13th edition of post(s): "Filaments and Assemblages: Ecotones in Arts-Based Research".

In this edition of post(s), we will receive academic essays analyzing the questions raised by artist and theorist Ilana Boltvinik (Universidad Veracruzana, México). In keeping with our interest in creative writing, we also invite visual essays and performative writings that present experimental and creative modes of knowledge production.

Topic: "Filaments and Assemblages: Ecotones in Arts-Based Research"

"I believe that knowledge cannot be separated from life, and the generation of knowledge cannot be separated from poetics and narrative." — Catalina Ortiz, Researching Otherwise

Let us think of art as an expansive, filamentous platform for research—not as a system for producing sensory objects. Rather than focusing on finished products, we invite a view of process and artistic thinking as a form of knowledge capable of overflowing, breaking the rules. Observation / reflection / praxis come together in a vital experience that infects each other—to order, speculate, transform, reinvent ways of knowing and existing; but also to disorder, destroy, destabilize, and transgress them through a critical lens.

This artistic practice can be understood as a research field that breaks with qualitative or quantitative perspectives by establishing multisensory (visual, aural, tactile) and multiformat methodologies, with different but complementary paths. (Sullivan 2006)

Let us think of that artistic platform as an ecotone.
Ecotones are known, from a strictly ecological definition, as transitional areas between two ecosystems or biomes, such as the meeting point between a forest and a riverbank. They are regions that function as interstices, a “thick edge” that becomes a contact zone (Kahn & Burns 2021:201). From ecotones, we can draw two key ideas: first, that they function as spaces of uncommon and singular assemblages, where fixed categories become blurred, mixed, and disordered. And second, the importance of the environment—coexistence between the more-than-human and its materialities.

If we understand art as an ecotone, we can imagine this platform as a space of diverse contact—not only between biogeographical systems, but also within socio-environmental and conceptual fields. It is about filtering through disciplinary boundaries, as well as geopolitical ones; dissolving and wrapping together praxis and theory, subject and object. It is a space where two or more types of knowledge, politics, and economies collide. A tangled mesh of organic and inorganic life that generates complex, collective networks between the human and the more-than-human. Thicknesses and viscosities interconnected through matter and energy. Ecotones, like Arts-Based Research, are filled with guiding ambiguities and uncertainty. They are spaces for shifting our point of view, for registering our mutual affectations. In the words of Henk Slager, it is research directed at the particular, at local knowledge, with an emphasis on autonomy: “Artistic [practice] has become a dynamic reference for experimentation grounded in theory.” (2004:12)

Let us also consider that this artistic platform is contextualized, situated in a specific and singular space-time with interspecies coexistences and more-than-human knowledges. Without ignoring complex socio-environmental phenomena like climate change and proliferating extractivisms, let’s consider how thick edges produce unrepeatable biogeographies—due to their topographies as much as the life forms that inhabit them. How do we work from embodied and empathetic knowledge toward convergent otherness? “The fight against species extinction should mobilize joyful passions,” says ethologist-philosopher Vinciane Despret (2022).

Finally, we consider the intersection between art, research, and environment as a powerful approach for living and communicating from a passion for knowledge, from the wildness of the artistic field, and from environmental attentiveness.

For this 13th edition of post(s), we invite contributions that consider the reflexive and experimental potential of transitional interstices made possible through the artistic ecotone: methodological anarchism—with a situated register—, political and epistemic disobedience, intuition as compass, speculative overflow, parafiction, and material, symbolic, and spiritual transmutations in our ways of existing. Let us think, as Marxen and González propose in Epistemologías emancipatorias (2023), of knowledge that seeks to “know with” rather than “know about.”

Juha Varto shares in the preface to Artistic Research Methodology:
"Recently, a colleague suggested we stop talking about different types of knowledge and admit—or even argue emphatically—that in art we are facing something “different from knowledge.” […] Why is it so important for so many people that art remain art? And why is there so much interest in conducting research based on artistic activities and in taking seriously art’s own way of operating, its manifestations, and its methods of conveying something, whether through whispers, screams, or conversations?" (Hannula, Suoranta & Vadén 2014:vii)

We would like to return to this last question to reflect on the ways art operates as a platform and as an artistic ecotone. What does it mean to think methodologically from within art—embodied and situated? What does Arts-Based Research propose that other modes of inquiry cannot uncover? How do we stretch thick edges to build collectivities and spaces of solidarity from an artistic ethics?

We invite proposals from artists who research, who experiment with alternate, situated, and plural methods; from people who are critical of methodologies and want to twist, tangle, or dismantle them to challenge epistemic coloniality; from thinkers open to recalibrating the doing, sensing, and being of what is plural and different. We aim to gather a collection of provocations from within artistic thinking and practice—where the key is to remain in the question, driven by constant curiosity.

The call will be open until November 15, 2025 and the edition will be published on June 15, 2026.
All submissions will be received through the OJS platform: https://revistas.usfq.edu.ec/index.php/posts/about/submissions

All submissions must meet the following requirements:
- The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author's Guidelines, which appear in About the Journal.
- The submission file is in Microsoft Word format: .doc / .docx
- The submission has been made using the magazine management system. In this system, the title in both Spanish and English of the article has been entered. The abstract (Spanish and English) of the article has been entered in the respective fields. Keywords have been entered in both Spanish and English in the respective fields. The complete bibliography has been entered, checking that it is in accordance with APA standards. Author information is complete.
- The author agrees to handle his article with the Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
- The file with the essay does not contain personal information of the author (names, affiliation), to avoid conflicts of interest during the peer review process.

For more details about the publication process, go to the Information section or download our guide for authors at http://posts.usfq.edu.ec

About the guest editor in this issue:
Ilana Boltvinik –
Artist who explores the interweaving of theory and visuality. Ph. D. in Social Sciences and Humanities, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Cuajimalpa. Her work focuses on extradisciplinary artistic research, practice and thought in dialogue with anthropology, science and other forms of knowledge, with special emphasis on critical ecologies and the socio-territorial implications of the residual. With her collective, TRES (2009), of which she is co-founder, she received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the PAC and Fundación Jumex. In 2016 they were awarded the Robert Gardner Fellowship from the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. She has had more than 30 solo exhibitions in America, Europe and Asia; and more than 40 group exhibitions in Mexico and abroad. She is currently a researcher at the Plastic Arts Institute of the Universidad Veracruzana.

References:
Balkema, Annette W., & Henk Slager (eds.). 2004. Artistic Research. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi.
Berger, Ludwig, & Denise Bertschi. 2024. Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies for Landscape and Urban Studies, edited by N. Bathla & C. Ortiz. Zürich: gta Verlag.
Hannula, Mika, Juha Suoranta, & Tere Vadén. 2014. Artistic Research Methodology: Narrative, Power and the Public.New York: Peter Lang.
Kahn, Andrea, & Carol J. Burns (eds.). 2021. Site Matters: Strategies for Uncertainty through Planning and Design. 2nd ed. Abingdon/New York: Routledge.
Sullivan, Graeme. 2006. Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Marxen, E., & González Gutiérrez, L. 2023. Investigar con arte y poesía. Editorial Gedisa.