Process Vs Product?

In the last few years I have been wrestling with the question you posed Lia.  

Partly because I felt that my product could not sum up the vast and varied experiences that were formed in the collaborative making process.  I'm not sure it's about one eclipsing the other.  This feels like dangerous territory that we're entering, because I don't want to say outright that "the experience of doing is key" but in truth I live by this motto and the artists I research were promoters of this position.  It would clearly help if the product itself was not "uninteresting" and thus it would be less of an indulgence to ask artists to let themselves go in experiential processes. 

My research is concerned with two different but connected concepts, Anthropohagy and Syncretism.  To varying degrees I utilise these concepts in my practice as a methodological position. Brazil has provided the base for my research, both in the art produced there and in the antropofagia movement, adopted by Brazilian intellectuals in the 1920’s. Anthropophagy (antropofagia) stemmed from a Brazilian indigenous Tupi Indian custom of cannibalism as a means to absorb the vital potency of the other, to become the other.  The movement promoted forms of cultural cannibalism that used or adopted cultural influences from outside of Brazil, absorbing it into the culture to produce new forms.

Linked to anthropophagy is the concept of syncretism (a term appropriated from theology) explained by Jean Fisher as relating to ‘the dynamics of the transaction between self and other, [to] contamination as the trigger for the production of difference, from which one can begin again.’[1] Through this role the artist can temporarily inhabit the world of their subject or spectators to seek an extension of their artistic intent that is, arguably, more parasitic than collaborative.  In doing so, production is inevitably affected, promoting space for the difference that Fisher mentions. 

I continually seek groups and individuals to join.  Call me a leach if you like, but I feed off their knowledge and this continual contamination can be mutually rewarding for both parties.  Time plays a key factor in this.  The collaboration, contamination, host/parasite connection has it's limit.  In my case it is always temporary, but temporary in the sense of months and years rather than brief encounters.  

Veronique, your emphasis on gesture is important, because perhaps the presence of our bodies within a group is as potent as the spoken word.  On a formal level, entering a group as an outside body inevitably affects it's dynamics. Sometimes my experiences in groups (here I think back to my work with mediums in Scotland) were outside of language, based in phenomenological encounters, in theatre and in ritual.  The impact of my body in the group was undeniable as the stranger who was attempting to fit in.  In this sense, there must be something in the attempt itself. Surely this is a performative gesture?

In this way the photograph of my aura sums up my time with psychic phenomena. It was something I could not pinpoint or find answers in.  I felt absorbed into the immersive theatre of the seance arena, but I cannot tell you what was smokescreen and what I believed actually happened.  What was important was that my investment was:

emotional, psychical and physical.

[1] Fisher, Jean ‘Some Thoughts of Contaminations’, Third Text, no 32, 1995