The collaborative PhD “Transcribing, speaking, repeating - transformation as artistic practice” assembles the findings that result from the practice in and with the three artistic bodies of work “It depends entirely upon the hue of the lighting”, “Blue skies becoming almost black” and “[f: la répète]”.
Based on one specific object each - a photograph taken in 1944 in connection with art-air protection measures in Germany, an 18th-century instrument for measuring the blue of the sky, and a correspondence dossier from the 1930s on the creation of the Palais des Nations from the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva - the three bodies of work investigate how 'something', 'different', can be experienced through the objects and their context. How could the materiality and media-related qualities of the objects and the singular histories they encapsulate become starting points for speculative practices? Practices that attempt to create an echo for the fragilities and ambiguities of the invisible and unspeakable within the objects - an echo in which 'something different' can be experienced, or 'something' can be experienced 'differently'?
Conjecturing that by juxtaposing the bodies of work, 'something different' could be experienced and/or 'something' could be experienced 'differently', the bodies of work were experimented with in an open-ended setting. A process in which methodological, material, and content-related repetitions, transformations, and transitions were practised and questioned. This procedure resulted in the artefact script/transcript.
The six artefacts presented in this PhD are : an introduction, the DVD box “It depends entirely upon the hue of the lighting”, the record “Blue skies becoming almost black”, the brochure “[f: la répète]”, the three-part reflection “Script/Transcript”, and a tote bag assembling the aforementioned artefacts. The artefacts are witnesses, traces, and results of an artistic-reflexive research, in which 'repetition' crystallized during the process as a carrying method, a method that made it possible to stay with something by repeatedly revisiting it.
Throughout the process, we began to understand 'research' in the literal meaning of the French recherche and the English research: as a repeating search - a searching movement that puts things next to and into each other and thereby opens spaces for the invisible and unspeakable within the works, their contents, and subjects, to make “something different” perceptible and tangible or to make “something differently” perceptible and tangible.