L. Puska
Tracing Verticalities in Precarious Artistic Practices
In this research, I explore how freelance artists work and navigate the professional landscape through precarity and embodied practices. I move between vertical and horizontal dimensions. The horizontal represents linear time and externally imposed obligations and narratives. The vertical emerges from lived and embodied experience, and is interdependent on the surrounding conditions. Observing where these dimensions overlap and collide, perhaps sometimes align, I critically observe the predefined narratives about contemporary artists and how they are expected to practice their profession. By foregrounding verticality, situated practices and processes over externally motivated performance and output, I aim to contribute to discussions on artistic labour, care and time, especially in relation to the neoliberal terms of agency and production. With a desire to make space for vertical voices, I conducted interviews with my peer artists based in Belgium and the Netherlands. I also engage in an exercise of vertical writing to dive deeper into my own practice and how I work.
The research is rooted in a personal struggle. Some years ago, I was awoken by a feeling that I was only running from deadline to deadline. Jumping between short-term, temporary jobs and (un)paid projects, exhibitions and working periods, I longed for time to sit down with my work and develop it deeply. Practicing as an artist driven by curiosity and in-depth processes felt like mission impossible in a fast-paced society emphasising economic imperatives and outcome-oriented production models. From this point on, I began to ask what I’m actually doing when working as an artist: what takes my time, who dictates my professional performance, how I work and whether I can create conditions that support a deeper workflow. My current research, Tracing Verticalities in Precarious Artistic Practices, continues from here. I propose to approach an artistic practice as a habitual site where change can take place and unfold through acts, choices and habits in the everyday. I suggest that precarity can serve as a platform for informal circuits of care, collegial support or knowledge exchange that can confront the common understanding of labour, knowing and value.
My methodological framework intersects performance and visual arts, and is informed by feminist and postcolonial theories. Through one-on-one interviews and writing, I seek vertically oriented ways of practicing and speculate on creating conditions for them. The artist interviews allow me to explore artistic work beyond my own practice. I did not start the interviews with a fixed format. Rather, I strived to develop a structure through the interviewing process itself. The interviews are not made public, and I made this decision for two reasons: to dismantle the interview situation from the pressure of (horizontal) performance and to honour the privacy of those conversations that may emerge from an intimate space of trust and respect. There is also a trait in my work that I’ve recently begun calling ‘introvert practice.’ I don’t mean to create a binary between extrovert and introvert, and I’m unsure if this is the best term, but for now, it helps describe my need for time to think before responding, a desire for solitude and a longing for depth. These tendencies shape how I work, and I am slowly learning to accept them as a bodily condition. As I refuse to normalise exhaustion, I reject to see my introvercy as a flaw, but as a working method that can support and invite reflection, intimacy and trust. Through it, I can embrace slowness as a generative mode of artistic labour.
As an outcome of this research, I share the interview instrument Loud & Slow. The instrument consists of a score and props, and I present it in the form that I arrived at after seven peer interviews. I show three different material versions of the same instrument. Each adjusted for different social situations: original props from one-on-one interviews, a DIY prototype version to hand out, and a version for public moments, hosting casual conversations instead of full-length interviews. I want to offer this interview instrument as a gesture of solidarity and collegial support. I suggest Loud & Slow not as a blueprint but as a companion in discovering verticalities and what really matters. This way, my research invites continued reflection and experimentation. It’s an attempt to help close the gaps between how we work, how we want to work and how we could work.
I am an interdisciplinary artist (she/her) with a performance-based practice. My work expands the mediums of drawing, sculpture and video as well as collaborative practices and choreographed routines. It is typical for my work to reuse and accumulate material, repeat and vary actions, collaborate, and experiment with forms of co-authorship, micro-social relations and agency. I consider objects to be potential companions and a performative gesture to be a tool to direct attention. I approach the work of an artist as a holistic process and artistic practice serves as a platform to observe and explore alternative models for working and producing.