postgraduate program, workshop

Nicolas Galeazzi BRICOLAGE

4-8 May 2015 / a.pass

a tool for opening the block

To open this block we start with bricolage. The bricoleur never starts – he is continuously working on ‘whatever is at hand’.

Diving into this concept, described in Claude Levi-Strauss’ ‘The Savage Mind’, we develop a practice to present, discuss and discover the momentary objectives of our researches. With the help of found and constructed objects, objects of personal importance and desire, daily objects and precious ones, or objects of thought and discourse, we will try to define the actual quality of each one’s research model and methodology.   

The bricolage technique may be very close to many of our practices. The artist researcher is commonly acknowledge, as the bricoleur-scientist. He crafts the object of knowledge. Levi-Strauss describes the the bricoleur in opposition to the engineer: the bricoleur’s tools and materials are heterogeneous but – working only with what is there – his/her universe of instruments is finite. The understanding of the world is assembled and constructed on the go. The material “is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.”

The engineer instead, tries – in the most rational manner – to overcome the constraints of his current reality and works under the basic assumption of infinite possibilities. The engineer as much as the scientist creates events (changing the world) by means of structures and the ‘bricoleur’ creating structures by means of events.

Living and acting as an artist researcher in-between these two methodologies is a choice of political dimension, which we want to discuss at the beginning of the block.

In the course of this week we will present the current state of our research case from various perspectives. ‘Bricolaging’ the ‘objects’ of your research, turning them upside down, looking at them through the other’s eyes and assembling the elements in play, we want to understand the complex horizon of your research target.

For this we will use a variety of objects (and their relations, materials and relations to those materials, tools and relation to them.) Fixing and recycling will be as much part of the practice of understanding as destroying, dismantling and dissecting.

As a preparation to this opening workshop we would like you to search for three objects with different characteristics:

• one precious object, relevant to your research in a personal, ev. emotional sense,
• one broken object, to be fixed, even if in this case fixing might be hopeless,
• and finally one object with an open structure – something not yet finished, in the middle of its becoming.

All of these objects should have a more or less tight connection to the research discourse or field you’re working on.