Tim Ingold | KFI – Knowing From the Inside project

TITLE: Tim Ingold | KFI – Knowing From the Inside project

---

WORK: Knowing From the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design (or for short, KFI) is a 5-year project funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant held by Professor Tim Ingold in the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen. It commenced in June 2013, and will run until May 2018. The KFI project aims to re-configure the relation between practices of inquiry in the human sciences and the forms of knowledge to which they give rise. Its fundamental premise is that knowledge is not created through an encounter between minds furnished with pre-formed concepts and theories, but grows from our practical and observational engagement with the world around us. Knowledge, we contend, comes from thinking with, from and through beings and things, not just about them. Our overall aim is to show how research underpinned by this premise could make a difference to the sustainability of environmental relations and to the well-being that depends on it.

The Unfinishing of Things exhibition, University of Aberdeen, May – September 2016 Things are never finished. They always overflow the ends set for them; that’s how life can carry on. If knowledge grows from practical engagement with materials, with people and with places, in what form can academic research be presented and shared with others? Alongside conventional jornal articles and books, this exhibition has been an opportunity for members of the Knowing From the Inside research project to experiment with this question. Rather than communicate polished research findings, somewhat removed from life, the focus of the works presented here is on the process of research. The exhibition was grouped around three modes of knowing with at the heart of the KFI project knowing with materials, knowing with people and knowing with place.

https://www.abdn.ac.uk/research/kfi/

---

THE GATHERING

Spring Gathering, University of Aberdeen, May 2016 The Gathering coincided with the launch of our KFI book series [link: https://knowingfromtheinside.org ], the opening of the The Unfinishing of Things and a visit from Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. We thought this would be the perfect opportunity to bring together not just the core members of the project but all those with whom we had a sustained and productive dialogue over the course of the last few years. The week did not follow the usual conference or symposium format, but instead aimed to foster an informal space to do things together, exchange ideas and discuss future collaborations.

---

MATERIALS

Learning by experiment; learning by experience One of the basic premises of the KFI project is that materials are not passive matter onto which form and meaning can simply be imposed. Rather, every material has its own particular liveliness that sets it apart; a liveliness that imposes a particular quality to working with this material that fundamentally shapes the forms into which it can be coaxed and the uses, meanings and values it takes on in human lives. It is in handling materials, in playing and experimenting with them, that this liveliness makes itself known in experience and in unfolding form. Each of the exhibits here share an interest in this liveliness and particular practices of forming and transforming that have grown in correspondence with specific materials. Every practice carries its own skills of perception, feeling, language and careful gesture that become its habit and hearth. Creativity is understood here as a verb, as something inherent to practice itself, in the ‘improvisatory movement that works things out as it goes along’ (Tim Ingold 2011).

Anne Douglas, Marc Higgin, Nicola Chambury and Paolo Maccagno // Chaoïdes Collective (Alan Vergnes, Anaïs Tondeur, Germain Meulemans, Marine Legrand; Yesenia Thibault-Picazo) // Elishka Stirton // Émile Kirsch // Francesca Marin // Jo Vergunst // Judith Winter // Liz Hodson // Rachel Harkness // Solid Liquid project (Cris Simonetti, Judith Winter, Rachel Harkness) // Stephanie Bunn.

---

PEOPLE

People: knowing by way of remembering

One of the threads running through each of the exhibits here is an interest in memory, in the process of remembering those relations from which one is woven: as anthropologists, as artists, as people. Knowing is always an encounter and dialogue, not just with those present around us but with those no longer present; no longer present but whose presence remains inscribed in our being and the world we inhabit. In their different ways, these works approach this remembering as a process of taking care: of one’s self, of others, of the land and its ways. I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.

John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 1975 Alec Finlay // Caroline Gatt // Cassis Kilian // Christine Moderbacher // Christelle Becholey-Bessonand and Claire Vionnet // Claire Delhumeau and Valeria Lemba // Emilia Ferraro // Gwich’in Social and Cultural Institute // Tim Collins and Reiko Goto // Wonderland project (Alistair Sinclair, Amanda Ravetz, Cristina Nuñez, Diane Gleave, Jayne Gosnall, Kelly Harte, Kelly Jones, Mark Prest, Michaela Jones, Nathan Aiyna-Sassen and Nikki Farrell).

 

---

PLACE

Looking, and looking again: getting to know a place

Place is not abstract space. Places are not the anonymous containers of human lives. Places are always particular; they have a character, and not in the singular sense, but character that is emerging from the many threads from which they are woven. People, then, do not live in places but through them, in continual interaction with the coming together of weather, the earth, the plants and animals, the built environment and made things, which mark out a place as distinctive. You have to get to know a place. Each of these works presents its own place, but – just as importantly – it presents its own way of getting to know this place. The use of the camera, the watercolour brush or felt-tip pen, the pen and notebook, are not just methods of description but ways of perceiving, feeling and thinking with the world. Each use of tool or method shapes and educates attention, inciting curiosity and inviting us to look, and look again. I prefer this continual interrogation on what you should see and what you shouldn’t see. This way I can show how in reality there is always a zone of mystery, an unfathomable area that to me determines the interest of the photographic image (Luigi Ghirri, Lezioni di fotografia, Lessons in Photography, 2010).

Alfonso M. Cuadrado Mulero and Ester Gisbert Alemany // Elizabeth Hallam // Enrico Marcore // Griet Scheldeman // Jennifer Clarke // Paolo Gruppuso and Simona Trozzi // Rachel Harkness // Ray Lucas