Creative Thinking Labs: Logos, Techne, and Critical Thinking

When do conferences break new ground? One can think about individual presentations, or panels, that stand out as paradigm shifting – though this is often a tall order in the short twenty-minute span available to speakers. Most conferences in the Humanities still follow the traditional format of papers, panels and keynote addresses. It is a tried and tested way to present ideas, new interpretations, and spark debate. Press Play: Creative Interventions in Research and Practice, hosted by MACRO and the British School at Rome (28-29 March 2019), and organised by a team led by Emma Bond and Derek Duncan (both based in the Italian department at the University of St Andrews) took things in a different direction. The conference aimed to fuse together academic research, creative practice, and civic engagement in a combined conference and exhibition. Both the central thematic concerns and the format of the conference and associated events were innovative. It is the first academic conference I attend in which the organizers have created a space for thinking through making rather than simply thinking through scholarly discourse and debate.

The presence of creative practitioners was key in injecting a different perspective and approach to the objects of study. Conference papers often focus on the outcomes of research, presenting them as a (more or less) stable set of results. Creative artists were both more openly focussed on the process of making/doing, and more at ease with using the conference as a place to experiment and try things out: if the process is as important as the outcome (or indeed it is the outcome itself) a space opens up in which one is more willing to take greater creative and intellectual risks.

This is why, rather than presenting a traditional paper, I ran a creative thinking lab: ‘Beyond Logos and Techne: Creative Responses to Italian Feminist Art’. The focus was a series of works by the Italian visual poet and pioneer video artist Ketty La Rocca (1938-76) titled Riduzioni in which she transformed an initial photographic image, until only the memory traces of the image were left.

The workshop participants were both academics and artists. We used a selection of photographs from the BSR Photographic Archive: iconic Roman monuments and sculptures, and equally iconic artists who resided at the BSR—Winifred Knights and Barbara Hepworth. The selection of the images was in itself a moment of dialogue and co-production with archivist Alessandra Giovenco. During the creative lab we did our own Riduzioni (using paper, pen and ink) and displayed them at the end of the day in the conference exhibition. The outputs were thus both individual and collective. The intention was to reflect on the role of practice as critical thinking by responding to La Rocca’s work and shifting our default position of critical thinking through words. It was a modest attempt to place techne rather than logos first, in line with La Rocca’s creative and theoretical preoccupations, nudging our work towards collaborative creative critical thinking.