Title: Inhabitation
Subtitle: A New Artistic Paradigm at the Intersection of Aesthetics and Ecology
Subject Classification:  Arts, Research, Humanities  
BIC Classification: AB, GT
BISAC Classification: EDU057000, PER018000, ART060000
Binding: Hardback, Paperback, eBook
Publication date: 03 Sep 2024
ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-80441-653-2
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-80441-654-9
ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-80441-655-6

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Description

This innovative new book contributes greatly to important emerging and interdisciplinary fields of research within performance studies, such as the problems of art and activism, spectator engagement, artistic research, and an ecology of aesthetic attention and perception. The author combines artistic practice and scholarly engagement with critical theory, which contributes to the research environment for both researchers and practitioners in the arts.

This book moves beyond the former art and performance participatory paradigm into a new one, which the author conceptualizes as ‘Inhabitation’. Inhabitational art works move beyond both spectatorship and temporary participation and invite the ‘audience-participant’ to live inside the artwork.

It also introduces the notion of ‘democratizing the aesthetic’ as a new artistic and didactic strategy, carving the path towards more sustainable futures through the stimulation of ecologic connectedness unfolding in highly sensuous (sensory-evoking) spaces.

Biography

Author(s):  Dr. Gry Worre Hallberg is the Co-founder and Artistic Director of the international performance group Sisters Hope. Advocating a more sustainable future through the arts, see also her TEDx talks Sensuous Society (2013) and Sensuous Learning (2015).

Reviews

"Inhabitation: A New Artistic Paradigm at the Intersection of Aesthetics and Ecology by artist, activist, researcher, and founder of the internationally acclaimed performance group Sisters Hope, Gry Worre Hallberg, is an investigation into the power of the aesthetic, the poetic, and the sensuous. In 2008, Sisters Hope wrote The Sensuous Society Manifesto as a response to the financial crisis and the ongoing ecological crisis. This book takes a deep dive into the group’s artistic and activist practice since then, placing it in a theoretical framework of the writings of mainly Baumgarten, Guattari, Latour, Braidotti, Haraway, and Bateson. Within academia and artistic discourse, much has been stated about the potentials of art in general, but the premise of this book is both quite refreshing and convincing. Worre Hallberg uses in situ data from the participants, or inhabitants of Sisters Hope, consisting of hundreds of notebooks from their archive. These form a solid body of empirical knowledge for Worre Hallberg’s research: What do inhabitants of Sisters Hope experience, when immersed in the aesthetic? When the dominating economic rationality and acceleration are abandoned for 24 hours, and people become inhabitants of Sisters Hope’s Sensuous Society of slowness, poetry, awareness, rituals? The answers speak of interconnectedness and carve out a path towards a more sustainable future."
- Birgitte Kirkhoff Eriksen, writer, teacher and founder of Being in Practice and former Museum Director of Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde.

"This book by Gry Worre Hallberg – and the artistic research that forms its basis – is a remarkable accomplishment. Rarely does one come across an art project which manages to 1) identify and distill a core aesthetic principle – ’aesthetic immersion’, 2) develop this principle beyond its current understanding, 3) manifest it in a novel artistic format, and 4) frame this format theoretically through nuanced and insightful reflection. Inhabitation, as Hallberg terms her new artistic format, takes the principle of aesthetic immersion beyond what is usually meant by participatory art, and in so doing, unlocks a hidden potential of the aesthetic to infuse meaningfulness, beauty, and interconnectedness, into life and society. Those who take part in the immersive, durational artistic manifestations of Sisters Hope – as Hallberg’s performance ensemble is called – step into a different universe where the aesthetic and the poetic inform every aspect of individual and communal life. Ultimately, Sisters Hope is a laboratory for exploring what a society guided by those principles – a Sensuous Society – can be. Thereby, Hallberg’s project instills hope – hope for the future of art, and for a society that may awaken to the deeper meanings of the aesthetic."
- Max Liljefors, Professor of Art History and Visual Studies, Lund University