Abstract

Radicle Assemblages explores aesthetic praxis through an experiential research-creation doctorate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Fine Arts program. This studio-based project interwove diverse phenomena through speculative narratives inclusive of matter, thinking with techné, and in contemplation with living entities. The artworks that were developed in this study explored aesthetic modes of relational play among natureculture assemblages. The artworks acted as a form of dialogue to contemplate what would become defined as relations of tender curation. Individual gestures were composed for learning care and expanded perception through artistic experiments with domesticated natures such as houseplants, bacteria, algae, gastropods, and yeast (among others). The concept of tender curation emerged where what became a central component of an artwork required daily attendance. These experiences opened to a kind of tending that inspired affection and concern for the living creatures that were assembled within artworks. Another concept that formed was the radicle assemblage as a motif for thinking with differences among beings that are unique yet unfolding together in shared or common space. Comprehending subtle affects through interactions with vegetal life led to concern regarding personal and ethical implications of artworks that were composed with living phenomena. The living beings changed one another in their interactions. As a result, the artworks shifted over the duration of the study increasingly towards co-creative relations with domesticated, urbanized, or shared-territory beings as a way that incrementally expanded the artist-researcher’s ability to respond. Through practice and in the dissemination of multiple artworks, this research-creation doctorate eventually gravitated towards a post-anthropocentric art of response-responsibility. In this sense, the research-creation methodology evolved as a form of contemporary art practice that performed an expansion of possible social relations through generative propositions as incremental research.