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You First Then Me
Exploring Complexity with Art Workshops
Mostyn de Beer
1
Institutionen för bild- och slöjdpedagogik
Självständigt arbete i visuell kultur och lärande med inriktning mot bildpedagogik, 30 hp, AN Masterprogram i Visuell kultur och lärande med inriktning mot bildpedagogik VT 2020 Handledare: Ulla Lind
Examinator: Fredrik Lindstrand
You first then me: Att utforska komplexitet med bildverkstäder
1 de Beer, M. (2020). You First Then Me mural in Bulwer Park. Property of the author.
2 Abstract
This work takes as its starting point the idea that awareness and understanding of the complex nature of relationships, among people and the natural and built environment, is of crucial importance against the background of the ongoing environmental crisis. The author explores how holding art workshops can contribute with specific knowledge about this complexity.
In early 2020, the author held art workshops in the South African port city of Durban, in a gallery area adjacent to a park. Qualitative methods, including ethnography and visual methods, were put to use in the study which developed from this project. The stages of fieldwork, processing and analysis are described in detail. The study’s posthumanist
theoretical framework draws in insights from Arts-Based Environmental Education and Art Education for Sustainable Development, as well as current thinking about design and creativity. These ideas, together with the choice of methods, facilitated an awareness of correspondences, or productive similarities, among elements from the workshops and the surrounding area. Noticing correspondences like these widened the project’s focus to include informants, groups and stories from the edges of the field, and opened up possibilities for relating local insights to larger concerns.
The study considers how holding art workshops can provide opportunities for research into environmental, educational and social issues. It concludes with a discussion about how thinking about complexity can be productive within the field of Art education.
Key words
sustainability, art education, generative methods, posthumanism, visual ethnography
3 Contents
Abstract 2
Key words 2
1 Introduction 5
1.1 Prologue 5
1.2 Background 7
1.3 Aim 9
1.4 Question 9
2 Choice of material 10
2.2 Ethical considerations 13
3 Empirical material 14
4 Method 14
4.1 Generative methods 14
4.2 Collective biography and storytelling 19
5 Fieldwork and Processing 20
5.1 Beginnings 20
5.2 The first field trip 21
5.3 The first period of processing and reworking empirical material 28
5.4 The second field trip to Durban 29
5.5 The second period of processing material 33
5.5.1 Producing the ethnography 33
5.5.2 Writing the ethnographic retellings 34
5.5.3 Working with the visual material 37
5.5.4 Grouping the visual material into themes 39
6 Theoretical Framework and Previous Research 41
6.1 Art education and the environment 42
6.2 Posthumanist writing strategies 42
6.3 Posthumanist ethnography 43
6.4 Design and creativity 44
6.5 Posthumanist educational research 46
7 Analysis 46
7.1 Noticing 46
7.2 Correspondences 47
7.3 Progress narratives 50
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7.4 Making up the world 52
7.5 Contamination 53
8 Discussion 55
8.1 Holding art workshops 56
8.2 Insights about the field 57
8.3 Discussion of methods 61
8.4 Complexity and Art education 63
8.5 Final comments 64
Bibliography 66
Printed sources 66
Unprinted sources 67
Images 67
Internet sources 71
Appendix 72
Visual essays 72
Promotional material 75
5 1 Introduction
“Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things”.2
Through my way of writing and choice of subjects, I try to convey some of the themes that my project deals with, among them, storytelling, and productive groupings of heterogenous elements. This is intended to give a sense of my subject: relationships and their complex, precarious nature.
1.1 Prologue
In this section, I situate my field of research in its geographical context, and explain my personal connection to the area. I introduce work I’ve done in my professional life, where I’ve put posthumanist ideas to use in my art workshops, before broadly outlining my research interests. I conclude the section by imagining how my research field might appear in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, current at the time of writing, drawing in themes that feature in my study, including memory, temporary groupings and a focus on the living world.
Looking at the coastal South African city of Durban on a map, Bulwer Park and the KwaZulu- Natal Society of the Arts, or KZNSA, are represented by two triangles adjacent to each other.
The KZNSA is an arts complex that includes a gift shop, gallery and workshop space, a café, garden and playground.
2 Ovid, and Martin, C. (2004). Metamorphoses. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. cited in Powers, R. (2018). The Overstory: A Novel. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, p. 117.
3 de Beer, M (2020). Screengrab from Google Maps. Property of the author.
4 de Beer, M (2020). Screengrab from Google Maps with circle added. Property of the author.
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I was born near Bulwer Park and went to school in the area. While growing up in Durban, recently voted the greenest city in the world by Husqvarna, I enjoyed spending time in nature reserves, parks and the Botanic Gardens.5 Having qualified as an art teacher, I currently live and work in Sweden. Some of my recent art workshops have had to do with environmental concerns. In this example, participants group themselves into humans and trees. The trees tell the little humans what they need in order to be able to perform a specific task, like painting a picture: maybe they need arms, access to an easel and so on.
Besides working with the concept of other living things experiencing the world in different ways from people, I’d hoped to convey a sense of the researcher Nathan Snaza’s ideas about mutuality and reciprocity.8 My intention was to raise awareness of the notion of taking care of each other; that the relationship between humans and the natural world can be understood as an exchange; that people and the environment are connected, even intertwined.
My interest in relationships between humans and the living world continued through my postgraduate and undergraduate studies. At the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, I went on two field trips to Durban, that resulted in the ethnography that forms part of this project. At the time of writing, different meetings and connections from the ones I experienced during those visits are certainly happening there, because of restrictions related to the ongoing pandemic that prevent people from going outside for long periods of time.
I wonder how it would be to visit Bulwer Park and the KZNSA now, three months later. The coming together and drawing apart, the makeshift associations, must all have changed. I’m
5 Durban is world’s greenest city according to Husqvarna’s new AI solution and index.
https://forestry.co.za/durban-is-worlds-greenest-city-according-to-husqvarnas-new-ai-solution-and-index/
Accessed 2020-05-08.
6 de Beer, M. (2019). Becoming a tree: workshop documentation. Property of the author.
7 de Beer, M. (2019). A tree and some humans collaborate on a painting: workshop documentation. Property of the author.
8 Snaza, N. & Weaver, J. (ed.) (2015). Posthumanism and Educational Research. London: Routledge, pp. 27-28.
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tempted to write, must all be gone, but that wouldn’t be telling the whole story. I’m sure that there is still movement, activity and bustle, but this will be happening with many of the people out of the picture. Hadedas will still be rooting with their long beaks in the thick- bladed grass of Bulwer Park. Trees will be slowly entwining themselves with other trees. A sweet smell of rot will be filling the air from the small yellow fruit on the grass. Lengths of wire and beads will be lying in the shade of a tree. The air will be sticky and warm. Walls will still be dusted with red earth; termites and ants will be burrowing, and sand will be
accumulating underground, threatening to prevent water from draining from the park during heavy thunderstorms.
Perhaps memories begin to fill the spaces opened up by the near-absence of people. Arborists pulling down branches using ropes and machetes. A couple of sculptors sitting side by side on upturned buckets, crafting flowers from beads and wire. A curious figure, stalking through the grass, collecting odds and ends in an old purple basket. Taxi drivers relaxing in the shade, eating fried chicken from plastic boxes. Memories like these flicker past like the slight presence of a dove on gnarled limbs.
1.2 Background
In this section, I introduce two projects, entitled African Robots and Threads, by other artists and researchers who work with themes related to my interests. I go on to mention a
retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery, current at the time of writing, dealing with relationships between humans and trees, and relate these projects to ideas expressed by the author Richard Powers, the researchers Affrica Taylor and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, and the biologist Merlin Sheldrake. The examples and ideas that I present here are only a small portion of many scholarly articles, stories and other creative endeavours that reflect the current heightened awareness of our complex relationships with other people and with the natural world that the environmental crisis has provoked.
Artist, academic and curator Ralph Borland has collaborated with Zimbabwean wire artists to produce sculptures with mechanical components, as part of a project entitled African Robots.10 The first prototype wire robot was based on a bird that can be found around
9 Borland, R. (2017). African Robots & Spacecraft: An Overview.
https://africanrobots.net/downloads/AfricanRobots_SpaceCraft_overview.pdf Accessed 2020-04-26.
10 Ibid.
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the pavements in Cape Town where wire artists sit and work, the red-winged starling. These artists typically use cheap fencing wire to make their sculptures. Electronic elements, in the form of second-hand phone parts, were integrated with wire elements to build the robots. As mobile technology rapidly changed, the robots started to be made with components salvaged from old toys produced in China. The project seems to facilitate and make apparent complex meetings and connections: networks of expatriate wire artists intersect with networks of informal electronics dealers; pavement artists coexist with starlings, and hand-made wire sculptures meet factory-made toys from China.
This idea of portability, where aspects of a system are taken away and re-used in other
contexts, can be found in another project which also involves the combination of hand-crafted elements and everyday technology. Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl, both artists and
researchers, developed a project called Threads, which they describe as a mobile sewing circle: mobile in the sense of being easy to pack up and move around and in that it makes use of mobile phone technology.11 In some versions, an embroidery machine is linked to a mobile phone, so that SMSs sent to the phone are embroidered by the machine. In others, participants sit together and embroider SMS messages by hand. Lindström and Ståhl were interested in finding out what kinds of knowledge can be produced in relationship, in meetings among people, machines and material. Another aspect of their interest was in the sorts of groupings that result when people make things together, without a specific agenda, during temporary gatherings of participants.12 Writer Donna Haraway’s recommendation to “stay with the trouble” is understood by Ståhl and Lindström as an encouragement to not try to resolve an issue or situation, and instead to be aware of complexity.13
Both Threads and African Robots seem to contribute to awareness of the complexity of relationships through a focus on productive groupings. In a virtual tour of the current
exhibition at the Hayward Gallery at London, Among the Trees, the gallery’s director, Ralph Rugoff, says that the exhibition gives a sense of “human culture being intertwined with tree culture” – of the complexity of relationships between humans and the natural world.14
11 Lindström, K. & Ståhl, Å. (2014). Patchworking Publics-in-the-Making: Design, Media and Public Engagement. Diss. Malmö University, p. 17.
12 Ibid., p. 22.
13 Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 1. In Lindström & Ståhl, p. 120.
14 Among the Trees: A virtual tour | Hayward Gallery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrjzLLPDITc Accessed 2020-05-18.
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For Richard Powers, the idea of the living world and humanity being separate is a recent one, that he attributes to technological developments causing us to believe that we’re not
dependent parts of a community. Powers explains how much of the history of humanity has had to do with dependence on other living things.15 He describes ways in which Indigenous stories and classical works, like the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, give a sense of porous, and less rigid, boundaries between people and the natural world. Powers believes that our current sense of separation or disconnection has led to a belief in human exceptionalism, of being set apart from the rest of the natural world, and that this is a direct cause of the current ecological crisis.16 Affrica Taylor and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw describe how small encounters, and their “micro-effects” – between starlings and pavement artists, between humans and trees, among participants in temporary sewing circles – have significance in that they are part of and perform “macro-politics”, the bigger picture of how we are situated in a dynamic web of relationships.17 According to Merlin Sheldrake, curiosity about organisms other than ourselves, and their relationships to each other, can lead to increased awareness of the relationships that we have with one another and to the rest of the natural world.18
Awareness of complexity has, for all of these thinkers, become of ethical importance at this time of environmental crisis.
1.3 Aim
Against this background, my aim with this project is to contribute with specific knowledge about how holding art workshops can explore the complexity of relationships and so lead to increased awareness and understanding of social and environmental issues.
1.4 Question
My question for this study is then: How can the complexity of relationships be explored through holding art workshops?
15 Kinship, Community, and Consciousness: An Interview with Richard Powers
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/kinship-community-and-consciousness/ Accessed 2020-04-09.
16 Ibid.
17 Taylor, A. and Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2019). The Common Worlds of Children and Animals: Relational Ethics for Entangled Lives. Oxon: Routledge, p. 5.
18 A live interview with Merlin Sheldrake about his new book Entangled Life
https://www.facebook.com/ScienceAndNonduality/videos/949036565549710/UzpfSTY2MTA0NzQ0NjoxMDE 1Njg0NzY2NTU1NzQ0Nw/ Accessed 2020-05-15.
10 2 Choice of material
I begin this section with an origin story for my postgraduate work, that, in keeping with researcher Helene Illeris’ ideas, extends critical engagement to concern about the natural environment.19 I describe encounters with books and authors which led to my interest in posthumanist theory. I go on to discuss some of my earlier projects and the influence that they had on this current work. After this, I give an idea of how my fieldwork in South Africa developed. I introduce concepts that I discuss later on, such as generativity, the Deleuzo- Guattarian conceptual framework, marginality and the idea of correspondences.
When I was trying to understand which topic of research I wanted to follow in my postgraduate studies, I wrote to my friend Talitha, who had recently finished her own Masters’ project, working with students in tertiary education in India, and asked her for advice. She replied, “Could you at all find your topic in South Africa or Work with Refugees?
Something like that. Something current and difficult and kind”.20 She went on to explain that, in her view, education is about equality, and that a project with a focus “within the
privileged”, in her view, becomes ineffectual – “what’s the point of it?”21
I tried to understand what kind meant to her and came away from our conversation with the idea that it meant having a critical focus or being socially engaged. Considerations like these were at the back of my mind as I began my own postgraduate studies. What seemed most kind for me, at the beginning of 2019, was to focus on the ongoing climate crisis and what sort of effect it might be having on Art education. Finding Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble in the library, and subsequently watching a documentary about her called Storytelling for Earthly Survival led me to familiarise myself with other writing at the intersection of posthumanism and education.
Besides the posthumanist concepts that I was putting to work in my weekly art workshops, I conducted three ethnographic investigations before settling on my final project. First, I interviewed the gardener at a local primary school, talking to him about his relationship with his favourite tree, and following him around as he emptied birdhouses in preparation for spring. The second project involved participant observation in a local community garden: I
19 Illeris, H. (2012). “Nordic contemporary art education and the environment: Constructing an epistemological platform for Art Education for Sustainable Development (AESD) Information”. Nordic Journal of Art and Research. 1:2, pp. 81-82.
20 de Beer, M. (2018). Private correspondence with Talitha 2018-04-11. Property of the author.
21 Ibid.
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volunteered there once a week over a period of three months and took photographs. I became interested in how the phenomenon of groups of people working together, growing vegetables, and improving the soil using organic methods, could be understood in relation to the climate crisis. I started to read Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw’s ideas during this time; this reading, the work I was doing and the process of taking photographs helped me to become more alert to the diverse encounters going on there. The project in the garden led to my increased
awareness of and interest in the subjects of community and ecology. During my third project, I held a series of painting workshops with young people enrolled in a course where they learned about community living and leadership skills.
Not long after this, in late December 2019 and early January 2020, I visited South Africa and had the opportunity of holding two art workshops at the KZNSA. I didn’t immediately understand that this new project in Durban could form part of my research: this understanding emerged as I was preparing for and holding the workshops. When I went on to process the material that resulted from my documentation from this period, new directions suggested themselves.
I realised that I didn’t have a sufficiently clear photograph of an artwork in Bulwer Park, the You First Then Me mural. On my return to Durban, I started paying close attention to this painting and became interested in the area around it. I started to notice the tree that shades the area in the middle of the day, where a local sculptor sits and works, often with others. Talking to him, I learned that he had come to South Africa from Zimbabwe as a refugee. He told me about his love of nature, and the importance that he attaches to the living world, to trees and birds.
A generative aspect seems to be present throughout this short account of my choice of informants, of my field of study, and of the data that resulted: elements give rise to other elements.23 One way to structure this account could be to set it in a circular form, starting with
22 de Beer, M. (2019). Dog next to a compost heap at Under Tallarna garden. Property of the author.
23 Taylor, C. & Hughes, C. (2016). Posthuman Research Practices in Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 7.
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Talitha’s advice, to be kind, to work with refugees, to go back to South Africa, through my projects with the gardeners and the students learning about community living and then towards South Africa and a sculptor who spends his working days making birds and animals out of wire to sell to passers-by.
Writing in a top-down fashion like this creates a challenge when it comes to suggesting the connections and intersections between the elements of my research, and can only partially tell the story. Listening to the gardener at the local school talk about his relationship with the tree outside his cabin led me to think about the tree in my parents’ garden; the project caused me to pay more attention to trees in general; working with him led me to an increased interest in Nathan Snaza’s ideas about the role that school gardens can play in augmenting learning.24 Working with an informant who was marginal to the field of study, the gardener, instead of one of the teachers at the school, was something I continued in this project, where I preferred to interview people on the unruly edges25 of the field: pavement artists and labourers, and not the KZNSA gallery staff.26
Encounters took place, not only with trees and people, but also with books and ideas:
connections suggested themselves during the course of my studies. Visiting Tensta Konsthall, a gallery in Stockholm, with a friend, I found the author Anna Tsing’s A Mushroom at the End of the World in the bookshop there. Other stories include how involving participants in
my painting workshops through the use of a shared log book led to me using a log book in my work at the KZNSA.
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychotherapist Felix Guattari use the rhizome as a productive figure for thinking about relationships, implying open-ended connections among
heterogenous elements, with no single element being privileged over others.28 While I agree that this can be understood as a rhizomatic way of looking at the account of my choice of material, other, similar figures also come to mind. The structure of the story of my project in
24 Snaza, N. & Weaver, J. (ed.) (2015). Posthumanism and Educational Research. London: Routledge.
25 Tsing, A.L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, p. 20.
26 Aull Davies, C. (2008). Reflexive ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others. Oxford:
Routledge, p. 90.
27 Leminen, V. (2019). Mostyn holding a copy of The Mushroom at the End of the World. Property of the author.
28 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, p. 7.
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Durban is not that dissimilar from the phenomena I observed among the trees in Bulwer Park, where one tree may grow in the crook of another tree’s branches, extending roots downwards, so that two or more trees can be growing on one trunk. Attention to the natural and built environments can lead to forms and patterns suggesting themselves, and this awareness may make it easier to see connections among elements.29
30 31
2.2 Ethical considerations
In carrying out my fieldwork, I have followed the principles of information, consent, confidentiality and appropriate use.32 The three workshop participants that I interviewed all agreed to be involved after I gave details about my project. I told my other informants, the sculptor and the arborist, that I lived overseas and was writing about the area, and both were willing to talk to me. I have anonymised all photographs that show people other than me, and avoid using my informants’ names; my friend Talitha gave me permission to use her first name. I have not used any details about my informants outside of this study.
29 Kinship, Community, and Consciousness: An Interview with Richard Powers
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/kinship-community-and-consciousness/ Accessed 2020-04-09.
30 de Beer, M. (2020). Tree near the playground in Bulwer Park. Property of the author.
31 de Beer, M. (2020). Drawing of a tree in Bulwer Park in pen and orange crayon. Property of the author.
32 Codex: reglar och riktlinjer för forskning. http://www.codex.vr.se/index.shtml Accessed 2020-05-27.
14 3 Empirical material
My empirical material consists of:
• Photographs taken during the field trips
• Field notes in digitised form
• Drawings and sketches from the field trips, also digitised
• Transcripts from interviews
• Photographs taken by workshop participants and by interview subjects
• Photographs taken during my teenage years, digitised
• Digitised images of writing produced as a teenager, as well as other documents from this time
• A log book kept by participants, also digitised
• A record that I kept of how I processed my material
• An ethnography based on the visual and written material
4 Method
In this section, I give an idea of how ethnography and posthumanist methods can increase understanding of variation and complexity through the generation of more knowledge, with particular reference to visual and reflexive ethnography. I relate these methods to Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual framework, and introduce the method of collective biography.
4.1 Generative methods
The term ethnography may refer both to the research method and to the written product of research. Ethnography uses qualitative methods to give the reader a thorough sense of the place being studied and an understanding of ethnographer’s ongoing process of creating meaning, both in and out of the field. Qualitative methods can include interviewing and participant observation; the researcher usually keeps field notes, including descriptive detail.33 A generative strategy, as the scholar Carol Taylor shows, has the potential to open up new and unexpected areas of knowledge.34 In Taylor’s account, humanist research involves maintaining an attitude of separation, with the researcher keeping themselves unaffected by
33 Aull Davies, C. (2008). Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others. New York:
Routledge, p. 4.
34 Taylor, C. & Hughes, C. (2016), p. 7.
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their field.35 By contrast, the posthumanist researcher has a flexible attitude, and is open to changing circumstances and impermanent, coincidental and accidental arrangements.
As the educational researchers Adrian Martin and George Kamberis explain, Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual framework can be useful as a way of getting at the complexity of
“interactions, events and institutions”.36 Taylor also shows how their notion of the rhizome can be applied to posthuman research, with knowledge being regarded as a network of connections. The focus is on how knowledge works, and what it does; on facilitating, not on limiting; and on producing more life, not less.37 Deleuze and Guattari elaborate six
characteristics of their rhizomatic approach, which seem relevant to my discussion of ethnography and posthumanist research methods.
Their vision of the rhizome is of a structure comprised of lines and nodal points. All nodes must be connected in some way, and any node can be connected to any other node: they refer to these characteristics as the principles of connection and heterogeneity.38 Instead of
conceiving of a project, an ethnography or a field of study as having a clearly demarcated beginning, middle and end, this model makes it possible to begin right in the midst of things.
This situation of being in the midst of things, as opposed to being in the middle, allows for movement: a middle point is after all a fixed point.39 The lines of a rhizomatic structure are always proliferating, and this is in keeping with the third principle, the principle of
multiplicity, which can be understood as a celebration of plurality and diversity, and in opposition to an epistemological model that is static or totalising.40 More proliferation and growth in unexpected directions can occur as a result of the fourth principle, the principle of asignifying rupture. The lines of the rhizome can come apart, or break, at any point, and the structure reforms itself around these disruptions: new lines can grow, or the rhizome can continue along the old lines. Situations can change, unexpected events can occur; new directions can suggest themselves.
Ethnography doesn’t aim at making exact copies of the field but at producing versions of the researcher’s experience of reality. The fifth and sixth principles of decalcomania and
35 Taylor, C. & Hughes, C. (2016), p. 10.
36 Martin, A. & Kamberelis, G. (2013). “Mapping not tracing: qualitative educational research with political teeth”. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26:6, pp. 670-671.
37 Taylor, C. & Hughes, C. (2016), p. 10.
38 Martin, A. & Kamberelis, G. (2013), pp. 670–671.
39 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987), pp. 5–8.
40 Martin, A. & Kamberelis, G. (2013), pp. 670–671.
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cartography - tracings and maps - can be productive here. The ethnographer isn’t concerned with making tracings or copies because these imply representations that may be fixed, static and immobile, that rely on the belief that a pre-existing deep structure can be discovered and represented.41 Instead they make maps, and the metaphor of the map suggests mobility and openness to change and variation, as well as the possibility of experimentation with the material. Maps and tracings can work together in a productive way: Deleuze and Guattari recommend that the “tracing should always be put back onto the map”.42 The superimposed tracing may reveal the lines of articulation, the “dominant discursive and material forces” – while the underlying map can give an idea of forces that have been “elided, marginalised, or ignored altogether” as well as forces that have the potential to transform or change reality:
lines of flight.43
For the ethnographer, the generation of knowledge, or making a map, is of greater concern than the collection of data - tracing. Ethnographic research is characterised by a continual circling movement: from the field of research, towards the researcher, and back to the field, before returning to the researcher again, referred to by the author Charlotte Aull Davies as reflexivity.44 She shows that this back-and-forth movement of continual reflection aims to come at an increased understanding of the world outside the researcher. Theories, practices and methods are constantly being tried out, applied and evaluated, and new ideas and directions emerge. Analysis may be ongoing and is not necessarily a separate stage in the research process. Through constant theorising and analysis, and through their ways of relating to their informants, the researcher constructs their observation.
As Aull Davies explains, during ethnographic fieldwork, the researcher maintains a continual awareness that any insights that arise are a product of their own consciousness. The
researcher’s awareness of changes and transformations that happen to them during this process is an integral part of the reflexive process: through carefully documenting these inner changes, they can gain more knowledge of the field. For the same reason, the researcher is aware of the changes that they are causing to the field through being there, and to how their feelings change about their subjects of research. The ethnographer affects and is affected by the place, the people, and the rest of the living and non-living world that they encounter
41 Martin, A. & Kamberelis, G. (2013), pp. 670–671.
42 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987), pp. 5–8.
43 Martin, A. & Kamberelis, G. (2013), pp. 670–671.
44 Aull Davies. (2008), p. 7.
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there.45 The researcher reflects on their own socio-cultural position: their biography, experiences and identities become important during research, because it is through these existing experiences that the experiences of others can be understood. They sustain an
awareness both of how they are situated within the research context, and of how others situate them: how others construct and understand the researcher’s identities.46
An awareness of ethics plays an important role in posthuman research; posthuman ethics is often regarded as an ethics of relationships. Taylor makes the point that it isn’t about trying to imagine what it’s like to be a tree or a cat, because this implies separation and intactness. A posthuman attitude towards relationships has to do with a sense of permeability and dynamic connection.47 Affrica Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw draw attention to Donna Haraway’s emphasis on the use of the word with, which for them places the emphasis on collaboration, in the sense of researching with, or “becoming with”. This formulation expresses Haraway’s insistence that “no species acts alone”.48
The research field can be regarded as made up of complex, accidental and temporary arrangements, familiar from the Deleuzo-Guattarian conceptual framework, that can be referred to as assemblages.49 Taylor shows that thinking in terms of assemblages enables acknowledging relationships and connections, not only among people, but also among
“objects, bodies and materialities”.50 Paying attention to groupings like these is a way for the researcher to increase their awareness of the diversity among the components. Trees and people, for example, differ in terms of relationships to time and space.
Anna Tsing emphasises the indeterminacy and open-endedness of assemblages: some parts of an assemblage “just happen to find themselves in the same place”.51 They are in flux, and encounters with other parts of assemblages can generate new ways of being. Unintentional patterns can arise in these groupings. Thinking in terms of assemblages may alter the researcher’s way of looking at research: posthumanist research can become an invitation to
45 Aull Davies. (2008), pp. 91–92.
46 Ibid.
47 Taylor, C. & Hughes, C. (2016), p. 3.
48 Taylor, A and Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2019), p. 15.
49 Taylor, C. & Hughes, C. (2016), p. 2.
50 Ibid.
51 Tsing, A.L. (2015), p. 21.
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experiment and to be inventive, to test adding new things into temporary mixes, and to create with what is to hand.52
Powers describes the joy he feels when readers write to him and tell him that they have started looking at the world differently because of reading his book: that the world has become more interesting to them now, and less homogenous.53 As Taylor explains, paying attention to the living world, and not just the human aspect, is a feature of posthumanist research methods.
Through widening our focus of attention, anthropocentric thinking can be shifted.54
In her discussion of visual ethnography, the researcher Sarah Pink elaborates this notion of widening focus. She shows how, in their striving after increased understanding of the research context, the researcher may concern themselves with all aspects of lived reality, material and immaterial: with everything that can be observed and recorded, including sensory
experiences, feelings and associations, dreams and visual images.55 The ethnographer is encouraged to use a variety of methods to increase their awareness, including writing, sketching, filming and taking photographs. As Pink explains, visual material is made in relation with the surroundings; visual ethnography can be understood to be generative in that it may lead the researcher in unexpected directions. Paying attention to the visual practices of the subjects of research, through, for example, lending the camera to them, or looking at the photographs and drawings that they produce, may, as Pink shows, offer new insights into the researcher’s understanding of their subjects.56 The acts of walking around, carrying a camera, or sitting and drawing may cause the ethnographer to become increasingly engaged in life around them. Methods like this can help the researcher pay sustained attention to aspects of the field; Tsing has written about this “commitment to observation and fieldwork” that she terms noticing, with particular reference to drawing.57
Posthumanist researchers recognise and celebrate the idea that we can never apprehend the whole truth; research and its effects are indeterminate, and researchers are always “asking questions and more questions”.58 An understanding like this can lead to discussion about the efficacy of ethnography as a method of research. Aull Davies evaluates ethnography in terms
52 Taylor, C. & Hughes, C. (2016), p. 18.
53 Kinship, Community, and Consciousness: An Interview with Richard Powers
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/kinship-community-and-consciousness/ Accessed 2020-04-09.
54 Taylor, C. & Hughes, C. (2016), p. 2
55 Pink, S. (2013). Doing Visual Ethnography. London: SAGE Publications Ltd., p. 8.
56 Ibid., p. 84.
57 Tsing, A.L. (2015), p. 159.
58 Taylor, C. & Hughes, C. (2016), p. 3.
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of validity, generalisability and reliability.59 For her, ethnographic studies cannot be
consistent with other ethnographies carried out in the same field, due to the reflexive nature of the method, so the criteria of reliability needs to be re-evaluated. In her view, ethnography can be regarded as a valid form of research because of the variety of methods typically used, and the ethnographer’s facility in dealing with interactions on other people’s terms. She concludes that theories generated during ethnographic research may be generalised, if not statistical data from specific studies.60
4.2 Collective biography and storytelling
Aull Davies is careful to draw a distinction between ethnography and fiction. While acknowledging that any ethnography is deeply personal, she feels that if the ethnographer freely makes things up, this could bring ethnography into disrepute.61 On the other hand, researcher Bronwyn Davies makes the point that moments that have passed can never be relived, and that our memories are unreliable.62 She describes a technique that she developed called collective biography which involves workshops where people work together to help remember episodes from the past. In my understanding of her method, participants are first given a concept to think about as preparation, and in the workshop discuss somatic memories or physical sensations that this concept evokes for them. The participants help each other remember, asking questions and trying to fill in blanks, until they come up with something resembling “the moment as it was lived”.63
In my ethnography, I was inspired by this technique: I was careful to document sensory and somatic experiences - the smell of rot, the feeling of insects biting my wrist - so that when I later came to write my account, I was better able to remember what I had experienced.
Another aspect of this was keeping a concept in mind during my fieldwork: while focussing on the complexity of relationships, I was thinking about the idea of connection, and this helped me to direct my attention.
While agreeing with Aull Davies’ idea that it can be better to keep ethnography and fiction separate, I’m also sympathetic to Bronwyn Davies’ view that memory is fallible, that we all remember things in our own ways, and that the researcher’s thoughts, motivations and
59 Aull Davies. (2008), pp. 96–101.
60 Ibid., p. 104.
61 Aull Davies. (2008), p. 262.
62 Davies, B. & Gannon, S. (ed.) (2006). Doing Collective Biography. Berkshire: Open University Press, pp. 1–2.
63 Ibid., p. 3.
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intentions aren’t always clear to them. Ethnographic writing can only ever be a version or approximation of the truth, and so could be regarded as approaching something like
storytelling.64 In my ethnography, I sometimes include more than one version of events. I also write most of my account in the present tense. My use of the ethnographic present, far from suggesting that the field is static and unchanging, is intended to give an idea of how memory can colour the events of the present moment.65
5 Fieldwork and Processing
In this section, I introduce the different phases of my project, before going into more detail about the stages of fieldwork and processing. I present examples of my visual material, and show how I put it to use.
5.1 Beginnings
“How could it begin once only? That doesn’t seem sensible”.66
A few alternatives suggest themselves to me when I try to start telling the story of how I came to conduct research with the KZNSA and Bulwer Park. In one story, I find some round seed pods under a tree in Bulwer Park that I pick up and use in the sculptures I’m making with the jacaranda tree in my parents’ garden. In another story, I’m having tea with my mother at the KZNSA, and I notice children taking photographs in a little workshop space at the top of a staircase, in front of a glass wall looking out onto Bulwer Park. In a third story, I’m passing by the outskirts of Bulwer Park and I see a group of sculptors working with wire, sitting in a circle and chatting.
None of these are the definitive version of how the project came to be and they all contain aspects of the truth. I didn’t go to Durban with the intention of holding a research project; a project grew that was in keeping with the research interests that had developed during my other postgraduate projects. A glass wall separates the workshop area in the KZNSA from Bulwer Park, and this situation invited an interest in the surrounding area: I saw two lively, dynamic places adjacent to each other and yet kept apart.
After six weeks had passed, during which time I processed the material from the first period of fieldwork, I returned to Durban for a visit. I returned to conduct more research, as a follow-
64 Davies, B. & Gannon, S. (ed.) (2006), p. 2; Aull Davies. (2008), p. 18.
65 Aull Davies. (2008), p. 14.
66 Le Guin, U. (2019). Always Coming Home. New York: Penguin Random House Inc., p. 191.
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up project that processing the empirical material had suggested to me in the interim. I went back to Durban, and new trails opened themselves to me.
After leaving Durban for the second time, I started to think of the project as having had four phases:
1. The first field trip: preparing for the workshops, holding the workshops, photographing, making notes, holding interviews with workshop participants, processing material while in the field.
2. The first period of processing and reworking empirical material while away from the field.
3. The second trip to South Africa: interviewing, writing field notes, drawing, taking photographs.
4. The second period of processing and reworking empirical material after leaving the field.
5.2 The first field trip
This account describes my first stages of research and processing. My interest in situating my workshops in a context – setting the scene - leads to an exploration of new areas suggested during the processing work.
In late December 2019, I asked the staff at the KZNSA if I could hold art workshops there, and they agreed. They advertised the events on their website and in the gallery and I held two
workshops over a weekend in mid-January 2020. Around twenty people came to the first workshop, and half that number to the second. I documented the workshops and the preparations for the workshops mainly through taking photographs, and made a log book available for the participants to write and draw in, which many did. I kept limited field notes during the course of the workshops. I conducted unstructured interviews with three of the participants: at the end of the first workshop, I had a conversation with one participant, a woman in her twenties, and then with two other participants, a couple; at the end of the
67 de Beer, M. (2020). Writing in my notebook. Property of the author.
67
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second workshop, I spoke to the couple again. During all of these interviews, I wrote down what the participants were saying in a little soft-covered notebook that I’d purchased locally.
Immediately after each workshop, I coded the visual material, transcribed the interviews, and coded what the interview subjects had said. During this period, I also coded the other visual documentation I’d made during the preparations for the workshop. In my analysis of my material, I make extensive use of these processes of coding: of grouping the empirical material into categories. As Aull Davies writes, this is “a well-established ethnographic analytical practice”.68 For me, coding is a way of familiarising myself with the photographs, transcribed statements, and other material. As the philosopher Gillian Rose puts it, attaching codes to visual material allows the researcher to compare photographs. From this first comparison, new codes may begin to emerge.69 Going through the material soon after producing it with a view to putting it into categories in this way invites me to look at it more closely: I become more alert to differences, similarities, and other nuances. The process helps me to notice details and become aware of complexity. I avoid thinking for too long about which codes I need; I try not to have too many codes at the beginning, and work quickly, ideally experiencing a state of collaborating with the material. I made several folders on my computer in preparation for working through the photographs. I started with the photographs I’d taken during visits to Bulwer Park, mainly while I was gathering material to use in the workshops, dividing them into categories: Fallen material, People, Relationship with the KZNSA, Sand, Surroundings and Trees. Relationship with the KZNSA, for example, showed how the building is situated relative to the park. There was some overlap between People and Trees, as, for example, some visitors to the park may have been sleeping under the trees.
I made the category, Sand, because we worked with sand in the second
workshop, and so I wanted to have some photographs of what sand looks like in Durban. I included images of termites and ants, rotted stumps of trees
68 Aull Davies. (2008), p. 245.
69 Rose, G. (2016). Visual Methodologies: A Guide to Researching with Visual Materials. London: SAGE Publications Ltd., p. 302.
70 de Beer, M. (2020). Municipal workers sleeping under a tree in Bulwer Park. Property of the author.
70
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covered with sand, and what I’d later realise was the opening of a drainage system, blocked with sand.
I divided up the collection, Surroundings, into Context and Outskirts. The Outskirts folder included images of buildings and vegetation around the park: the photographs are taken while in the park and facing outwards.
73 74
Context documented a walk I’d taken from the café across the road, past the area where the You First Then Me mural is situated and towards the KZNSA. I photographed local street life and the buildings nearby.
75 76
71 de Beer, M. (2020). Sand blocking the drainage system in Bulwer Park. Property of the author.
72 de Beer, M. (2020). Rotting branch in Bulwer Park. Property of the author.
73 de Beer, M. (2020). Outskirts of Bulwer Park, Helen Joseph Rd. Property of the author.
74 de Beer, M. (2020). Outskirts of Bulwer Park, Lena Ahrens Rd. Property of the author.
75 de Beer, M. (2020). Mural on a shipping container near the KZNSA. Property of the author.
76 de Beer, M. (2020). Pedestrians near the KZNSA. Property of the author.
71 72
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This was also the first time I photographed the area where the sculptors sit in the shade of the tree.
77 78
Towards the end of the trip, I went back to the area where the mural is situated, at a time when the sculptors were sitting in a circle, working, and asked if I could photograph them.
They agreed, and this was the first contact I had with them, and the only interaction during this first field trip.
I had taken photographs of the workshop area of the KZNSA, showing the interior and how it is situated, about a fortnight before I would hold the workshops.
I documented the café and performance area, and the playground; I showed how close it is to the park, and how it is separated by a low fence. These
photographs had to do with the context: at this point I thought of the workshops as being the substance of my project, and of my other documentation as a background to the workshops.
After the workshops were over, I took photographs of elements that the interview subjects had spoken about:
trees that had been cut down outside, and
77 de Beer, M. (2020). Approach to Bulwer Park from Bulwer Rd. Property of the author.
78 de Beer, M. (2020). You First Then Me mural with cars parked in the background. Property of the author.
79 de Beer, M. (2020). Wire sculptors working together in Bulwer Park. Property of the author.
80 de Beer, M. (2020). The workshop area at the KZNSA. Property of the author.
81 de Beer, M. (2020). Café seating at the KZNSA. Property of the author.
79
80 81
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the expanse of wall that they said had once been a window. I also photographed some of the toys for sale in the shop, that were part of a project that the couple that I interviewed, a retired academic and a journalist, were involved in.
I took photographs of the KZNSA from across the road, showing the murals on the façade.
All of these photographs I grouped in one folder, Visiting the KZNSA, and I kept these separate from the photographs documenting the workshops. During this first period of field work, I also worked with the old jacaranda tree in my parents’ back garden, making paintings of it using mud and hanging sculptures from it. I collected documentation from these projects, which I came to regard as preparations for the KZNSA workshops, in a folder I called Trial paintings and sculptures.
After the first workshop, I coded the photographs I’d taken that day. There are different sorts of categorisations. On one level, I follow a chronology: here you can find folders with names like Afterwards, Making the mobiles and Preparation. Another level shows events that
happened during the workshops: Working outside, Hanging in the Window, Writing in the logbook, Interactions. I included a folder called YouTube video, showing one of the
participants using her phone as a reference when making her sculpture. A third level shows material and context: Surroundings and fence, and Raw material, for example. I grouped photographs from the interviews in separate folders. Finally, I included photographs of the pages of the Log book, and the Promotional material that the gallery had set up around the building.
82 de Beer, M. (2020). View from the parking lot at the KZNSA, showing a tree stump. Property of the author.
83 de Beer, M. (2020). Toys for sale at the KZNSA. Property of the author.
84 de Beer, M. (2020). Participant working on her mobile. Property of the author.
82 83
84
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After coding the photographs, I transcribed my written notes onto my laptop. I’d written quickly, while the participants were talking, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to decipher what I’d written if I left it too late. I put the statements into Excel documents and grouped them into codes. Sample codes were: Ideas about art in Africa, Reflections on the interview itself, Instructions on what I should focus on, Their creative universe. I also transcribed other notes I’d made during the workshops and didn’t code them.
Besides giving me a broad familiarity with the material, all of this work of coding and
transcribing, done immediately after the workshops, gave me ideas about what material might be useful for me to gather when other opportunities presented themselves. For example, I realised I would like a picture taken from the café area of the KZNSA looking up to the workshop area, so I took a series of photographs from this point of view early in the day before my second workshop began. I took more photographs of elements that the interview participants had referred to, including the exterior walls of the building, imagining that these might be useful if I were to decide to include their ideas in my study.
I coded the photographs from the second workshop in a similar way to the photographs from the first: chronologically, showing specific events, and focussing on material and
85 de Beer, M. (2020). Page from the logbook 1. Property of the author.
86 de Beer, M. (2020). Page from the logbook 2. Property of the author.
87 de Beer, M. (2020). Promotional material at the KZNSA. Property of the author.
88 de Beer, M. (2020). Stairs leading up to the workshop area at the KZNSA. Property of the author.
89 de Beer, M. (2020). View of the workshop space at the KZNSA taken from outside. Property of the author.
85 86 87
88 89
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surroundings. I was particularly pleased with the sequence I’d photographed showing one of the participants interacting with passers-by on the other side of the window, because it suggested a dialogue between the two spaces.
I also transcribed the long interview I’d held with the couple after the second workshop and left the coding until later due to time constraints. Before I left, I took some more photographs of the area, including the photograph of the wire sculptors. It struck me that the sculptors were sitting together, working and chatting, much as we had done during the workshops: holding the workshops had led me to become more interested in the sculptors, and to my asking them if I could photograph them.
90 de Beer, M. (2020). Interaction 1. Property of the author.
91 de Beer, M. (2020). Interaction 2. Property of the author.
92 de Beer, M. (2020). Interaction 3. Property of the author.
93 de Beer, M. (2020). Interaction 4. Property of the author.
94 de Beer, M. (2020). Participants sitting around a table at the KZNSA. Property of the author.
95 de Beer, M. (2020). Wire sculptors working together in Bulwer Park. Property of the author.
90 91
92 93
94 95
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5.3 The first period of processing and reworking empirical material
This account describes how I dealt with my empirical material while away from the field and gives an idea of how new directions for further research suggested themselves.
I was away from the field for a month and a half. During this time, some workshop
participants uploaded images from the workshops to social media, which I downloaded and coded. I also downloaded images that my mother had emailed me documenting work I’d done with the jacaranda tree in 2018 and grouped them in same folder I had used for the trial paintings and sculptures I’d made before the workshops. Grouping the material in this way reinforced the relationship between the two projects.
I wrote about the tree and about these earlier projects. Most of my time was spent writing extensively about my experiences during the first field trip, writing from my memory, and referring to the photographic documentation and the log book. I often wrote more than one version of the same occurrence, writing about it in different ways and concentrating on different details. I also described the process of writing and the challenges I was experiencing with working with both visual memories and photographs; I regretted not having kept more extensive field notes or spending more time with the trees in Bulwer Park. I started to understand that the trees had also been an important part of the workshops and wished that I had visually documented more of the area.
96 de Beer, V. (2018). Necklaces hanging from the jacaranda tree. Property of the author.
97 Eastern Eye South Africa
https://www.facebook.com/easterneyesouthafrica/photos/pcb.2477115702411926/2477114902412006/?type=1&
theater Accessed 2020-04-21.
96 97
29 5.4 The second field trip to Durban
In this part, I describe the new shifts in focus that processing the material had set in motion. I map the course of my fieldwork during this period, which includes interviewing, work with visual methods, ongoing reflection and processing.
After six weeks, I returned to the field. This time, I spent less time at the KZNSA and far more time in Bulwer Park and the surrounding neighbourhood. The initial impetus was that I wasn’t satisfied with the photograph I had of the You First Then Me mural in Bulwer Park.
Besides the image of the sculptors, where the painting is just visible in the background, I only had one photograph of the mural from the first field trip, taken from an angle that didn’t allow for a clear view of the painting.
I liked the mural and felt that I could relate it to the spirit of my workshops;
through looking at the photographs and writing about my memories of the area, it started to emerge as an important element in my project. You First Then Me was a slogan that I could apply to the ideas of connection and co-operation that I was thinking about at the time. I also liked the way it was in the same area where the sculptors sat, working together.
In this way, I became more interested in the area around the mural and in the sculptors. I started to regularly sit in the café across the road, which gave me a view of the area. I paid attention to, wrote about and drew what I saw there.
98 de Beer, M. (2020). You First Then Me mural with parked cars in the background. Property of the author.
99 de Beer, M. (2020). Drawing of You First Then Me area showing a group of visitors. Property of the author.
100 de Beer, M. (2020). Drawing of You First Then Me area showing two sculptors. Property of the author.
98
99 100
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Through this observation, I noticed the tree near the mural. I started to take photographs of the mural and the area around it almost every day.
In many of these photographs, the mural is in shade, because it was at those times of day that the sculptors were sitting across the road, on the pavement outside Woolworths. This meant that I was able to stand in the area and take photographs without feeling that I was bothering the sculptors. When the sun was shining on the mural, they were more likely to be sitting in the shade cast by the tree; fewer of my photographs are taken at these times.
One afternoon, I went over and talked to one of the sculptors about the tree. I had two informal conversations with the sculptor, writing down his words from memory afterwards,
101 de Beer, M. (2020). The tree near the mural, with a view of sculptors sitting outside Woolworths. Property of the author.
102 de Beer, M. (2020). Shadows cast by the tree near the mural. Property of the author.
103 de Beer, M. (2020). Sculptors working behind the tree near the mural. Property of the author.
104 de Beer, M. (2020). Municipal workers under the tree near the mural. Property of the author.
105 de Beer, M. (2020). The other side of the You First Then Me mural, with a figure relaxing under the tree.
Property of the author.
106 de Beer, M. (2020). The You First Then Me area, with a figure lying in the grass nearby. Property of the author.
101 102
103 104
105 106
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and one longer interview, where he invited me to sit on an upturned bucket on the pavement next to him while we talked and I wrote down what he said in my notebook.
From time to time, we looked together at my written notes to make sure that I had understood him correctly. Looking at my notebook, I see how, after
checking with him, I changed the sentence that I had started to write,
“I get more done…” to what he had actually said, “Together, then we can do more”.
During the course of the
interview, I lent the sculptor my camera and asked him to take photographs of his favourite works, inviting him to talk about why he chose them as his
favourites.
Straight afterwards, I annotated my notes, writing down my memories of things that
happened around us during the interview, for example, about how a fly had landed on my finger while I was writing and how the sculptor had drawn attention to it, leading to him talking about dissatisfaction with the city council regarding rubbish collection. I also wrote notes reminding myself of understandings I’d had at the time about things he’d said.
Remembering that I had felt that I lacked photographs of the trees in Bulwer Park, I took the opportunity while in the field again to make sure I had a good amount of material, and this
107 de Beer, M. (2020). Page from notebook kept during the final interview with the sculptor. Property of the author.
108 Anonymous informant. (2020). The Tree of Life 2. Property of the author.
109 Anonymous informant. (2020). Rhino wire sculpture. Property of the author.
107
108 109
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meant taking many photographs in Bulwer Park, as well as making sketches. I also kept extensive field notes, sometimes visiting the park more than once a day, walking around or sitting in one place. In my field notes, I wrote down my sensory experiences: the physical sensations that I felt. I had realised in the time away from the field that this information was of value when writing my ethnographical accounts.
I talked to other people in the park: an arborist and a municipal worker who was clearing out sand that had blocked the drainage system. In a similar way to how I had become more aware of the wire sculptors, I noticed these informants while I was in the park taking photographs of trees, after I had felt that I didn’t have enough visual documentation. While documenting their work, visually and in writing, a connection with the themes of my workshops occurred to me:
working with trees, rope and fallen material, working together, and working with sand, and this made them more interesting to me.
As I mentioned, in my use of the method of collective biography, I held a concept in my mind, and, during this project, a productive concept for thinking about the complexity of relationships was connection. I started to think about my connection to Durban and the field,
about memory, and the connection between past and present.
During the time when I wasn’t in the field, I was reading, writing and processing the visual and written material. I transcribed the new interviews and conversations at the same time as I
110 de Beer, M. (2020). Page from notebook with drawing showing arborists at work. Property of the author.
111 de Beer, M. (2020). Arborists at work in Bulwer Park. Property of the author.
112 de Beer, M. (2020). Workers clearing sand from the drainage system in Bulwer Park. Property of the author.
110 111
112
