Open call: Living Methodologies - SOLU / Bioart Society

Field_Notes – Living Methodologies responds to shifts in the field of art and science insisting that how we research matters. Engaging with specific sites via a range of methodological approaches has been vital to previous Field_Notes; building on past iterations, this feral field lab attends to the methodologies themselves. Methods carry ethical and political weight; methods are not simply instruments to be selected at will, but practices that have consequences for the relationships, bodies, materials and knowledge systems they engage with. They demand attentiveness to context, accountability to the beings and environments involved, and an openness to being shaped by the process itself. Rather than treating methods as extractive or universally applicable, they require a commitment to ongoing negotiation, care, and responsiveness, resisting the tendency to instrumentalise knowledge for convenience or efficiency. How do fieldwork encounters call us into ethical relationships with the lives—human, more-than-human, material—that they engage? How might we rethink “data” in ways that honor the complexities of lived, entangled field experiences? How do we cultivate methods that emerge through lived, embodied experience rather than imposing external research logics? What kinds of practices, commitments, and collaborations enable research methodologies to be reshaped by plurality rather than merely incorporating it? During the laboratory a group of 15 participants will work together to examine, exchange and experiment with different methods and approaches towards shaping a future ethics and politics of researching in the field in Kilpisjärvi and beyond. The group will be composed of 7 practitioners selected from this call, and 7 practitioners who are invited to bring methods, prompts and provocations for the group to collectively test and trouble in site-sensitive ways. While some activities will be guided, Field_Notes – Living Methodologies embraces a slow pace and gives space for questions, actions and responses to emerge from and with the site and the group. Invited guests include: Anastasia (A) Alevtin, Sam Nightingale, Astrida Neimanis, Aleksija Neimanis, Leena Valkeapää, with more to be confirmed.