Research as Art in / as Context (2018)
By Elpida Rikou
This paper presents an outline of ten years of research projects situated between art and anthropology, which I have initiated, coordinated and participated in as both an artist and an anthropologist.
They are listed here as an example of interdisciplinary, collaborative, socially engaged art research, that took place in Athens, Greece, between 2007 and 2017, parallel to similar trends developing internationally, with the additional trait of the systematic reference to anthropology. In fact, certain methodological and theoretical aspects of anthropology and other social sciences may become useful in amplifying art’s political potential, in general and more specifically in the context of a social and economic “crisis”, as it was the case in Athens during the decade these projects developed.
Artists’ work may thus be influenced by a diversity of informed, critical, ethical and reflexive approaches to everyday “reality” as it is conceived and experienced by people who are not only artists.This resource may prove of particular interest in periods of political upheaval, extremism and despair. The reverse may also be true, i.e. reference to art practices may help to liberate a diversity of needs and ideas that seem to emerge at a collective and/or individual level inside the academy, particularly in moments of “crisis”, and which tend to remain “disciplined”, restrained by the complex network of relations between anthropology, the academy and activism.
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Citation: Rikou, Elpida. ‘Research as Art in/as Context’. Field: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism1, no. 11 (2018).
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