SHAKE WELL – before thinking and making in academic research is a series of encounters with artists, researchers, performers and designers who place practice at the core of their inquiry. Chloé Déchery, Eleanor Bauer, Julia Valle Noronha, Linnea Bågander, Marion Boudier, Stacey Sacks and Xavier Le Roy will share their recherche–création methodology, an approach in which theory and practice constantly mix, activate and transform one another — just as the title suggests: shake well.
This approach challenges conventional modes of knowledge transmission and production by making research itself a performative, embodied, and situated act.

In the context of the growing recognition of practice-based research (or recherche-création), this seminar explores how artistic practice can function as an autonomous epistemological device, capable of generating knowledge through the very act of making. In an era where the boundaries between theory and practice, production and reflection, object and subject of research are becoming increasingly porous, it is essential to rethink the methodologies and languages through which research is conducted in artistic and design contexts.

Through the contributions of invited guests – protagonists of hybrid practices across visual arts, performance, design, and fashion – Shake Well invites doctoral students of the Iuav University of Venice PhD Program to engage with practice-based research forms in which thought and action, word and gesture, theory and form constantly intersect and contaminate one another.

This series of encounters does not merely present practices, it enacts them. Each contribution becomes an opportunity to observe, in real time, how a practice reflects on itself, how it generates questions, forms, and relationships. The goal is not only to inspire, but to provide tools for imagining and constructing research paths where making becomes both method, content, and form of thought.

Within a doctoral program that embraces research in visual arts, performance, and fashion, recherche-création becomes a space for experimentation and exchange, where theory takes on material form, and practice becomes a critical language.

Curated by: PhD students from the Visual Arts, Performing Arts and Fashion Studies, 
Iuav University of Venice
Lisa Andreani, Giulia Ciola, Lucia Di Pietro e Caterina Rossato

Image: Courtesy Linnea Bågander