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In spring 2008 I travelled to Beirut together with artist Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfelt to attend the international forum on cultural practices; Home Works IV organised by the Lebanese Association of Plastique Arts, Ashkal Alwan. Inspired by the experience of leaving Copenhagen and coming back we wrote the article Fin de Copenhague 2008, which you can find in the magazine Internationalistisk Ideale edited by Marie Kølbæk. Look for page 47.

Later, in June 2008, I participated in the seminar Art and Research : New Interfaces held by the Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies in collaboration with Goldsmiths College of London and Freie Universität, Berlin. The seminar was intense and thought proviking – still lingering in my mind.

This was my abstract:

Abstract for Art and Research: New Interfaces. Copenhagen, June 5-7, 2008

The writer as producer

Walter Benjamin described the ”author as producer”. To inhabit the position of a producer brings forth the potential of the political. To produce is understood as creating a text that will make people take a stand. It also means that the writer is the producer of something – a written text. In academia we are taught to produce texts, but not to understand ourselves as a producer. The elimination of the border between art and research could be a way to open toward the space of creating producers. Artists have for a long while learned from theory and academia, while academics are just about to learn from artistic processes in their reasearch and writings.

My own practice as an academic is shaped by the non-existence of a space for the academic producer. I therefore place myself between three fields:
Academically I work on biographical representations of historical persons within contemporary art. I look at the ways in which contemporary artists convey the life of a person in relation to literary theory on biography, the notion of re-enactment and the archive.
Personally I have over a 12 year period collected letters, stories, publications and interviews about my female ancestors. It is a project on its own and has similar traits of the artworks I am writing about.
Outside of academia i collaborate in an ungoing art project with an artist on two imaginary female theorists. I also have a writing collective with an art theorist where we are working on a writing workshop for art writers.

This paper will touch upon the consequences of such a devided practice. Inspired by the art scene in Beirut, Lebanon, and a writer/philospher/artist such as Jalal Toufic I will look at why we should and how we can create a greater space for the writer as producer both within academia and the art scene in the future.