Talk, Workshop

Open Forum: Brandon LaBelle / Pirate Academy: On Poetic Knowledge

With the emergence of artistic research as a dominant language, art is increasingly understood as a form of “knowledge production.” As Tom Holert highlights, art today is predominantly viewed as “epistemic activity.” Such a development follows from the prevailing logic underpinning the global knowledge economy and the ways in which information and data function as new forms of power and currency. This seems to invite a number of questions, such as: what do we mean by knowledge production? In what way does a logic of production displace other ways of knowing? If art is now largely a gesture of epistemic activity, what kind of knowledge does it make possible? And how might art contribute to movements of epistemic justice and the ongoing need for decolonized institutions? This edition of The Pirate Academy is interested to investigate the prevailing logic of knowledge production. To do so, we’ll explore the notion of “poetic knowledge” as a potential counter-logic. Stemming from the writings of James S. Taylor, poetic knowledge explicitly works at reclaiming a relation to the world grounded in the fullness of “the senses,” and what Taylor terms “knowing by way of the inside.” In contrast to scientific objectivity, and the imperative to analyze, dissect, and categorize, poetic knowledge is profoundly sympathetic, subjective, and defined by love: as the ability to “see the life within the object” (as Robin Wall Kimmerer notes), suggesting a link with planetarity and the “beauty of living things.” Moreover, poetic knowledge follows from the distinction Hannah Arendt makes between “knowing” and “thinking,” where knowing is aligned with truth and thinking instead with poetic wisdom (and intuition). For Arendt, “the will to know” has become a dominant force within human society, undermining our ability to think freely. Importantly, thinking equates with art, and the “uselessness” of contemplation, whereas knowledge is utilitarian and directed toward scientific capture and ideologies of progress. As Taylor summarizes, “poetry discovers, science proves.”

Following these different views, the two sessions will be devoted to exploring understandings of poetics and poetic knowledge, bringing to life different perspectives through opening a shared space for free thinking. This will include the presentation of particular theoretical views and references, along with specific artistic examples, as well as invitations to join in gentle material activity related to listening, drawing, walking and sharing. We’ll consider the possibility that poetics may be what is so needed today in order to challenge dominant systems with their related enclosures: to act poetically, as Fred Moten highlights, is to “refuse to be settled.”

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The Pirate Academy is an experimental meeting point in support of creative practices and methods. It draws upon pirate culture as a guide for mobilizing a range of inquiries and interventions, and for squatting the arena of knowledge production central to artistic research. If, as Steven Connor poses, knowledge acts as the governing economic, technological, and cultural material and means today, what types of anti-hegemonic practices can be crafted from within the institution of knowledge itself, that of the Academy? Are there counter-narratives to be configured, that might queer knowledge production as a production all-too-readily instrumentalized in the service of the next funding application? The Pirate Academy is an open source academy bringing together an intentionally diverse assemblage of perspectives and practices, supporting speculative, transversal, wilding and inoperative approaches. Originally founded at the Bergen Art Academy in 2021, the Pirate Academy is understood less as a ship and more as a fog spreading its diffuse and intoxicating vapors.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist living in Berlin. He is also the founder and artistic director of The Listening Biennial and related Listening Academy. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture and poetics, resulting in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including Communities in Movement (2019-2023), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-22), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015). https://brandonlabelle.net/

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Open Forum is a student run initiative from the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo. Open Forum seeks to create a meaningful exchange of ideas and a dynamic space for dialogue and debate between art students, artists and others.
The talks are structured around different topics, from those closer to artistic and curatorial practices to other of social and political relevance.