Emergence: (Un)Common Intervention

Abstract

Emergence: (Un)common Intervention is a video that introduces a multimodal, interdisciplinary, and sensory art installation created by the artists, educators, and PhD students Malvika Agarwal and Sandra Poczobut. The composite of moving images and photos portray various iterations of the installation. The video captures a sensory aspect of the art, which reflects on the role of emergence and intra-action in engendering embodied reflexivity as a way to advance socially just pedagogies. It serves as an invitation for educators, students, and artists to consider collective processes of embodied reflexivity in their work through artistic undertakings in education.

Curatorial Statement

. . . embodied reflexive processes become opportunities for complex learning to occur in which participants gain potentially transformational insights into practice through their symbiotic interaction with others. (Vettraino & Linds, 2018, p. 31)

Emergence: (Un)common Intervention (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Nod0SC9OvU) is a multimodal, interdisciplinary, and sensory installation collaboratively developed by Malvika Agarwal and Sandra Poczobut (2022a, 2022b, 2023), artists and doctoral students in the Faculty of Education at Western University, Canada. The piece asks: what types of openings occur for equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization when engaging with and producing work in emergent multimodal ways; how might expansive ways of working with the environment, sound, and materiality produce opportunities for embodied reflexivity to occur; and how might concepts of intra-action and emergence (Barad, 2007) support embodied reflexivity through collective art practice to engender socially just pedagogies?

The installation and its iterations emerged through intra-action (Barad, 2007). Intra-action looks at how relationships do not arise from external phenomena that create causal binary logics, but rather “emerge from relations within the phenomena” (Snaza et al., 2016, p. xvii). As various constituents—fiber, technology, sounds, environment, and audience—intra-acted, our work was altered (Agarwal & Poczobut, 2022a, 2022b, 2023).

We, as artists/educators/graduate students, worked in relational ways with others. Materials rooted in craft and feminist practice (Hodgins, 2019; St Clair, 2019) and future-oriented technologies transformed each version of the work. The iterative process emerged from our relational and reflexive engagement with fabrics, thread, weavings and strings, audio recorders, computers, and speakers. Our sensory experiences and reflections from each instance of the installation echoed Vettraino and Linds’s (2018) view that perception and embodiment are collective and relational undertakings.

We contemplated Chambers’s (2012) assertion that “we are all treaty people” (p. 29) as we recorded sounds for our work from the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, and Lūnaapéewak peoples. Specifically, we adapted Springgay and Truman’s (2018) critical walking approach, which draws from feminist-queer, anti-racist, anti-ableist, and anti-colonial thought and practice. As we walked and recorded, questions around access, ownership, and care arose. We used a critical walking approach to engage in pedagogical dialogue with ourselves and our audiences to consider land-based pedagogies and the Truth and reconciliation commission of Canada: Calls to action (TRC of Canada, 2015). This interaction prompted further conversations regarding access, ownership, and care in relation to our work being placed in (un)common spaces, such as urban walking trails, contemporary galleries, and rural farms.

The video (https://youtu.be/_Nod0SC9OvU) invites educators, students, and artists to consider collective processes of embodied reflexivity in their work through artful undertakings in education. It suggests that such an invitation may provide pedagogical opportunities for socially just educational practices, emphasizing our relationships and intra-actions with the land, materials, and the world. We and the work emerge in constant flux, open to change, and moved by arts to work in socially just ways.