Premises, Promises is a performative workshop and co-teaching event for the 10th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research, held at ZHDK in Zürich (March 2019), held with Bernhard Garnicnig and Lucie Kolb for the Institutions as a Way of Life project.
The collaborative encounter invests itself in the institutional 'spaces between things', as spaces where 'everything happens.' Knowledge practices in institutions, in pre-pandemic times at least - were negotiated and deliberated in the interstices of institutional cultures and environments: stairwell and water-cooler conversations, elevator pitches and coffee break meetings, lunchtime chats, conference dinners and last drinks at the bar. These are the academic and artistic scenographies of both art and research — where cultures are produced, languages relaxed, methods modulated, skills and knowledge transferred, identities reconstituted, in and as back- and side-channels to representational, academic discourse. It is in these gaps that all the work really gets done.
Groups from these sessions move into the modernist architecture of the Swiss art school ZHDK, mapping, diagramming and dialoguing (in) spaces of institutional otherness. Maps were inspired by the formal systemic graphic languages of artist Stephen Willats, for diagramming spaces of non-inscriptions and side-chats, spaces that allow dissonance to continue and resonate, spaces of conversation and exchange that refuse the call to begin, to formalize, to order, to end.