“Research about/for/through Art;
Art about/for/through Research”
The Center for the Humanities and Tyson Research Center, Washington University’s environmental field station, hosted humanities graduate students in spring 2024 for a semester-long inquiry into the field of artistic research. The 2,000-acre wooded landscape has a rich and varied history of human activity, from centuries of Indigenous use to settlement by white Americans (some of them enslavers) in the 19th century, to its acquisition by the U.S. military and use as a site for storing and testing of munitions during World War II. In 1963, WashU acquired the land from the military and began to use the land as a field station for ongoing research and as off-site storage for Danforth (then Hilltop) campus projects and materials, some of which remains in Tyson’s many concrete bunkers, originally built to store munitions. Visiting Tyson early in her tenure as ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow compelled Anya Yermakova to perform her own artistic research there and use the site as an exploratory space to teach others methods in artistic research.
With funding from the humanities center’s Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities (RDE) initiative (supported by the Mellon Foundation), Yermakova led a cohort of 13 graduate students through their engagements at Tyson and together with them conducted explorations of the site on topics such as histories of war, interspecies humanities and the intersection of art and environmental activism. Students developed projects intended to connect artistic research to their critical and intellectual work in fields as varied as classical music, migration studies and creative writing.
In a culminating event in late April, the students presented their works in progress in a two-day on-site workshop and gathering. Via discussions, presentations and guided explorations, participants focused on the exchange of methods for including (and exposing) creative practice as complementary and fruitful to their critical and intellectual work within the university. Throughout the weekend, they were joined by members of the public and by invited guests Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Salomé Voegelin, leading scholars in the fields of sound studies, performance and artistic research methods.
“Research about/for/through Art | Art about/for through Research” is quoted from artist Florian Dombois’ What Are the Places of Danger, in which he documents six of his projects.
