Making space for research - A conversation with Vladimir Miller

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of The Critical Practices Program in fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series, I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

Today, I am having a conversation with Vladimir Miller, an artist, researcher, scenographer and dramaturg. His practice focuses on collaborative research, education and spatial organization through the development of spatial and institutional structures for artistic research and practice. As program and research curator at a.pass Vladimir creates multidisciplinary, collaborative spaces and project trajectories that encourage the production of self-organized environments of artistic practice. He is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement VI that centers around the collective study of governance with a specific focus on institutions. In this conversation, we discuss about processes of constructing spaces of collective learning.

Vladimir, welcome to Pali-Room!

Thank you.

Thanks for joining me today. It's been a while since we last saw each other and it's a pleasure for me to have this conversation with you today. I would like to start by discussing your practice, which oscillates between fine arts, education and performing arts. Your practice focuses on the relationship between artistic practice and the institutional space, as well as in the investigation of art and knowledge production as a spatial practice and I m curious to know, how did you start engaging with these questions?

I started somehow in the year 2009. a.pass Institute for Higher Education Artistic Research invited me to give a workshop in their space in Antwerp and I think the work that I developed was partly also in reaction to the conditions that I found there for collaborative research. When I arrived at a.pass, they were still in a very small space situated in Antwerp, almost like a collection of small office spaces. I quickly realized that for a research institute, for a place where people are supposed to share their research, there was very little space and very little framings for the actual research to happen in the institution. So one of my starting questions was, "Well, why is that? Why is that like this?" And also how to create spaces where doing research could be done collectively in the presence of each other. And I think I was reading at the time social theory —i.e. de Certeau— people describing cities and the way cities work and the way a city is also a site of of knowledge production where the occupants of the city by using it already reproduce a city in a certain way on their own terms. While reading this, I was kind of looking for a model of how to come together in the research space. And then, the city became sort of the first initial model of how I understood the spaces. I thought it would be interesting if we would create an environment where specific practices of people would have specific places in a sort of maybe like a village, like a small village space that the participants would build together according to their own design and according to their own practice. Designing the spaces themselves became the sort of the driving force behind the work that I've been doing since.

Thank you for bringing up a.pass, because this brings me to my next question. At a.pass which is, as you described, a postgraduate program for interdisciplinary artistic research in Brussels, and based on your experience. Over the years, the term artistic research has been employed in the academia as a label and a category of its own to define a process of knowledge production. I was wondering, how do you perceive this term through your practice?

It's really interesting because I've been just kind of reviewing one of the books that are very important for me. That's the book called Constituent Imagination, which talks about the tradition and contemporary practices of militant research. While I am reading about militant research, I also understood that that's the kind of research that is sort of situated in community, is done by community for the community, and comes from the tradition of Italian resistance worker organization practices from the 1960s. And I realized that actually artistic research, the way I understand it, is much closer to that definition than to any kind of definition that it can obtain by differentiating itself from academic research. I think a lot of thinking about artistic research has gone towards creating a kind of a palpable difference from academic research, but for me, the affinity to militant research and to activism is actually much more inspiring. It's kind of funny for me to read that the terminology that we have been establishing for a long time, like situatedness, not knowing, collectivity, the questioning of the subject-object relationship in research, all of this has been already established in the activist and militant research theory and we just have not made —or I had not made— that connection quite yet.

But how to define artistic research? a.pass is sort of based on this idea of a kind of accumulative definition. So, we are not necessarily interested in defining one singular artistic research methodology. I think when a.pass started 12 years ago, artistic research was not as popular in academia yet and the initial idea to start a.pass was to somehow also make a research on education and artistic research and just invite different positions into a.pass which understand themselves as artistic research to provide a kind of platform where that definition can find itself temporarily and also change over time. I think that's been very productive for us somehow to kind of a bit avoid that question.

I'm very happy that you bring up the need for this multiplicity of disciplines that artistic research can entail. I would like to go back to what you were mentioning before about your interest in collaborative research and how this is related to space, to the city, to architecture. In one of our previous conversations together, you had mentioned that participation is key in order to inhabit the institutional border and I think that you have been developing a very interesting practice through the "poliset" structure at a.pass that I would like you to share a little bit more about.

So, the poliset idea is actually to create a kind of a temporary condition within institutions where the means of production are shared with a particular open group of researchers. And by means of productions, I mean materials, budgets, but also something abstract and immaterial, support structures, like what is the collective goal and also the modes of entry and access to that space. So, I am trying to create somehow a condition where those things are commonized. They structurally move away from the power of institution and are somehow given to a group of participants.

For me it's been very productive to understand that there's a great potential and also necessity for this thing to happen, because I am looking for kind of spaces that are shaped by the desires and the practices of the practitioners themselves. And while I am looking for these spaces entering institutions, I somehow more often than not find preconditioned spaces where the practice of the researcher has to adapt to the given conditions. I am trying to create spaces where that is somehow at least temporarily reversed and all of the setting up that I'm doing in negotiation with the institutions and also with the practitioners are centered around that one central process. I think that the general mode of this practice is also disorganization. I think institutions are already organized towards certain kind of productions and towards welcoming and supporting certain kinds of practices in their institutional spaces and what I am trying to do is to, first of all, disorganize this already previous organization, so that the community of researchers can reorganize and organize the space according to their practice. What I am proposing on a kind of utopian level is that institutions have to be aware that this rhythm of organization and disorganization has to be established within the institution. Otherwise, the institution is just busy with maintaining the status quo of the spaces that they are giving out.

I'm very happy to hear this from you, because actually, when I had a conversation with Marta, your co-participant, she was also talking about the same thing. For example, how the way that an institution is organized in terms of space affects the way that we relate and that we can exchange with the institution. She mentioned "what about moving our offices in the ground floor of the museum that is visible to the public instead of being isolated on one of the top floors". And I think that's bringing up a really different perception of how we can deal with the question of the institution.

Yes. I think there's a lot of sort of pre-visioning or there is a kind of a vision of the kind of a practice and the kind of needs of the artist that will come in. But I think it's also important to say, "OK we don't know. We don't know what you will need. And so we will not make a space based on some kind of knowledge of what you might need. But we just make a space based on not knowing what you might need."

What you describe right now really resonates with the way that we have been designing the program of The School of Infinite Rehearsals, where we offer to the participants a sort of an empty space, a budget that they have to make a decision about collectively and in general the day-to-day program was defined by the participants. So I'm wondering, you know, on the one hand you are organizing this for artists in Brussels and then you became the participant of such a structure here.

Yes.

I found that very interesting. I would be happy to hear how did you perceive that from the other end?

I mean, it's been incredibly educational for me to be on the other end. And this was, I think, one of the main reasons why I wanted to be part of the program, because it's really a chance, a great opportunity actually to shift the roles. When I organize spaces, that's very hard to make happen, that I become the participant of my own space. But I think it's interesting that you say that. I'm not sure how you phrased it just now, but something like an empty space, right?

Yes.

I don't think that's the actual condition, because I think the space that you give out is not empty. The conditions of the Onassis space that you are right now occupying is kind of dominated by small, but quite powerful set-ups. And I think those set-ups kept also kind reactualizing themselves throughout the two months that I was there. So, I think that the kind of practices that can happen at the space are actually quite limited or require a big amount of reorganization, what I call organizational weight, in order to take place in that space. So, of course, you could somehow cover the floor if you want to make a painting or some kind of a messy studio, but again, this is not the condition that is already there. And to create that condition the group would have to negotiate in a laborious process whether everybody agrees with that and also the group would have to negotiate with you whether that's possible. So it's not a condition of entering that space and that is already messy enough to start working.

What would constitute this sort of an empty space for you?

I actually don't think it has to be empty. The spaces that I have produced —there is a lot of floor space in the beginning, but they are already full of materials. I think what for me is interesting is a kind of a signal that this can get messy. That would be one of the things and a very simple gesture that I always also try to implement is actually getting rid of tables and chairs as kind of catalysts for group meetings. For me, one part of disorganizing is not to start the day with a meeting around the table. A table is kind of magnetic and when you enter the space in the morning, you come together on the table and that's the condition from where it sort of starts. So it's not necessarily about the empty space, but for the specific conditions which disable sort of habitual modes of use of space, which we are very comfortable with and used to.

The table has always been part of an argument here, I have to say. I really like how you brought forward different ways of how we can foster our own spatial and temporal structures within the dominant, let's say, structure of an existing institution and also how you see spaces not necessarily as a resource, but as the site where new relations and alternative forms of relating can get reproduced. I would like to jump to another question, because I feel that every time we talk about a different way of relating, we also tend to speak on a speculative sense. The building process is not happening on the here and now, but we often talk in a future sense, into an unforeseen or idealist future and I am wondering how we can come together in the here and now.

I mean, in the spaces that I facilitate the building is the process. Because they are sort of void of conventional supportive structures. In order to work you first have to sort of go through this process of understanding what could be the most helpful or even like the minimal condition for comfort or for writing or for meeting or for any kind of process. So for me, speculative building is actually not necessarily something that happens in the future, but the moment of speculation is sort of speculating on what the structure that we need right now could be. So the future is much closer. The future is in 2 hours or tomorrow. Or we need a reading place, so we quickly sort of design and build the reading place for the meeting right now. That for me is the speculative part, trying to understand how to design for specific needs and conditions.

In one of your texts, you actually mentioned that "the fictional break is what instigates a process of commoning within an institution". And I would like to ask you, what role does fiction play in this process for you?

There is a sort of a collective fiction that is needed for a process like this to start. Maybe you want to call it utopia or collective agreement, but when you come together in a space like this and you say "we are going to stay here together and we are going to build our own space", none of that has yet happened. But nevertheless there is a commitment and that commitment is actually to an idea of creating a different space or of working otherwise, or, as you say, constructing other relations. So that is a kind of a fictional leap. We are a fictional community before we are a real community. So we kind of work towards actualizing that fiction. That is the role that fiction plays. It helps you to bridge somehow that first gap. We imagine the institution otherwise and then we we work along that imagination.

I would like to close our discussion today with the words of Audre Lorde, because I think that they resonate a lot with what we have been discussing. And Lorde says that "the Master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, but this condition only threatens those who still define the master's house as their only source of support". I would like to thank you for Vladimir for being with me today and for all the sharing. Thank you so much.

My pleasure. I find very interesting this quote, because I sometimes use it myself in writing, but I think that this quote should not be used by institutions to sort of then relax and say "OK, we cannot change anything". Because I think this quote is meant for people who enter institutions. But I think the institutions, who have the master's tools and in that particular maybe closed interpretation, do have somehow an obligation to at least try from that position.

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.