Banting, Jill

Compound Object

The research I performed during the MAA program was focused on establishing a theoretical framework for creative and collaborative participation, using dialogue and encounter in place-specific contexts. I discuss the development of this methodology through a narrative progression of four artworks. Performed over the course of the program, my practice-based research brought forward themes and questions related to institutional, public and social spaces as sites for dialogue and participation. For the graduate project, Archive Encounters, I worked with five community members inside the archive and collections of a regional social history museum. These individuals were associated with the Campbell River Arts Council in various ways, involved in public art, writing, education and community organization in the local area. In the archives, I played the role of interlocutrix to open up a space of dialogue with my participatory audience, responsive to each individual’s living archive of memory. The interlocutrix is the feminine form of interlocutor, a theatrical term for one who initiates dialogue with an audience. Inside the collections room, the audience/participants were given access to the artifacts in storage and a projecting digital camera. Each person used the tool to capture and project a series of images onto the artifacts. Encountering personal and collective narratives in the process, we played with the surfaces of memory and form, exploring shifting and contingent meaning. The projections were documented, resulting in a collection of digital images that formed a secondary body of work. To support dialogical and participatory aesthetics with an audience, I look to the critical theories of Paulo Freire (dialogue) Grant Kester (dialogical aesthetics), and Pablo Helguera (participation). Doreen Massey, Michel DeCerteau and Henri Lefevbre informed the development of a critical framework when working with the elements of space and place in an artwork. The writing of Liza Graziose Corrin informed a dialogical methodology for my artistic research performed inside the contemporaneous museum.

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