Beyond interdisciplinarity: Situating practice in the art-geography nexus

This session explores new ways of activating the productive nexus of art and geography: moving beyond familiar, discursive, models of inter-disciplinarity to engage seriously with the immediate material efficacies of contemporary art as a mode of spatial enquiry.

Recent geographical work has shown a lively engagement with the possibilities and affordances of artistic practice, to incorporate atmospheric and material affect. Art methods are appreciated for their capacity to elicit multiple concurrent registers - to address the nexus of differing, yet interdependent, systems of meaning and doing. Such work has adopted various approaches to cross-disciplinary practice, including critique, conversation and collaboration. What is increasingly apparent - yet remains relatively unexamined - is the potential for new ways of working the relation of art and geography not as two separate systems working alongside one another, but as a generative encounter in which the full potential for new understanding is elaborated in the nexus of creative experimental practice. Rather than a simple borrowing of methods from other disciplines, what is at stake is a dissolution of boundaries in which the very nature of enquiry in certain areas of the social sciences and humanities becomes coextensive with modes of enquiry developed within contemporary art.

This session invites methodologically innovative interventions that are situated explicitly within the nexus of artistic and social-scientific-humanities research, extending the scope of such work beyond familiar, discursive, models of inter-disciplinary practice.