What do we need?
Artistic presentation and public PhD defence of 'What do we need?’, conducted by Geoffa Fells between September 2019 and September 2024 at Royal Conservatoire Antwerp and University of Antwerp (ARIA)
PROGRAM TUESDAY 3 SEPTEMBER 2024
| 16:30 - 16:50 | Artistic presentation |
| 16:50 - 17:20 | Public defence |
| 17:20 - 18:30 | Jury |
Jury members: Dr. Xandra Miguel-Lorenzo, Dr. Claudia Molitor, Dr. Marcelo Lazcano (IPC-member), Dr. Henk de Smaele (promoter UAntwerp), Dr. Thomas Moore (promoter Conservatoire), Dr. Sarah Van de Velde (chair)
ABSTRACT
Person who asks questions:
What is this PhD about??
Masha:
It’s about the fact that, because we have DID, there will be different answers to this question on different days.
Geoffa:
It’s about how I can forge a creative practice that enables me to care for myself and how a culture of care can enable under-heard, intersectional voices to be heard and shine in new music. It’s about how we have diversified facets of the neurosciences of safety (the Polyvagal Theory) including meditation, social interaction, play, and interactions with nature into modes of making, and how we’ve extended this to include empathy and care as modes of creation too. It’s about how I have embraced my multiplicity. You could call this radical inclusivity, but it also draws upon a culture of queering and critiquing current approaches to equality, diversity and inclusion. It’s about questioning everything that I am finding difficult, interrogating and asking, “Am I really the problem here?” Or is this just not accessible for me?
Ruby:
It’s a story told via wallpaper, white goods and furniture housed within the world of a doll’s house. The fridge is particularly riveting.
Edward:
I think our PhD has something to do with politics, but I don’t know the first thing about politics.
Geoffa:
This PhD is about knowing and not knowing. Understanding and not understanding. What we knew yesterday may not be what we know today. What we understand today, may hold no meaning tomorrow, but that’s okay. Our PhD is a baton carried by the different “me”s, each with different types of intelligence. Some of us have taken our research forward by reading and dissecting written theories and academic texts; others have extended the research further using a scaffolding metaphor that engages them.
The younger ones of us have looked at our research with highly emotionally intelligent and sensory perspectives. This PhD is about the benefits and approaches to radical inclusivity when the starting point is the inclusion of all the voices of one’s own mind.
Ruby:
It’s about world-building and imagination. My imagination is a safe haven where I can dream up the things that I need, from deep pressure squeezes to a number system or language that makes more sense. There are many things I need that feel completely out of reach in the real world.
Geoffa:
It’s about how the voices highlighted in my PhD, including my own, have been historically under-heard because they fall outside of society’s definition of ‘normal’ as shaped by capitalism. The ways in which we have included these voices has seen us working collaboratively and in ways that defy traditional artistic and productive values. For Sophie, every day is a foggy day, I used to consider her contributions, like her layering layering of sellotape, a waste of time, lacking in artistic value, but now I value her perspective of blankness, it’s almost like being in a sensory deprivation chamber. Her experience creates space for new, fresh ideas to emerge from the fog.
Masha:
It’s about frames, language, and perspective. How is an artwork interpreted in the bathroom of the doll’s house versus the attic? What is its title? What are our associations with these words and spaces that change the way we perceive colour, shape, or sound? How are these perspectives shaped by our previous experiences, our identities and our comfort zones.
Geoffa:
It’s autoethnographic. I am making art that will meet my needs and regulate me as a neurodivergent artist and so I share my growing awareness of how my needs today have been shaped by negative attitudes within mental health, social class, the gender binary, ableism, misogyny and trauma.
Sophie:
This PhD is about validating and acknowledging that my feelings are real and important.
Geoffa:
It’s about reducing shame.
I started this PhD on the topic of Artistic Activism for the Rights of Women and girls. I was very uncomfortable with my initial research topic because as a non-binary person, I have never felt or identified with being a woman or girl and I felt like my artistic output was being interpreted and talked about in ways that were further scaffolding the gender binary in harmful ways. I deliberately ignored the feelings of discomfort because I was in an academic space that people like me, with a background like mine don’t usually enter and I wanted to do well and please. This PhD is about the journey of me discovering my research topic through the gradual uncovering of how my own art can meet my needs.
Image: (c) Geoffa Fells