Eva la Cour-Nielsen

Eva la Cour-Nielsen

Postdoc

As a postdoc at the Art as Forum center I am working on a project titled Post-Future Essayism: Temporal communality as epistemological strategy.

Post-future Essayism is a term that I started using when I was writing and doing my practice-based Ph.D. in artistic research (2022). I am now suggesting that the term captures an orientation towards temporal and relational forms of the image and image-practices.

 

The project seeks to connects two distinct, and rather different, collaborative research strands:

  • One strand is broadly speaking concerned with ‘the mediation of Arcticness’. Drawing from travels in Sapmi, Greenland and (particularly) Svalbard since a decade, I reflect upon collaborative, creative and negotiated processes of imagining and engaging Arctic fields (when both a matter and an issue). Together with social science researcher at the Swedish Center for Nature Interpretation, Jundan Jasmine Zhang), I am particularly concerned with the risk of aestheticizing and imposing colonial frameworks of imagination in seeking transformation and speculating futures.
  • The other strand explicitly takes as its starting point the Belgian tv- and filmmaker, Jef Cornelis (1940-2018). Engaging with form experiments produced for public service television in the 1980es, I collaborate with visual artist Mia Edelgart to explore filmmaking practice that utilize live editing, when not merely seen as product-oriented but also as a knowledge activity. We are seeking modalities of articulation – by looking at archival material and enacting social experiments – that differ from those pre-designed by today's media infrastructures.

 

Across the two strands, however, I am striving towards a less auteur-oriented narrative about the artist's role in cultural production, in favor of a more relational consideration of the artistic act.

 

My urge to formulate a post-future essayism covers my interest in methods with and through which to negotiate across multiple, contested and layered disciplinary cultures. How to move beyond the production of knowledge objects and data, to engender practices with and through which to negotiate across multiple, contested and layered disciplinary cultures, to know something together? What could the epistemic and ethical status of audiovisual productions look like at this moment in time when the overarching risk of a collapse can only be improved through enormous collective efforts? How to enable a sense of shared time, certain kinds of social time? How to engage temporal communalities as epistemological practice?

 

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Eva la Cour is a visual artist and PhD in artistic practice, also trained in media- and visual anthropology. Drawing inspiration from strategies of montage, while using both analogue film, video, text and display aesthetic elements, her spatial work and performative demonstrations are always effects of lenghty and multifaceted investigative processes. Out of a fundamental dissatisfaction with the representational discourse, and its historical and colonial legacy, la Cour has written the book Geo-Aesthetical Discontent: Svalbard, the Guide and Post-future Essayism - the result of a practice-based artistic PhD project, obtained from HDK-Valand (the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, Gothenburg University, SE). Her individual and collaborative works have been exhibited, screened, and performed internationally, often transgressing spaces of film culture, academic research, and fine art. la Cour holds a MA in Visual and Media Anthropology (Freie Universität Berlin, DE) as well as in Fine Arts (The Jutland Art Academy, DK).

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