Reflections in water: Displaying political agency through costume, performance and video

Abstract

This research revisits individual and collaborative artistic processes to articulate the combination of creative skills to produce and document research outcomes. Various creative processes, such as costume-making, performance-making, artistic video, photo documentation and editing, came about under particular circumstances and with different objectives. These processes, all with their unique and embedded stories, were brought together in a collaborative research outcome to create an original visual story with layered meanings – the video titled ‘Merelle (To the see)’ (Miettinen 2021). This video illustrates the connections between the different creative processes, and the memories, bodies, places and environments attached to them. However, some of the places and environments in which the costumes, performance and video came about were also implicit, only to be revealed in the research dissemination. The selected methodology entailed narrative accounts, reflexive research and collaborative visual analysis. The data were collected through storytelling and note taking of the events that enabled was re-narration of the three artistic processes described in this article. The reflexive research methodology and analysis drew on visual data from photography and the video to explore the outcomes of the collaborative work.