Practice as Research a collective form of activism from a South American perspective

Abstract

As a Chilean living in Aotearoa/ New Zealand I am constantly looking to Latin and South America. Living in the diaspora has allowed me to examine and reflect upon the different socio-political issues arising in the region from afar and with perspective. As an actress and researcher, I am on an ongoing exploration considering how to share research projects from a creative activist standpoint, moving beyond traditional academic research publications into forms that are situated and accessed in the exchanges of everyday relationships and resistance. Written academic outputs are primarily intended for reading, although some contain images or photographs that complement and / or enrich the verbal content. These outputs tend to reach a small portion of the population, the highly educated elite with economic means to access books and participate in conferences or symposiums. Practice as research emerges from a rigorous process of research, critical analysis, and embodied distillation of academic texts. Practice as research relates to my aim to share research not only with wider audiences reaching communities with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. It also relates to my intention to create work that could resonate outwards, across borders and boundaries, transferring content from one format to another, from the academic world to a medium of expression such as theatre, illustration, dance and/or digital. The concept of transposition emphasizes the creative process that operates in the transition from one medium to another, it “designates the idea of ​​transference, but also that of transplantation, of putting something in another place, of removing certain models, but thinking of another register or system” (Wolf, 2001, p. 16). The transposition process creates a new object, precisely from other languages, cultural contexts, and disciplinary formats (Wolf, 2001). The idea of ​​transmedia transformation certainly applies to my way of finding spaces to share research.  Working across languages, Spanish, English, German and French has enabled me to work collectively and in collaboration with other artists, researchers, and activists. These collective actions have been produced through different media and artistic languages where each of us bring our specific artistic experiences, aesthetic incarnations, and gender experiences to inform our research practices.

Wolf, S. (2001). Cine/Literatura: Ritos de pasaje. Paidós.