The project’s third and last interval followed close to the preceding one, giving us little time for pause. What would be a suitable space for its intensive weeks? Kicking off right at the beginning of September, still in Austria’s summer semester break, we seized this opportunity to plunge straight into the ‘intensive weeks’, as the incoming artist-researcher Andrea Bakketun arrived from Norway. Seeking closer proximity with the Mahler university as the main research institution, we had secured the opportunity to work at the Hoke Werkhaus in Saager, half an hour east of Klagenfurt in Carinthia. Conceived by late artist Giselbert Hoke and carried forth by his family, the Werkhaus consists of a number of workshops and is located on a hill, surrounded by forest and lakes. For a part of the intensive weeks, we had again support for facilitation, this time by anthropologist Caroline Gatt.
"I tapped into a me who is more aware of potential connections. Not only to people but to possible points in a process and how ideas arrive."
The first international three-day symposium Forum Artistic Research at the GMPU in Klagenfurt was a wonderful event, and a success to follow up upon. The theme Listen for Beginnings created
just the right amount of cohesion between the various projects presented across art disciplines, and a significant number of which related to questions that are also at the heart of simularr.
We therefore felt that we did not need to center ourselves on stage more than necessary, instead grouping contributions on the second day of the symposium around a panel on simularr.
It is less than a month to the first Forum Artistic Research hosted at the Gustav Mahler Private University for Music (GMPU) in Klagenfurt, a joint effort by GMPU and simularr. Originally conceived as a major milestone of the research project, we opened up its theme to topics that resonated with the kind of collaborations we investigate in simularr, from ecological and more-than-human perspectives to the challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary work, succinctly captured in the title “listen for beginnings”.
Based on an open call, twenty-seven contributions come from various countries and authors with a large variety of disciplines and backgrounds—freelance artists, early career and established researchers.
The second project interval was particularly nomadic: Beginning at our trusted art space Reagenz and the premises of the Technical Unversity in Graz, we then took the Adriatic road to Lecce in Southern taly (with a stopover in Rimini), returning after the intensive weeks to Carinthia, Austrian’s southernmost state bordering Italy. At the Gustav Mahler Private University for Music (GMPU) work is underway to build spaces for Artistic Research, and we identified a yet-to-be-refurbished space as our penulimate domicile, baptised by us for its colour and Lynchian feel the “Yellow Lodge”. From here, it was only a stone’s throw to the Domenig Steinhaus in Ossiach, which hosted us for the concluding reflection rounds.
The so-called ‘intensive weeks’ of the simularr intervals live up to their name. We open our senses, our intellects, and we let others into our working processes, which are interwoven with collaborative and group activities. For the spring 2024 interval, we were lucky to work at the Palazzo Russo in San Cesario di Lecce, hosted by Alessandra and Nikolai Pomarico (Free Home University). With an uncanny resemblence to some of our prior imagined drawings of a suitable ‘house of simultaneous arrivals’, the palazzo is based on a circular layout of rooms encompassing a patio. The space offered ample possibilities for distributing the research team, consisting of the core researchers, the two invited researchers (Elena Redaelli and Fulya Uçanok), the invited facilitators (Susanne Bosch, arriving by bike from Rome, and Miguel Castillo).
