Marc Nair

Since late 2017, I have been pursuing a practice research PhD at RMIT University in the School of Media and Communications. Sounds cool, but what exactly does practice research mean?

“Practice as research might denote a research process that leads to an arts-related output, an arts project as one element of a research process drawing on a range of methods, or a research process entirely framed as artistic practice.”

University of Manchester)

Practice-related research goes by many names, ‘such as “arts-based research”, “practice-based research”, “practice-led research”, “practice-centered research”, [and] “studio-based research”. These are more or less used synonymously’ (Niedderer and Roworth-Stokes, 7). The term ‘practice-led research’ is typically the one used most consistently, perhaps because it puts the creative practice ahead of the research, a horse before a cart, as it were (Skains, 2018). The research question, which shifts and never quite settles unlike the traditional PhD, should also articulate how the practice is the research.

In my case, my PhD involves elements of creative practice produced prior to as well as during the PhD. My practice research journey began with my ekphrastic work. I thought that elucidating a ‘conversation’ between text and image was a way to define my practice. This led to an expansion of scope into collaborative practice, which segued into spoken word and various dimensions of performance.

One of the ‘problems’ that I faced in articulating my practice is that I have trucked all over the landscape. Publishing, performing, exhibiting and working with a range of artists from various disciplines on projects that are equally varied in theme and style does not easily lend itself to a focused ‘slice’ through the practice, which is what my supervisors at RMIT would like to see. Currently, my dissertation has moved into something extremely personal; my faith. Spurred on by a memoir-in-progress of twelve years in Christian fundamentalist churches in Singapore, I am writing, researching and producing work that negotiates my loss of faith from the perspective of a creative practitioner.

This, seems to be rather distanced from the subject matter of the journal, which located me in a very different space. Initially, I began approaching the residency like an extended travel trip. I thought that I would probably come away with a bunch of ‘travel poems’ and photographs that would accompany them. But what I created couldn’t have been further from that. ‘Far From The Plastic World’ was birthed from an impulse to explore subject matter without an endpoint in mind. It was also birthed out of frustration. I could not photograph freely, bound as I was by Guna laws and social mores that felt archaic and unreal. Yet, I had to honour and respect those practices if I wanted to remain part of the life of the village.

In putting the journal and its related media together, I started reading about autoethnography, which seemed to be a useful methodology for approaching this project. One of the many definitions of autoethnography is about “reflexively writing the self into and through the ethnographic text, isolating that space where memory, history, performance, and meaning intersect” (Denzin, 22). However, assuming the role of a creative autoethnographer was not what I had in mind when I was accepted for the residency. Autoethnography emerged in retrospect as a way of documenting, reflecting on and providing a frame for my experience. 

The journal became an intersecting space that held both art and an informal cultural anthropology. Art is evinced through poetry and photographs. The latter are sometimes documentary in nature, but also have a representational element to them. The video and audio clips are definitely a lot more documentary-like in nature. The journal itself is a hybrid text.

While the journal’s form is clear, its contents aren’t as obvious. Certainly, it is a document that aims at communication. But it also holds fragments of observations from the other artists and myself. These sit within the landscape of the residency that extends far beyond the walls of the residency house. As Rutten says, “Autoethnography is both process and product” (Rutten, 300). As process, autoethnography researchers study a culture’s practices, values and beliefs then “retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity” (Ellis et al. 2010, 8).  And much like how I brought my own practice in poetry and multimedia to Armila, other artists came with diverse backgrounds in sculpting, drawing and performance art. All of us wrestled with translating and transforming experience into forms that we were familiar with.

However, I believe that the journal became the nexus of my autoethnographic impulse. The form of the journal was a mix of observations of activities that we engaged in as artists, descriptions of the village life and snippets of ‘lectures’ by our host, Nacho. The journal thus becomes a repository of how I engaged in a more expansive way with the rich landscape that I found myself in.

The access to experience and the permission that was given to learn, listen and document was only possible because of the La Wayaka residency that was already in place and the relationships that the founders of the residency had established with the Guna in Armila. The anthropological angle is an unforeseen byproduct, a wonderfully rich outcome of working within such a vibrant and rich environment. The tapestry of Guna history, spirituality, daily life and culture is fertile earth for creative seeds to bloom.

So what is the point or value of building this repository? The journal reflects what Anderson defines as embodied writing, “relaying human experience from the inside out and entwining in words our senses with the sense of the world” (Anderson, 84). As a creative process, it gives rise to creative research insights into the Guna people through my personal experience, leading to further possible areas of research by offering a perspective that sits between the fleeting tourist gaze and the embedded eye of the writer as ethnographer.

References

Anderson, R. (2001). Embodied writing and reflections on embodiment. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 33 (2), 83-98.

Denzin, Norman K. (2013). “Interpretive Autoethnography” in Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Ellis, C. Adam, T., Bochner, A. “Autoethnography: An Overview Forum: Qualitative Social Resarch, 12(1). (Online, last accessed 22 July 2020)

Niedderer, K., and Roworth-Stokes, S. 2007. ‘‘The Role and Use of Creative Practice in Research and Its Contribution to Knowledge.” In IASDR07: International Association of Societies of Design Research. Hong Kong.

Rutten, K. (2016). “Art, ethnography and practice-led research”, Critical Arts, 30:3, 295-306.

Skains, R. Lyle. (2018). “Creative Practice as Research: Discourse on Methodology”. Media Practice and Education, 19:1, p. 82-97.

In October 2019, I was given the opportunity to attend the La Wayaka Current residency in Panama. Along with four other artists, I stayed for three weeks in Armila, a remote village in the north of Panama. This was a village that was part of the autonomous reservation of the Guna, an indigenous people hailing from Panama and Colombia. It gave me an opportunity to be immersed for a period of time in a culture that was deeply spiritual while being indelibly rooted and aware of the present.

I arrived with a lot of artistic baggage, full of my own expectations in terms of what I wanted to create, little realising that the point was not the art, but that the art was meant to make a point about me. 

Usually, I make art with a plan. Even on a ‘holiday’ I intend to create. This was how I treated my early backpacking trips, which resulted in my second collection, Chai: Travel Poems. But this put a pressure on the idea of travel, where there is an intent beyond the simple notion of what a holiday is meant to be. It is ironic, then, that on a trip where I was supposed to create work I decided to go without a plan, to immerse myself in my surroundings and then see what could emerge from it, even though I brought all the necessary equipment to make. I had a camera, a drone and audio and video recording equipment (microphones, tripod and a small video light).

But it turned out that the Guna people were rather protective of how they were represented. I think it was a combination of being reticent by nature as well as a genuine concern of having their way of life disrupted by tourism. This has happened to other Guna communities, particularly those in the San Blas region, where tourism has changed and often commoditised the nature of the villages there. A gross dependency on the tourism completely upends the natural rhythm of subsistence occupations such as fishing, hunting and farming. 

Consequently, I was unable to get permission from the village council of elders (Sahilas) to fly my drone, even though I asked very early on and kept sending reminders. And even photographing the people in the village was frowned upon. Most of the older people did not want their photograph taken. One day, though, an older lady asked for a photograph. I was happily surprised and duly obliged.

Then she asked for the image. Apparently, she thought my camera was an Instax, an instant camera, and she thought she could receive the photo on the spot. She was very disappointed to find out this wasn’t the case and sent off a string of choice Guna invective in my direction. Most of my photographs of people from Armila are those of children, still free from cultural restrictions, still innocent of the ramifications of the image.

We had to get permission for many things in the village, something that felt rather strange, but I found myself thinking about the relationship between permission and appropriation. When are we taking and when are we making? So, instead of trying to push my luck with my camera, I decided to keep a journal that would document things that happened, snippets of conversations with artists and my own reflections about Guna traditions.

This sustained act of writing was something entirely new to me. It changed my practice rather fundamentally. I found myself thinking twice: once in conversation and the next when I documented the moment in the journal. There was no need for permission for the journal, it was not a visible intervention into the space of the village, but nevertheless, it presented an intertwining framework and record of the residency. It also broke my dependency on the image as my governing mode of observation.

This new way of making through various modes of expression allowed me to resolve the initial tension I felt in being unable to operate in all the usual ways I was used to. Moreover, I was immersed in a society that was deeply spiritual and connected to the earth in a healthy symbiotic relationship.

In the course of the residency, I experienced a shift, a growing awareness of nature and a more natural way to engage the body outside of the processed, curated world of the city. It made me realise how dependent I had been on technology as a mediator of meaning. It also allowed me to explore autoethnography for the first time.

What is autoethnography? It is the intersection of writing the self within a larger cultural context. Naturally, these are all broad terms that occupy larger space. What does it mean to write? It can literally be written documentation, but it can also be images, sound and video. What aspect of the self is captured? The physical presence? An emotional or spiritual state? The interactions with others? The reflective musings? It is all of that, depending on the context. Which brings us to culture, that large, amorphous concept. What is culture indeed? In this journal, culture is the combination of being ‘inserted’ into an experience that is multi-faceted in terms of environment, spiritual and social practices, governance and community, both from an experience of the village as well as the interactions with the smaller community of artists. These have been captured in snippets of dialogue, observations and excerpts from the hours of conversation that we had. The artwork that came out of this residency is a reflection of the environmental concerns but also speaks to the camaraderie and communal expression of living.

In framing this journal autoethnographically, I hope to represent the Guna people through a lens that is more than just the typical indigenous, exoticised ‘Other’. The journal is a means of processing experience through sites of story, mythology and reflection but it is also an entry point into Armila, and by extension, the Guna people. While much of my documentation is not rooted in academia or supported by scholarship, the intention is to offer a performative autoethnography, where the “idea, concept, experience and/or culture under consideration guides the form and structure of the work” (Adams, Jones, Ellis, 89). At heart, the journal is not about seeking social justice for the Guna, but rather, about trying to express this rich culture through various lenses.