Editora UFMG has just released the digital book Figuras da Experiência. The e-book gathers articles that address the artistic experience of researchers and speakers who participated in two colloquia held in 2015 and 2016 under the seal of the Bureau of Image and Time Studies of the School of Fine Arts at UFMG.

According to Professor Patricia Franca-Huchet, who is a professor at the School of Fine Arts at UFMG and organizer of the book, when looking at the different artistic practices of today, there is a legitimate interest in the diversification of aspects and spaces of experience. The book aims to address the way in which these practices act as devices that make it possible to invent, elaborate, think, produce, exhibit and criticize the most diverse figures of the artistic experience. “There is a diversification that also affects the figure of the artist, who is gradually transformed, while remaining untouched in certain aspects” – highlights Patricia Franca-Huchet.

The book Figures of Experience is part of the IEAT Collection and is free for download at the Editora UFMG website. In an interview with IEAT, Professor Patricia Franca-Huchet talks about the research of the artistic experience and provides us with more details about the book, which brings together the academic contribution of twenty one artist researchers.

How the concept of the artist’s experience is approached in the book?

Experience involves several related concepts: memory, oblivion, history, time, freedom, obedience, tradition, authority, exemplarity, transgression, hypothesis, conservation, invention, reproduction, creation etc. It involves the two polarities of having and doing. It also involves a back and forth movement between authority and discovery. It is a kind of critical and dialectical image, in the sense that descriptions and analyzes of experimental processes are ways of establishing experiences.

A well-described and analyzed artistic or experimental process is capable of becoming a reference, even if provisional. Artistic experimentation and the walking and discovering construction of every proposal build an experience. When we are touched and convinced by an artistic work, it is because he knew how to explore and contemplate the two sides of experience, with a meeting between laboratory production and consistent method.

The book presents the experience of the researcher artist as a process of investigation that is situated in the time and history. Could you tell us more about this?

Today we can say that research in art, in its various manifestations, presents forms and actions susceptible of showing the human sciences questions and propositions still unexplored. Thus, it reveals a rich knowledge that can consolidate investigations on other orders of human nature in general. The history of art is made up of a broad set of artists who would not have been what they were, would not have left the mark they left in time, if they had not been researchers. The artist researcher is a key player in the formation and transmission of historical knowledge, but also and, above all, of an experimental knowledge that he experiences in his practice.

What will the reader find in the book Figures of Experience?

The texts that we find in this book present a diverse panorama of what art embraces: the theory of art and artistic processes and their narratives, the relationship between art and psychoanalysis, historical artistic movements, the analysis of the behavior and actions of artists, the intricate relations of history with the image, the situation of artists in the face of politics and activism, the perspective of a historian on an artist and the perspective of an artist on another, criticism and the theory of art. These are the structural issues of this book.