Artistic Research: Lines of Emergence
Artistic research is not always easy to pin down. For some, it may sound like an odd pairing: how can art also be research? But, for those of us working within this field, the two are inseparable. Artistic research is not simply about creating works of art and then explaining them. Rather, it is about allowing the act of creation itself to generate knowledge. As Henk Borgdorff once stated, it is “thinking-in-and-through-art”: an unfolding process in which artworks, practices, and reflections become forms of inquiry in their own right. The artwork is not just an object of study but the method of inquiry.
In my own practice, I approach this through what I call a decentred dramaturgy. Dramaturgy is often understood as the structural logic of performance – the way a play, dance, or event is composed. Traditionally, it was tied to scripts and linear narratives. But contemporary thinkers and practitioners such as Anny Mokotow and André Lepecki suggest that dramaturgy can be reimagined as a field of experimentation. In this expanded sense, dramaturgy is not about holding everything together in a neat order. Instead, it is about following lines of connection, fragmentation, and emergence.
A decentred dramaturgy resists the idea that one perspective, one text, or one logic must dominate. Instead, it brings different materials, practices, and voices into conversation without forcing them into hierarchy. In my work, one often encounters fragments from various disciplines such as performance, dance, text, movement, film, visual arts… Each fragment has its own weight and texture, but it is only in their weaving together – and their openness to re-weaving – that new insights emerge.
This also means that the body is not just an instrument of expression, but a site of knowledge. Thinkers such as Ben Spatz remind us that knowledge can live in the muscles, in rhythms, in the memory of a walk across a city. My own body, moving between South Africa and Austria, became a site where histories, privileges, and vulnerabilities collided. In this sense, artistic research is also personal and political: it unfolds in and through the lived body.
Equally central is a decolonial orientation. Scholars like Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh challenge us to question eurocentric frameworks that present themselves as universal. They speak of epistemic disobedience: the refusal to treat only western modes of knowledge as valid. Artistic research can be one such disobedient practice. By valuing plurality, relationality, and situated knowledge, it creates space for other voices and experiences to speak. This is why I often describe my practice as working at the border: the border between disciplines, the border between belonging and unbelonging, and the border between personal memory and collective history.
At times, artistic research may feel slippery to those unfamiliar with it. It does not offer a single method or outcome. Instead, it embraces process, uncertainty, and in-betweenness. Erin Manning calls this research-creation: a way of doing and thinking that unfolds together with the world in the making. For me, this means that artistic research is less about arriving at final answers and more about dwelling in questions. It is about noticing what remains – the traces, fragments, and echoes that continue to speak long after the performance ends.
So when I speak of “lines of emergence” in artistic research, I do not refer to lines that are straight or predetermined, but to lines that bend, branch, and entangle. They are lines that carry memory, that cross borders, that refuse to settle into fixed shapes. They are lines drawn by bodies, by materials, by places, and by histories. And they are lines that invite others – including you – to enter and trace your own pathways alongside them.
In this way, artistic research is not a closed field for specialists. It is an invitation to see art not just as a product, but as a way of knowing the world differently.