PRAKSIS Founder and Director, Nicholas John Jones catches up with Benjamin Lignel to ask about his experience of the residency; what went on, and why?
Ben, it's been a real pleasure and hugely rewarding for me to work with you on developing this residency. As we look back on the experience, for context, could you tell me a little about how you initially got involved with researching the relationship between adornment and gender and why you feel it is important work?
Sure! This project started three years ago. I was then editor of the American non-for-profit organisation Art Jewelry Forum (AJF), and during one of our monthly editorial meetings, scholar Jenni Sorkin asked if we had ever delved into jewellery from a gender-theory perspective. We had not, and the editorial committee decided that we should probably devote a book to the subject. I felt, from the get go, that a singular editorial voice and the usual one-year turnaround would not work, and asked multi-talented curator, scholar and educator Namita Wiggers if she would like to embark on the project with me. She agreed, bless her. Three years down the line, this has blossomed into an ambitious research project that aims to create an interactive, non-proprietory, open-access archive of interviews, commissioned images and essays on the gender work of jewellery. It involves a large (and growing) cast of allies, the world around.
Why is this important? Though my background of 20 years is “in” jewellery, I have tended to consider the relationship between jewellery and gender as “obvious”: specific objects and gestures are culturally associated to specific gender types. The stability of these categories invite a certain amount of trespassing across gender lines. We “sort of know” how that works.
The reality turns out to be more complex. Jewellery has the singular distinction of being a means to both endorse and contradict cultural norms, while gendered connotations are culturally and historically situated. Unsticking it from the “obvious” or the “natural” opens up the gender work of jewellery to a much more nuanced and multi-layered reading. In effect, acts of adornment turn out to be a fantastic lens to understand gender performances across the Western world…in all their contradictory beauty.
What were the key focuses of the residency, and what did you hope it to achieve?
The invitation to come and work in Oslo came at a pivotal time within the research: Namita and I have collected 28 interviews so far, and we are now busy thinking about the best way to publish them. “Publishing”, in this case, implies quite a long chain of activities. First, the interviews are transcribed, then Namita and I annotate them, and indicate passages that could be edited, then this is sent to the interviewees, who respond to our additional comments and questions with written answers. This process was conceived as a way to “continue the conversation” and somehow transform the exchange that is at the heart of any editorial process into a opportunity to dig deeper in the questions at hand. At the end of this process, we have a complex object: a primary text, accompanied by a string of comments and questions, and further enriched by the interviewees’ responses.
Meanwhile, these interviews relay the often intimate life-stories of people who experiment with expressions of gender: they push, they probe, they try things out, and en route, may have been subjected to quite a lot of push back, not to say the everyday abuse and discrimination that comes with challenging heteronormative and/or binary cultural coding. And so, we asked ourselves, how do we amplify these voices in a respectful way? What are the ethics of collecting, editing, and publishing stories about gender expressions? Who can we talk with to help us better understand the ethics of choosing certain formats, how to deal with authorship, how to give these inclusive conversations an inclusive platform? Namita and I feel a particular responsibility towards building a research that is non-exploitative, that may not resolve but at least should recognise the fact that processes of othering, of voyeurism, of exoticising, can take place when we interview someone about things we have little interaction with. The residency was built around these questions, and was meant to answer them in conversation with an incredibly diverse group of national and international residents, and the (amazing) professionals that you, Nicholas, put us in contact with during our stay in Oslo.
Now that you've had a little time to reflect since the residency finished, are there particular things that stand out in your memory—that you feel will stay with you? Were there things that have challenged or shifted your preconceptions?
Cor…where do I start? This residency has been challenging and rewarding in ways that I did not expect, and over the last few weeks, I have often cast my thoughts back to the residency. It continues to feed me, intellectually and emotionally, and has opened up lots of new subjects for me, even as it challenges some of my assumptions. One of them - possibly the most important one - could be described as the Western Rational Hypothesis, which posits that an agora of peers intent on expanding their knowledge will default to conversation as the best means to implement that plan, and that this will happen “naturally”. That ideal - which I suspect is a direct product of my French education - begged to be questioned, and my god, we certainly did not let it rest for a minute!
How we facilitate conversation - and in turn, what conversation permits - has been central to the residency. We questioned the gap between the ideal and the reality, looked at other forms of learning, considered issues of respect and safety. We started paying extreme attention to how we gathered, how we shared the floor, whether everyone was allowed to speak, or how we reached an agreement. The materiality of “making conversation” (you know: circle or semi-circle, chair or grass lawn, static or deambulatory) turned out to be a good tell-tale of what the presumed goal of a conversation might be. This line of enquiry - which happened alongside an intense engagement with texts, images, films that dealt with gender and adornment - was an eye-opener—I hope that one of the outcomes beyond the residency will be you and I channelling this aspect of the residency into a book.
Because of the intensity of that conversation, it sticks out in my mind as an obvious take away - one to which I can give a simple account for this short interview. I do also have a hefty pile of notes scribbled during the many meetings / visits we had: our guests were invariably generous, smart, hyper-well informed. What they shared with us - with thoughtfulness, intellectual courage and openness - profoundly impressed me, but those many moments are more difficult to neatly transcribe here, though I know they will percolate in my head for a long time…
PRAKSIS is founded with the belief that it's a rare but deeply productive and meaningful to spend an extended period of time with others you would not normally meet, yet with whom you share common interest, and that this experience can be further enriched by collective diversity. Having been through this experience, would you agree and what do you think of the model overall? Could you, on a personal level, have had as or more productive experience working alone?
My answer to the previous questions covers that in part: this residency put the format of PRAKSIS on trial. This occasionally made us forget just how much we were getting exposed to, in a way that solitary work can never do. Human encounters were made intense by the vulnerability that I believe everyone experienced at some stage during the residency, and more intense still by the residency format itself: a combination of formalized meetings, with informal moments of small-or-large-group domesticity, meals, immersion in nature. The sum of that was incredibly productive, and elicited strong intellectual and emotional responses from everyone. To paraphrase philosopher Isabelle Stengers, it transformed the relationship that each one of us has with her or his knowledge, and allowed the group to bring forth something that we would have been incapable of producing individually.
The PRAKSIS model is human-focused and human-led: this residency was intensely that, and I loved it for that very reason.
This is a little bit of a side question, but also important in a way: I know you had been to Oslo before, but having now spent this longer period in the city what is your impression of it? Was it as you expected and do you think you'll be back?
As you know, one of my best friends lives here: I met her here some 20-off years ago, when a fresh graduate from art school. Collaborations with Norwegian Crafts have recently given me the opportunity to come back, generally for a few days at a time. I invariably enjoyed myself, but this residency provided a much more intense form of immersion - specifically into the cultural sector’s ecology. The people we met and the nature of those encounters made it easy to feel less like an outsider, and more like a temporary member of the family.
We (also) had spookily good weather during the residency. This generated a lot of looking to the sky with suspicious eyes from Norwegians, and a diffuse sort of happiness in everyone. We were (finally) very pampered by Charlotte and you, who made sure that the eleven residents were fed, our needs satisfied within legality and our meanderings through the city made pleasant and effortless.
These are particularly auspicious conditions to discover a city and a people - and I do bear that in mind when telling you that yes, I very much look forward to coming back: I have got a lot to learn here, and know I will do so in good company.
Thank you Ben, that’s really good to hear. I for one am looking forward to your next visit.
