Launch Thinking Back, Making Forward at San Serriffe

• Come to the Amsterdam launch of Thinking Back, Making Forward
• With authors Gerrie van Noord, Joost Grootens and designers Virginie Gauthier, Zuzana Kostelanská, and Maud Vervenne

What: Book launch
When: Thursday, 24 September, 18:00 hr
Where: San Serriffe, Sint Annenstraat 30, 1012HE Amsterdam
Admission: Free, no reservations required
Language: English

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Authors Gerrie van Noord and Joost Grootens will go into a conversation about their artistic and academic practice, in a conversation moderated by Emily Rhodes. Graphic designers Virginie Gauthier, Zuzana Kostelanská, and Maud Vervenne will speak about their approach to the graphic design, dive into the yellow lines and the way to navigate between the different contributions.

About Thinking Back, Making Forward
In the last three decades, creative practice disciplines, such as art, design, architecture, creative writing, fashion, and others, have undergone a ‘research turn’, strongly stimulated by doctoral programmes to deepen artists’ reflections on the roots, relevance and urgencies of their work. There are many reasons why an individual practitioner might decide to undertake a PhD: a desire to uplift one’s practice, to contribute to the intellectual artistic climate, to teach, to pursue an academic career, or some combination of these, or other reasons.

The rise of artistic research or practice-based research is subtly transforming these disciplines. The integration of research into practice, however, has not always been smooth, and the transformations not unequivocally positive.

For this book we issued an open call to ask artists how PhD research has influenced their making and thinking. Our questions were: What are the impacts, urgency, and significance of the PhD for creative practitioners? How are these understood, captured, communicated? How did it change your practice? We even asked: should creative practitioners undertake a PhD in the first place?

Through its thirty contributions Thinking Back, Making Forward tackles these questions in an open way, to acknowledge, equally, the advantages and disadvantages of the creep of the PhD into artistic practice. At the same time, this book shows a wide range of possibilities of what research in artistic practice can entail.