Centre for Cultural Partnerships - Theses

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    A non-predefined outcome (ANPO)
    Martinez Mendoza, Ramon ( 2015)
    This practice-led research is a methodological enquiry into my community-based art practice A Non-Predefined Outcome (ANPO). This was originally developed as a participatory art project to generate culturally safe spaces for people to engage in artistic and critical thinking. It was by generating these spaces of interaction (to challenge mainstream or personal cultural prejudices) that the practice became more defined and led to the development of ANPO as a methodology. The final presentation of this thesis contains two units: Unit One offers an overview of the theoretical framework that helped inform the practice and Unit Two represents the practice as methodology of this research and includes a handbook and four appendices that explain how the methodology works. The methodology is based on dialectical games where participants interact with each other as a means of developing connection and the potential for mutual understanding. The methodological enquiry consists of four task-propositions, where every task has a specific function and generates a sequence that connects participants with language and its expression through the senses in an artistic way. The first task is ‘This is not a chair’, a warm-up exercise informed by Gottlob Frege’s theory on sense and denotation. The second is ‘The Topic’, informed by Paulo Freire’s concept of generative themes and which is the proposal of the theme that will be explored during the experience. The next task, ‘Vis-á-Vis-á-Vis’, is a dialectical game designed from the three-dimensional dialectic of ‘Definition – Dialectic – Hidden Message’. This game is informed by Hegel’s dialectic, and the structuralist language theory of Saussure and Michel Foucault. The potential of overcoming the contradiction with ‘Hidden Message’ offers a critical reflexivity in three different forms, depending on the participants’ enquiry: through the exploration of the senses; through the generation of a new discourse; or through a psychological reflexivity. In the final task, ‘Dialectical Representations’, participants reflect on different possibilities to comprehend the ‘Hidden Message’ employing visual, aural, performative and gustatory tools, informed by sensory ethnography methodology. Drawing on the reflexivity of Doreen Massey’s For Space philosophy it was possible to conclude that the ANPO methodology generates spaces of interactions that are the product of interrelations wherein multiplicities and heterogeneities are negotiated. These spaces are open and constantly under construction due to their interrelations.