Writing as Arts-based Research.
A lot has been written about the relationship between artistic practice and writing in the context of research, both in and outside the framework of academic and art discourses. Writing there has been primarily addressed as giving an explicit verbal account of the implicit knowledge embodied in both artistic practices and products while art seems to remain outside of what can be expressed by words. In this context writing appears mainly as meta-discourse. By comparison, very little has been said about writing as creative, transforming and significant practice, capable of generating meaning by expanding the scope of the writing process in order to give a voice to the semiotic, the unconscious and bodily as well as material processes of signification (Cixous, Kristeva). Within an arts-based research approach it is promising to view writing as an operation of the in between. As process of the in between – unfolding materiality and the intelligible – writing is the oscillation (Cixous) of materiality and the intelligible, it is the movement of the sense in both directions: materiality has the potentiality to become intelligible as well as the intelligible entails the potentiality to become materiality (Butler, Nancy). Writing transgresses (as the Latin praefix “trans”, “across, over” indicates) and matters in this space of the in between. Writing as arts-based research thus is a trans-sensible exposure.
The plural nature of writing – the creative, transforming and significant form of writing – makes it both a unique practice as well as topic of research for developing a theory of writing as arts-based research.
The given project addresses the lack in theory and practice of writing as arts-based research and starts from the assumption, that namely poststructuralist, queer-feminist encounters with writing (by e. g. Kristeva, Cixous, Derrida, Deleuze, Preciado, Deleuze, Durfourmantelle, Adnan, Irigaray etc.) have not yet been extensively implemented into the discourse of arts-based research. Writing as arts-based research thus is to bring about a form of radical openness for the excess of meaning that the academic writing tradition tries to capture. Understood as an arts-based research practice it does not signify monolithically.