Research-Creation

What and who can a lab be for, and how and why? When I began my work as an assistant professor specializing in media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in 2010, I proposed the creation of a “lab” oriented around cultural heritage, exhibition, collaboration, and a methodological approach that would come to be defined as research-creation (Loveless 2015; Springgay 2022; Aceves Sepúlveda 2023). Trained in anthropology, I chose the name Making Culture Lab to signal the importance of making as a starting point for knowledge creation and transmission: making, as an expression of intangible and tangible culture in all forms; what Ingold (2013) would explore in relation to anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture; and, what the collective Ethnographic Terminalia I was a member of at that time would go on to demonstrate through the curation of group exhibitions and experimental projects for over a decade as para-sites (Marcus 2021) to the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (Brodine et al. 2011; Smith et al., 2021.). Through the work of the collective and our individual experimental ethnographic practices, we engaged in a great deal of imagining and prototyping alternative forms and structures for working together and sharing the work we were creating in new mediums and locations and for new audiences (Boyer 2011). Looking back, I can see that we were part of a growing movement in anthropology toward art practice (Schneider and Wright 2013) the role of the anthropologist as curator (Sansi 2020), and critical engagement with the “multimodal” in the discipline (Takaragawa et. al. 2018).

Now in our second decade, the Making Culture Lab’s practice-based orientation is resonating with Natalie Loveless’s assertion that research-creation, “rather than uncritically adding one disciplinary apparatus to another . . . marshals new methods that allow us to tell new stories, stories that demand new research literacies and outputs” (2015). In this brief contribution to The Lab Book Techniques glossary I highlight some examples of our collaborative work. In our experience of making, of art-anthropology practice, of curation, of foregrounding care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), co-creation and collaboration, and insisting on an open circle of authors and makers, research-creation is a generative methodological orientation for imagining, challenging, materializing, and sharing research.

Research-creation in the Making Culture Lab has taken many forms, involving methodological explorations through collaborative applied media production (photography, video, sound, web, programming, digital modeling and fabrication, design), remediation of archives and transmediation of material culture and art, and the curation of exhibitions (physical and virtual) to bring people together to create new works and consider their broader implications, including showing the fluid boundaries across the physical and the digital. Our work across technologies and cultural contexts is often grounded in decolonial methods, such as those outlined by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) and committed to meaningful community collaboration in research, museum, and art practice. In British Columbia, with our university’s campuses spread across the unceded ancestral territories of the the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Katzie, Kwantlen, Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ̓əm), Qayqayt, Tsawwassen, and numerous Stó:lō Nations, we have been working through research-creation on many projects to reconcile contemporary decolonial movements for restitution and repatriation with colonial legacies and origins of anthropology. Building on my doctoral work, an ethnography of the collaborative production and curation of a virtual exhibit “Dane Wajich—Dane-zaa Stories and Songs” with the Doig River First Nation in northeastern British Columbia (Hennessy 2010), where community-based documentary and website design were starting points for negotiating public sharing of Dane-zaa histories, continuities, and resistance to relentless colonial extractive and exploitative dynamics across their territories (Doig River First Nation 2007), we have taken up collaborations that foreground research-creation as a central practice of challenging dominant colonial narratives, legacies, and ongoing dynamics.

For example, the Inuvialuit Living History Project—a partnership with the Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre and the Smithsonian—reconnected Inuvialuit knowledge holders, youth, and filmmakers with their belongings in the collections of the National Museum of Natural History, and then recontextualized them from an Inuvialuit perspective in an online exhibit (Hennessy et al. 2013); the project is ongoing with a third phase now re-designing a descendant web project with participation from communities across the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (Gruben et. al. 2022). In another example, we collaborated with curators at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia to design a tangible table called ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ—Belongings. Using tangible replicas of Musqueam belongings excavated from a village site called c̓əsnaʔəm, as well as contemporary objects that are a part of everyday Musqueam life, the project supported curators and community members in representing the long history of salmon fishing and the continuity of related knowledge at c̓əsnaʔəm (Muntean et al. 2016; 2017; Marsh 2015). In yet another example, Sq’éwlets: A Sto:ló-Coast Salish Community in the Fraser River Valley (2017) is a collaboratively designed and produced virtual exhibit that presents Sq’éwlets First Nation history and way of life using a Sq’éwlets and Halq’emélem-language ontology for the curation and reconnection of dispersed physical and digital belongings, including Traditional Knowledge labels and culturally-located frameworks for sharing collaboratively-generated content online (Lyons et al. 2016).

These projects have allowed us to participate in iteratively developing a distinct ethnographic and collaboration-oriented approach to research-creation as a method. In addition to curatorial initiatives and large-scale and long-duration virtual exhibit-oriented projects, we have provided technical, creative, and curatorial support for artists and their work. For example, we worked to support the installation of Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson’s massive three-part multimedia artwork Transmissions (2019) at Simon Fraser University, which explores the power of language from an Indigenous Futurist perspective, and also co-developed the installation’s companion website, Transmissions Expanded (2020). In another example, we have worked since 2017 in collaboration with Haida-Kwakwaka’wakw weaver and artist Jaad Kuujus (Meghann O’Brien) to support transmediation and exhibition of her woven Chilkat and Ravenstail style artworks into new forms. Together we have engaged in conversation and writing about repatriation, Indigenous contemporary art, dynamic cultural continuities, and the potential for digital replication and experimentation to support decolonial curatorial and contemporary art practice (Turner et al. 2018; Oogjes et al. 2023).

In the collaborative curatorial project The Water We Call Home led by Coast Salish—Sahtu Dene artist Rosemary Georgeson and filmmaker-scholar Jessica Hallenbeck and team, we used participatory documentary video, photography, sound, and the organization of community gatherings to “re-presence” an island in British Columbia’s Salish Sea as a method for the co-curation of public exhibitions telling the stories of Indigenous women’s enduing connections through fish, water, and family (Georgeson and Hallenbeck 2018). In another example, my ongoing collaboration with artist and anthropologist Trudi Lynn Smith as the collective Pairatext, we use experimental and conventional photography and video to document and theorize fugitive collections and anarchival materiality as a force of entropy and transformation in colonial museums and archives (Hennessy and Smith, 2021; Smith and Hennessy 2022).

While graduate students in the lab have worked in different capacities on all these projects, they have also written dissertations using collaborative research-creation and curatorial practice, and ethnographic research with cultural practitioners, traditional knowledge holders, artists, curators, archivists, activists, policy makers, and community organizations in places from Fort St. John to New York to Oakland to Chiang Mai and beyond. Across these physical and virtual geographies, which are entangled with practices of care, the creation and maintenance of digital archives, research ethics and the politics of representation, research-creation has emerged for us as a way to explore what, how, why, and for whom, a lab can be.

Kate Hennessy is an associate professor specializing in media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. She uses research-creation, including collaborative, feminist, and decolonial methodologies, to explore the impacts of new memory infrastructures and cultural practices of media, museums, and archives.