Estuaries: Ways of Knowing

“Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. As you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.” (Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

https://issuu.com/aikuiye/docs/final

A collection of voices from the ARIAS network on the notion of loss, it includes several written responses on loss, in relation to art research practices, which delve into the darker, exhausted, and silenced crevices of how coming to know loss, when looking for new ways of knowing, manifests.

***Estuaries: Ways of Knowing is a thematic line that started for ARIAS with a question on What is art-knowledge? Which turned into many meet-ups, events, and symposiums around this question between 2018 – 2021. ARIAS hosted two series of events one called ‘Art-Knowledge’ and another ‘Artists and Archivists’ working alongside the IISG. ARIAS also hosted a whole-day symposium called ‘The Shadow of Knowledge’ working alongside DAS research. And an event for Open Archief called ‘Uncertain Archives’ working with the Het Nieuwe Instituut. In 2021 ARIAS felt an urgency to find new ways for the network to work together on this theme beyond meetings and events and hired an intern to document this theme across the network. One artist named Pia Jacques, from F for Fact Sandberg Instituut, made a Zine publication asking ‘which questions need to be asked about different ways of knowing. And now the designer Aishwarya Kumar from Utrecht University, Theatre and Media, has taken the last six months to produce a Zine publication with a more specific line of thought, questioning how new ways of knowing might present a certain type of loss, in art-research practices.