ARTISTIC RESEARCH AND THE DOCUMENTATION OF SOCIAL CRISES: POSTHUMANIST APPROACHES TO COLLECTIVE AFFECTIVE STATES IN WARTIME MUSIC
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24193/subbmusica.2025.spiss4.12Keywords:
artistic research, arts-based research, posthumanism, collective affect, resilience, cultural trauma, wartime musicAbstract
Traditional research methods often struggle to capture embodied, affective, and relational layers of experience emerging during crises such as war. Arts-based research and artistic research offer practice-led epistemologies aligned with posthumanist praxis. This article examines how artistic research can document and transform collective affective states in crisis, using the author’s composition Wartime Reflections II. Resonances as a case study. A practice-led inquiry integrates the score, composer’s notes, and documentary elements (voice messages, textual fragments). The analysis employs “musical lenses” (form, rhythm, dynamics, timbre, polyphony/harmony) and draws on theories of collective affect (Durkheim), anticipatory grief (Rando), resilience (Masten, Ungar), learned helplessness (Seligman), despair (Freud, Kierkegaard), communitas (Turner), and moral elevation (Haidt). The resulting five-part model—Premonition, Resilience, Exhaustion, Despair, Uplift—shows how music functions not only as representation but as method for structuring and sharing crisis experience.
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