Exhibition view AURAL Galeria, Traversing the Unthought, with Judith Egger, 2021.
SOME SECRETS ABOUT FREESEARCH
(Neonletters, 2019)
On a personal level, I might secretly wish that this work would be part of my project "Somewhere on this Planet". That would mean it would be installed at any thinkable everyday place, or allow me to say, any location in the world. Maybe next to some other highway signs, hiking trail, above the instruction of a museum's emergency exit or a tailor shop in Dakar. Admittedly, I mostly doubt, but in this specific desired case, I would even through all doubts over board that any further explanation to ‘explain’ this work would be more than superfluous!
As a neon lettering, and as I initially made it to be installed in the context amongst other artworks, it is like a kind of reminder alarm for what 'artistic research' is/could be or could become if it truly resists other established regulations that quality research in other disciplines and keeps on insisting on finding, formulating and researching its own characteristics beyond a competitive or to adaptative mode to other common research regulators and methodologies that set and qualify research standards in other academic disciplines. Questions that remain important for me: What 'form of language' can serve art instead of covering or domesticating it? Artistic research as an independent discipline; one could almost claim that time could not be better than now to ask what the specific contribution of artistic practice can be to thinking and being within the world.
As modus operandi it is based on the assumption that art can research and generate new forms of knowing without leading to a scientific nature of art based on a purely scientifically founded truth. If it is consciously, it can perhaps also contribute to new artistic research paths or simply to new possibilities of being with or merely part of the world.
Freesearch as a revelation of (artistic) research: I consider it exceedingly indispensable that artistic practice first and foremost reflect on and relate to its own way to be as independent and free as possible what research concerns. Then maybe that's what I could mean by FREESEARCH.