To Research by Two Hands

Abstract

In this article, we explore artistic research methods by committing ourselves to writing in a sense Cixous is thematizing in her book Three Steps to the Ladder of Writing: a way of writing that includes what is banished, considered unclean, the mute and the missing, and by including drawing in the attempt. Our article’s starting point is our experiences working with and producing conventional and publishable academic texts. Our experiences have, in ways that still are not transparent to us, made the transition towards achieving the right skills for producing orthodox academic texts more complicated and hurtful than we could imagine. The desired language, the academic, is a language created to represent reality in transparent ways; you are expected to be able to present the world as a series of findings. Our writing and drawing as creations are contrary to this reduction. The text and the drawings attempt to demonstrate and discuss the possibilities of engaging in writing and drawing as production on its own terms and stop regarding them as activities that mirror what already is. Instead, we aim to experiment and thus maybe create something that was not already there, something new, something that might be missing.