Workspace Research X is a space to practice, through the gaze, posture and attitude of the researcher.

Practice is a tool for sharing an interest, through which research unfolds.

Through (self-)reflection on methods, practice allows one to specify one’s field of interest, producing unknown effects and is a tool through which one can access the universes, desires and obsessions of the other and of the rest of the group.

“I started with the idea that there’s something I do that is not training, process, or product, and that this thing underlies the decisions I make about training, process and product. And I wanted to call that thing my practice”

Chrysa Parkinson, “Self interview on practice”

PRACTICE from “Writing Scores – Glossary”, a.pass

The practice is the activation of the research, the moment the research is put out into the world, allowed to breath and breed with what surrounds it. The research only comes to life in the practice, demanding nourishment, nurture, and attention in order to thrive and transform. Every practice produces an offspring in the form of consequences, traces, that in their turn demand attention to transform into new practices or mutations of the old ones. The research can only be kept alive by experiencing its presence in the present, in the doing. Through repetition its potential appears, until it grows legs and starts to move away from you, walking right out of its case into the world. The power of the practice is measured by its capacity to survive this move from its in-vitro setting into other environments. For example, by being adopted by other researchers, entering into the public domain, or inspiring cross-breedings, monster ideas or breaking long-encrusted habits. A practice is always moving, even if standing still. A researcher’s relation to the practice is often a dysfunctional one. In other words, if the practice doesn’t talk back, it is probably time to try another one. The concreteness of the practice is what constitutes its unexpected twists and turns. Its resistance and inflexibility to adapt to the ideas or intuitions that produced them is exactly what excites the friction needed to bring out the unthought thought.

In Artistic Research, artistic practice becomes a research method with which to investigate a question, a theme, an object, a field, a world.

It develops multiple points of view, spreads and disseminates itself in the body and materialities, assembles heterogeneous materials, traverses knowledge in an unprecedented way and offers a new experience of it, produces new knowledge or new points of view, postures with which to make the experience of/to experience knowing.

Feedback is a constant practice, proposed continuously within Workspace Ricerca X in different contexts: during residencies, during public openings and on the occasion of formats specifically focusing on feedback.

Through feedback sessions, we train a mode of conversation that is intense and critical, starting from shared practices and materials. Proposing a structured feedback format allows to activate a space for collective dialogue, in support of everyone’s processes and artistic trajectories.

Feedback, practiced intensively within the context of Workspace Ricerca X, acts as an opportunity to train discursiveness and (auto)reflexivity around artistic work, articulating modes and times of being together and talking together, with a specific attention to language.

The feedback practice encourages the creation of alliances, more than fostering competitional dynamics, between professionals in the field, supporting the ethical dimension of work and research, by acknowledging a community at work, as well as one’s own sources and references.

Writing practices interest Workspace Research X as a means of sedimentation and transposition of materials that manifest in impermanent gestures and actions, thus allowing the discursiveness of practices to find a means of dissemination and further articulation. In the project, writing is practiced with a bottom-up trajectory and positioned in proximity: writing from practice/from the body and not about practice/on the body.

PARlor – Performance artistic research and underlying obsessions
editorial hub for bodily processed literature and thinking

PARlor is a space for collective writing and reflection, articulated by Ambra Pittoni within Workspace Research X, that investigates the relationship between writing and choreographic research practices by questioning possible literary formats in which the kind of thinking that emerges within choreographic practices can be disseminated beyond the circumstance of bodies in motion.

Scores

Within Workspace Ricerca X, Elisa and Francesco bring an interest for written scores, intended as a means to transfer into the practice some questions characterizing research processes, as well as the identification, construction and development of artistic practices and their sharing.

Scores are conceived as a choreographic tool, a device, an infrastructure, as well as a frame where to situate discourses and reflections around research.

Dramaturgy of research is understood, in addition to the traditional figure of the dramaturg accompanying an artistic process, be it a research or production process, as the practice of attention, both in doing one’s own research and in observing, dancing and embodying the research of others. Practicing attention intensively involves the articulation of body, gaze and language:

staying in and out of a process by measuring proximity and distance, shifting and producing new points of view, constantly weaving the relationship between body and language by inhabiting language through a somatic attitude. Thus dramaturgy of research becomes a function applicable to various moments and circumstances of one’s own and others’ research.

“We could define the minor dramaturgy as that zone, that structural circle, which lies in and around a production. But a production comes alive through its interaction, through its audience, and through what is going on outside its own orbit.
And around the production lies the theater and around the theater lies the city and around the city, as far as we can see, lies the whole world and even the sky and all its stars.” – Marianne Van Kerkhoven

We define the space created by activating the format and activities of  Workspace Research X as a complex, dense and intense research environment.

An environment that is generated, as a physical space and a space of thought, by the co-presence and mutual attendance of practices, materials, formats, tools, discourses, affects, intelligent corporealities.

It is an environment that welcomes and sustains movements of bodies, thoughts and discourses, making new meanings emerge from the relationships that are created. It is a shared space, inhabited in proximity and continuously over time, enabling and sustaining the circulation of knowledge within it and outward.

It is a horizontal environment of peer collaboration, in which to share a common responsibility, a common concern, making room for different and moving positionings, roles and points of view.