During the past two decades, artistic research has established itself as a part of academic research culture in many countries. The general legitimation struggles that were characteristic of its early years are not any longer in focus; the fronts have shifted and become more situational. Today, it makes more sense to demonstrate and disseminate what artistic research does than to ask what it is.
Spurred on by a general ecologization of thinking, and as an extension of the current edition of the Research Pavilion, RUUKKU #14 entitled "Ecologies of Practice" will highlight ethico-political issues on the level of artistic research practices. What can artistic research do in our current decade, where we suffer from a loss of common orientation, a common world, a common planet? How to develop sustainable modes of artistic research in and through processes of exhibiting, performing, exposing, collaborating, curating and discussing? How to articulate these research processes with related forms of critical reflection? How to deal with the individualistic tendencies in artistic research?
RUUKKU #14 "Ecologies of Practice" invites individual artist-researchers and research groups to ponder and share their ways of addressing the idiosyncratic environments of artistic research. This implies taking situational and historical responsibilities into account as well as striving for viable interconnections between a multitude of contemporaneous practices. At stake is a shift from disciplinary and territorial framings to more permeable, entangled and terrestrial modes of thinking, that is, towards the articulation of research ecologies in a world that is forced to think of its ends. Therefore, we certainly need new coordinates, another distribution of metaphors and sensitivities, as well as novel fictions and imaginaries in order to address the ecologies of the present in a compelling way and to restate speculations about future directions of art and research.