Creating Spaces for Reflection and Bracketing Practice
Bracketed here are the artist as twelve-year-old ballet dancer and recent self-portrait as circus performer.
The mental space occupied by thinking about and making creative work could be described as utopian; a space where the possibilities and idea of what will be created are perfect and perfected. However, like Foucault’s mirror, this reflective space where I consider previously made work, work being made and work yet to be made is also a heterotopia. This according to Foucault’s third principle ‘juxtaposes in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ (Foucault, 1986:25). Rather than reflecting on practice as ‘reflection-in/on-action’ (Schön, 1983), conceptualising reflection as a heterotopic and temporal space allows us to imagine a theatre of incompatibilities as possibilities.
Foucault, M. (1986) Of Other Spaces Translated by Miskowiec, J. Diacritics. 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22-26.
Schön, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. How professionals think in action, London: Temple Smith.
For: Nordic Summer University Circle 7 Artistic Research | Performing Heterotopia
Winter Symposium 2019 Departures, Deviations and Elsewheres
7–10 March 2019, European Humanities University, Vilnius
Joanna Neil 2019
