Research title: Role-play as an inquiry method and tool for knowledge production

Description:

How can role-play serve as an inquiry method and a knowledge production tool, providing access to embodied knowledge that may otherwise remain unrecognized within the constraints of our everyday personas? To what extent can knowledge generated through role-play be applied and integrated into one's real-life experiences?

My research evolves around the utilization of role-play as an inquiry method and a tool for knowledge production, particularly in accessing embodied knowledge that often remains concealed within our everyday personas. Additionally, I investigate the extent to which knowledge generated within the context of the fictional scenario of the role-play can be transferred to one's real-life experiences.

In my artistic practice, role-play has consistently been a method of engagement and production. During my Master’s thesis, I began experimenting with role-play as not only a method but also as an artistic outcome. These experiments led me to reflect upon my own research methods and prompted me to delve deeper into this area of research.

I approach my research through three distinct methods: Firstly, by participating in role-play games to observe and reflect on the knowledge produced both individually (inside myself) and within group dynamics. Secondly, by designing role-plays, often in collaboration with other artists, to explore the knowledge generated within the group concerning specific thematic contexts proposed by the designers. Lastly, by hosting a series of radio shows where I invite fellow artists who employ role-play in their artistic practice and research. These shows feature practical demonstrations, experiments, and interview conversations, making aspects of my research accessible to a broader audience. The radio shows are published on Radio Echo and available on Radio Echo's online archive.

Artist Bio:

Sophie Allerding (she/they) is a multi-media artist and designer driven by an interest in versatile modes of storytelling and creating immersive spaces for meaningful interactions and play. Sophie's work delves into power dynamics and relationships between humans and their environment, the art of constructing realities, and the exploration of magical realms through various visual, audio and participatory media. Sophie is active in the feminist collectives POSSY and Radio Echo Collective and currently based in The Netherlands and Germany.

Image Description: Photograph from the role-play 'The Last Submarine,' a climate fiction scenario depicting water scarcity in a speculative future where sea levels have risen. This role-play was cocreated with artist Jana Romanova in September 2023.

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Rietlanden Women’s Office

Rietlanden Women’s Office (rietlanden.womensoffice.nl) teaches Typography in the Graphic Design Bachelor and are also visiting tutors in Book Design at the Master Artistic Research.

Graphic designers Elisabeth Rafstedt and Johanna Ehde form Rietlanden Women’s Office. Their practice is interested in current and historical issues connected to (reproductive) work and collaborative graphic design. The basis of their work is a printed publication series called MsHeresies — an inquiry into collaborative graphic design practices and the ornamental as a form of work critique.

The ornamental sits at the centre of their practice where they consider ornaments not simply as added decoration, but as traces of the specific conditions under which a work was made. They look at how traces of reproductive work such as lines of alteration and correction, clashing elements, improvised type — manifestations of urgency — become the ornaments which make social relations legible. They search for ornaments’ disruptive, devious, and aesthetic qualities, and sketch the ornamental as a point where aesthetics and politics intertwine.

The Dialogue as a Research Method

During the Academic Years of 2021/2022/2023, Maarten Cornel (teacher of Philosophy & Discourse) and Ingrid Grünwald (senior coordinator and facilitator intercultural communication) of the Graphic Design Department took the initiative to develop a series of dialogues within their department. This series was called “The Big Dialogue”. The reason for undertaking this initiative was due to the many social issues and changes taking place at the Academy and in general in society, as well as them being part of the Diversity and Inclusion group of this academy. The Big Dialogue was held multiple times, and was visited by quite some students, teachers and other staff. Each session started from a specific theme, a dilemma or a question and and all participants were asked to reflect and communicate without attention to their position or function within the Academy.

In February of 2021, Ingrid and Maarten participated in the ELIA program in Brussels, where they gave a workshop for European colleagues, and the response was such that they generated a new session with some directors, researchers and teachers from the Academies of Marseille, Brussels (le75) and Glasgow University. Many of the issues and challenges of European academies are similar, yet, settings and discourses do differ. This group materialised a plan for an experimental collective workshop for the ELIA- conference in Helsinki in November 2022: The Board Meeting.

In October 2022 Maarten and Ingrid visited Beaux Arts de Marseille to give a presentation of their experiences with the Big Dialogues and to facilitate a Big Dialogue in order to investigate what kind of responses and input they could get to further develop their initiative. In March they visited the Athens School of Fine Art in Mykonos, Greece to give a Big Dialogue workshop with iconography students and one tutor. Another session took place at Le 75 in Brussels at the photography department.

Big Dialogues are open for students and tutors.

On the GD-department third year class Philosophy Maarten has developed since 2018 an extra compartment of the program that deals with rhetoric, sociological questions and speech and since the development of the Big Dialogue in 2021 there has been a correlation between the themes of rhetoric and the development of communal awareness and participation.

Ingrid has started in 2018 her English classes about intercultural codes, etymology, the impact of language in relationship to intercultural awareness. The Big Dialogue is an off spin of these sessions and there is reciprocity still going on.

From October 2022 onwards, Ingrid and Maarten are part of the Artistic Research Group Politics of knowledge, where they are investigating the dialogue as a research method to create new knowledge. They were part of the KABK Artistic Research Symposium taking the Chairs of the Table; a performative session in which all participants explore dilemma’s collectively in the role of a dilettante.

Some results and ongoing explorations are:

• Redefining the goals.
• Adapting the dilemma’s for different aspects of the discourses at hand.
• More awareness of our terminologies, and the impact they have on the participants.
• Diversification of the methods within the dialogues.
• International perspective/representation. What it means to understand diversity.
• In Design Practice students were given the assignment to rethink the identity and merch of the Big Dialogue and offer a new perspective on it. We reflected together on what it would take to make it more communal.

Biography

Maarten Cornel

Maarten Cornel (1978, Amstelveen, The Netherlands). After studying for one year at the Montaigne Academy, Amsterdam (currently AMFI), I switched to study philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where I obtained my master. At the VU, I specialised in aesthetics, ethics and antiquity/archaeology. I try to combine my lifelong passion for the arts, especially for painting and music, with cognitive investigations into (the mainly continental) philosophical discourses. Next to that, I have studied art history as a minor, and researched many sources on (historical) art materials and technologies.

I started working since 2008 at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, where I have created courses in philosophy and the academy wide program of Research & Discourse. This program consists of a cycle of theoretical lectures as well as research groups. Next to the activities on the academy, I have organised multiple Socratic talks on various social topics.

Ingrid Grunwald:

Royal Academy of Art, University of the Arts the Hague – Senior Coordinator Graphic Design BA

Ingrid Grunwald has studied English Language and Literature at the Free University in Amsterdam and wrote her final Thesis about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Always interested in minorities and language she tried to incorporate this passion within her work in art education from the start, among others in recruiting students with different cultural backgrounds. This brought her one year in places where talented youngsters are taught art in unconventional places in the East of Amsterdam. She worked as a professional at the Amsterdam School of the Arts (BA-Fine Arts in Education) and as a tutor Communication & Organisation in secondary vocational education at “Het Mediacollege Amsterdam” (MA). She is still an external reviewer for MA and an international reviewer at EQ-Arts. She helps international students in their first year with the English language and intercultural communication. Together with Maarten Cornel she initiated the Big Dialogue about a variety of (social) issues art education is struggling with.

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