Sixth Research Pavilion: Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries

What will the future look like? How can we imagine a future in a time determined by various crises? And what will be the role of artistic research in this? Nowadays it turns out to be difficult to provide a meaningful answer to that kind of questions. It seems that imagining another world, or speculating about it, has been completely taken away from us.

In such a futureless era, the desire emerges to rethink ideas that were formulated and imagined in times when the possibility of positive and progressive change was still self-evident. Roland Barthes’ text How to Live Together, written in the optimistic 1970s, contains a series of inspiring ideas. Barthes attributes possibilities to what he describes as “idiorrhythmic practices”: a productive form of living together where one recognizes and respects the individual rhythms of the other; the possibility of a community where everyone would follow their own rhythms, i.e. their “idiorrhythms,” instead of being subjected to a common regulation of life that one could not choose nor oppose. These practices, Barthes noticed, enable finding the right balance between life for oneself and life for the others.

With How to Live Together, Barthes intended to open up space and time to reflect, to fantasize, to create simulations before the process of imagination is disrupted by compelling demands for choices and priorities. Now, fifty years later, the question is: what is the value and significance of idiorrhythmic imagination in a world that, because of increased divisions and tensions, emphatically calls for clear positions on various planetary urgencies? And more specifically, how can the current practice of artistic research provide an impetus for a necessary reassessment of that concept?

It is these questions that form the starting point of a curatorial project (consisting of a year-long research seminar, a research exhibition, and a series of discursive and performative activities) in the context of Uniarts’ Sixth Research Pavilion. Its proposition, entitled Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries, invited (doctoral, postdoc, and keynote) research projects which not only depart from the practice of individual, idiorrhythmic perspectives, but that also clearly situate a resonance with our society and/or planet from a topical post-utopian consciousness. And with that, the utopian dimension of Barthes’ imagination makes way for a contemporary perspective that can aptly be described as that of the “imaginary.”

The concept of the imaginary does not refer to the unreal or false, but rather to the role of projective imagining as a real force exercising itself in the world through framing conceivable practices of communication, organization, mobilization, and cohesion. Hence, the imaginary manifests itself as a mode of reality-building. It addresses the ways in which operations within the space of imagination—i.e. the construction of social community and a re-mapping of the ontology of the lifeworld by radically challenging divisions—are part of the conditions for different imaginative modalities of pluriversal world-making.

Exactly these conditions enable artistic research to develop a projective framework (of discourses, images, ideas) that delimits the sense of possibility and thereby effectuate forms of radical imagination that relate to urgent planetary phenomena, such as extractivism, climate change, displacement/migration, austerity, economic dispossession, neo-colonialism, and social polarization.

To further investigate these topical perspectives, Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries presents itself as a platform for knowledge in the making. Experimental modes of curating (performance, discursive events, other rituals of gathering, new modes of delivery and display) are explored in order to understand the exhibition as a potential mode of inquiry in itself: a research process that negotiates and articulates the assumption of a possible resonance between idiorrhythms and imaginaries in the hybrid environment of an exhibition and an event space.  

Research group: Amanda Beech (Resident keynote); Jaime Belmonte & Paola Fernanda (Uniarts Helsinki); Sophie Durand (Vilnius Academy of Arts); Kerry Guinan (Valand Academy Gothenburg); Heidi Hänninen (Uniarts Helsinki); Marleena Huuhka (Tampere University); Joanna Kalm (Estonian Academy of Arts); Noora Karjalainen (Uniarts Helsinki); Kristiina Koskinen (University of Lapland); Veli Lehtovaara (Uniarts Helsinki); Christian Nyampeta (Resident keynote); Dominik Schlienger (Uniarts Helsinki); Kerstin Schroedinger & Angela Melitopoulos (Uniarts Helsinki); Henk Slager (Curatorial concept, Uniarts Helsinki); Whyte & Zettergren: Rut Karin Zettergren & Orlando Whyte (Uniarts Helsinki)

Research exhibition: Kuva/Tila, December 4–December 21. / Kuva Research Days: December 11–12, Presentation of the research projects. 

Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries is made possible by: Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary, Estonian Academy of Arts, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Gaia Stage Ry, HIAP Helsinki International Artists Programme, Kone Foundation, Niilo Helanderin Säätiö, Saastamoinen Foundation, Tampere University, Tarabya Kulturakademie Istanbul, Uniarts Helsinki, University of Lapland, Valand Academy Gothenburg, and Vilnius Academy of Arts.