Maastricht Style of Artistic Research

Maastricht Style of Artistic Research

Cartopology strongly relates to the Maastricht style of artistic research which is not equivalent to artists doing academic research, or vice versa. Instead its value emerges from and through specific artistic research practices. Artistic research at the Research centre for Arts, Autonomy and the Public Sphere starts from the premise that artistic research necessarily involves an exchange between making and thinking.1Link to the website of the research centre for arts, autonomy and the public sphere: www.lectoraataok.nl The goal of the Maastricht style of artistic research is not to explain the artistic practice, to objectify it, or to legitimize it. Nor is artistic research about instrumentalizing art. The Maastricht style distances themselves from a dualistic reasoning in which the worlds of art and science are either fundamentally opposed or should be reconciled. Rather than striving for an artificial synthesis between art and science, or defending either discipline, we take the heterogeneity of arts and academic practices as a starting point. We see the multiple differences between academic knowledge and art practice as a productive starting point, a collaboration over borders also in methodology. Aimed at methodological innovation for complex questions that escape given research traditions. Between making and thinking, drawing and knowing.

Parameters to recognise the Maastricht Style of Artistic Research are: 

  • It starts from an agnostic, generous and brave position on what to do and why, of acknowledging that maybe we do not know and that that is an important place to start. And from the sensitive and inclusive position that we are fundamentally curious enough to learn to know. 
  • Starting from the basic premise that there is never a given method for artistic research, we stimulate the reflexive development of methodologies-in-the-making. We construct sensitive and transformative methods that disturb classic notions of academic conventions. 
  • It is often collaborative. Scientists and non-scientists work together as researchers. The multiple differences between academic knowledge and art practice produce new productive approaches and insights.
  • It draws on and develops cross-disciplinary research methodologies through the practical investigation of multiple ways of making and of knowing. Through techniques of (self-) observation and documenting, students train their craftsmanship and cunning. By doing so, artistic researchers enter into a substantive detour that allows them to become reflexive about art and knowledge in new ways. The focus on the researcher-as-instrument engaged in a substantive detour is geared towards training and cultivating a critical attitude of active and creative construction.
  • In addition to a reflexive and critical attitude towards their own art practice, artistic research as an art of inquiry, is therefore geared towards training students to engage with the changing world around them. 

[1]Link to the website of the research centre for arts, autonomy and the public sphere: www.lectoraataok.nl