more importantly over the course of their writing, filming and editing.

3) The third avenue which we could call the multi-positioned strategy refers to the pedagogic or research practices that are able to position themselves as legitimate practices in different social worlds, such as academia, art, cinema or international law. This is certainly the strongest proposition for artistic research, but it is also the hardest to achieve.

8

This is what projects like Goldsmith’s Forensic Architecture or Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab have managed to produce: a film like Leviathan is considered as both a piece of great cinema and a ground-breaking piece of ethnographic research. Projects produced in the framework of Forensic Architecture are considered both for their artistic value (selection at Documenta, Biennale di Venezia, Rotterdam Film Festival, etc.) and for their value of evidence in high-profile national and international cases (the Grenfell Tower Fire, the Iuventa, etc.). Of course, the interdisciplinary and multi-positioned strategy are not mutually exclusive, and often multi-positioned projects are the result of interdisciplinary collaborations, but interdisciplinary collaborations are generally composed of projects that are firmly geared at one single audience.

CONCLUSION If everything goes well, June 2018 should mark the end of my formal participation to this master’s program. But it will certainly not be the end of the process I started in September 2016 when I enrolled. I might been soon no longer a “student”, but I am far from having completed my rite of passage. I have instead collected questions and approaches that I am eager to continue exploring as an “artistic researcher”.

9