RESCAPE | RESCAPE

RESCAPE was first established in 2017 and refers to the academic and artistic collaboration of Prof. Dr Janke Klok (The Netherlands), Prof. Dr Lena Haselmann (Germany), and Dr Lilli Mittner (Norway) who are all committed to multidisciplinary arts-based research. The acronym stands for Research – Education – Sources – Creativity – Arts – Performances – Engagement.

History is increasingly presented as multimodal, yet its interrelations are rarely researched multimodally. With RESCAPE we explore new forms of generating and mediating historiographic knowledge through materialized artistic practices. We ask: How can we create meaning on the basis of historical sources that materialize in such ‘things’ as diaries, letters, postcards, manuscripts, or notes on scores but also sound and performances? And how can we bring insight into our research process at the intersection of philology and artistic research to a broader audience?

Creating a dramatic assemblage makes it possible to give those a voice who have not been heard so far based on very little information. The dramatic format makes it further possible to interact with our audience, and we have experienced that in this process of interaction new questions rise, new insights can be found, as well as new ways to fill some information gaps. It has been said that fiction sometimes can be more real than reality itself. In the dramatic assemblage, we make use of that expression. Being active in the world of science it goes without saying that we always express, which parts of an assemblage are based on facts and which parts are based on assumptions. And why we make these assumptions.

So far, RESCAPE has manifested and theorized the following assemblages:

“Camilla Collett and Agathe Backer Grøndahl talk in Berlin”, as part of a theme night with talks and concert contributions in the Nordic Embassies in Berlin (14th February 2017)
“Autumn Talk and Ocean Songs. When Betzy (Akersloot-Berg) met Agathe (Backer-Grøndahl). Performance and Workshop” at the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Tromsø (16th June 2019). The latter was published in “Autumn Talk and Ocean Songs. Dramatic Assemblage – Methods and Relevance of Performative Historiography”, in: Musikgeschichte auf der Bühne. Performing Music History, Bielefeld, 2021