How to read the score?
Our research score consists of two layers. Layer I contains both: the process of making a score and the resulting score.
Layer II contains the reflections on scores that came out of the process of making the score. You also see two colours. The color grey is for documentation and blue is for instructions. They are both necessary for a score. We understand instructions as the frame (something mobile which is communicated in abstract terms) and documentation for us is the act of filling in and changing that frame (the work of grounding and making it tangible). Documentation does not follow instructions, both are intertwined and react to one another.
We, Sofia Villena Araya and Amelie Wedel, met in 2017 at our M.A. in Visual Cultures in London. Since then, we collaborate re- motely from San Jose, CR and Berlin, DE respectively. We made our first research score in 2019 in the framework of a re- search residency at Grimmuseum, Berlin. We strive to do more scores to bring more lightness into our research processes.
When we started Research Score #2, we wanted to break away from rigid patterns and conventional processes within our research practices and the spaces we transit.
This involved a deep work of mapping our desires and habits, which we call pushes and pulls. They modulate the contours of the intellectual territory in which we move. Some of the pushes and pulls are necessary and some of them feel more constraining. One could imagine a body that feels stiff.
How could that body loosen up in order to generously explore the space where thinking happens before arriving to any new conclusions? It would need to wiggle, stretch affirmatively, give permission to awkward movements, be light and agile and cherish exploring. We also think working in dialogue with others and without a goal helps to find new movements. This is what the score does for us; it helps us struggle through pushes and pulls in order to move from a state of constraint to a ›state of permission‹. The score is not another knowledge. If anything, it is a tool that can bring oneself to another way of knowing.
A set of replaceable instruc-
tions for finding the words
within your body – an example:
- Work in pairs.
- Choose a text and read it
to each other out-loud. - Be attentive to the words that
cause responses in your body. - Write the words down in a
paper. - Keeping a dialogue through-
out the process may help to
not get stagnant in a mental
process. - Work within 1-min cyclic
repetitive time frames:
One partner says the word
out loud, the other one moves,
trying to find the word within
her own body.
Then, switch roles. Do this a
couple of times. - At each end of 1-min cycle,
one gifts a word, the other
one gifts a movement. This
is a process of repetition,
adding, sharing and gifting. - Do it slow: it takes a bit of
time and breathing to find
the word.