Performance of Ephemeral Sustainabilities – a paradox and a creative venture that allows for and requires speculative and utopian energies.
Members of the group perceive embodiment and de-distancing as important vehicles for the exploration of knowledge (and our somatic toolkit and semiotic wisdom), both from the inside and in our entangled relationship to ecological and political environments. Our group seeks to drive research projects that also link intimately to our teaching and pedagogical philosophies, aimed at reconfiguring the relation between practices of inquiry in the human sciences and the forms of knowledge to which they give rise.
One of our fundamental premises is that knowledge is not created through an encounter between minds furnished with concepts and theories, and a material world already populated with objects, but grows from the crucible of our practical and observational engagement with the multi-cellular world around us, Thus performative knowledge comes from thinking with, from and through beings and things, not just about them. Our overall aim is to show how research underpinned by this premise could make a difference to the ephemeral sustainability of environmental relations and to the well-being that depends on it. The research thus also needs inquiries into what constitutes, and who or what owns, public spaces and outdoor off sites. We plan "off site" performances.
We also very strongly advocate a new cooperation between teacher-researchers and student researchers and create a more open, shared platform of rowing upstream together.