Between the 11th and 17th of September I had the pleasure of being in residency at radical_house in Ixelles, Brussels, to begin a trajectory of participatory artistic research that I'll be working on over the next eight months.
I've been organising messing on and off since 2016, in Dublin, and later Ghent and Brussels, as a loose framework for experimental group improvisation. Initially the sessions were very informal, a chance to play around with things without a set goal. It was also the best way I could personally imagine to hang out with friends and meet new creative people. I say experimental because a big part of it was adapting and inventing and trying out scores for improvising. A lot of the joy of it came from delving into a curiosity or idea from someone else's brain.
That genre of joy has driven a lot of the projects I've done over the years, as well as a desire to create artistic platforms for diverse practices and practitioners, professionalised or otherwise. Which makes me very excited to be able to spend some focused time researching what I am calling IDIO-AESTHETICS. This is my word to talk about the fact that everyone has their own aesthetic preferences, sensitivities and curiosities. That is, artistic interest in different kinds of sensory input, be it visual, tactile, proprioceptive, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, kinesthetic etc.
Over the coming months, I will be leading participatory performance-based research with various constellations of collaborators in Dublin and Brussels, where we will test out different possible routes of creative exploration within and between our own idio-aesthetics, and based on the research develop a framework for experimental improvisation for a mixed group (of artists and non-artists, whatever those are). A messing 2.0 if you will.
I'm very much looking forward to working again with clients and staff from Headway Ireland on this, and for the first time with young people from Toop/Sint-Francsicus vzw in Brussels in a proeftuin/lab supported by Lasso vzw. I'm grateful to be able to undertake this research thanks to an Arts Participation Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland and mentoring support from artists Gemma Gallagher and Heike Langsdorf/radical_house.
Big thanks to all at radical_house and the friends and peers who visited me in the residency to think (+ play + share): Betül Güven, Sam Steyaert, Aya Khedairi, Callum Bateson, Miksi Bee and Merel Stolker. Thanks also to all the messers; past, present and future.
