A major figure in anthropology, Tim Ingold has for several decades developed a way of thinking based on observation and careful attention to the world, following an approach that crosses various fields and disciplines amongst which science, art, music, archaeology, and architecture.
Ingold’s work invites us to rethink the way we traditionally conceive our relationship with the environment and to see it not as something that is peripheral, but rather as a “zone of interpenetration”, in which we are fully invested and immersed, alongside and with other beings. “Dwelling in the world (...) is tantamount to the ongoing, temporal interweaving of our lives with one another and with the constituents of our environment”, he writes. This approach has also led him to reconsider what it means to produce and create form, freeing this fundamental gesture from the idea of an execution of a preconceived idea and instead understanding it from the perspective of a continuous “weaving” of the world.
In this conversation, we will consider some of the motifs and gestures around which Ingold’s thought was built – line, rhythm, weaving, writing, walking – and their multiple resonances in the field of visual arts.
Tim Ingold is a British anthropologist and Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, UK. His books include Correspondences (2020), The Life of Lines (2015), Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013), Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011), and Line: A Brief History (2007).
Tim Ingold will be in conversation with Christophe Gallois, Curator, Head of Exhibitions at Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, and Tina Gillen, Artist, Teacher and Researcher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. This conversation inaugurates the research project Forms of Life, developed by Tina Gillen, Christophe Gallois and a group of students of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in collaboration with Mudam Luxemboug.
(Image: Tim Ingold, Isle of Skye)