The artists involved in Notes on Hapticity have varied practices, ranging from sculpture to film to performative and installational works. Founded at the end of 2019, our activities as a collective were catalysed by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on spatiality, social relations, and haptic modes of interacting. Our guiding principle departs from the concept of the ‘haptic encounter’ — a theme that extends as a red thread throughout our individual practices and collective presentations. The most literal understanding of this concept refers to that which evokes a kinaesthetic response — for example, processes of friction, collision, permeation. Beyond this definition, we also approach the concept from a perspective that considers more expansive and metaphorical notions of touch, imprint and inscription — experiences that reverberate long after the initial event. Memory, trauma, collective imagination, affect, and rituals, for example, are all embedded with traces of haptic encounters.

Amongst our central enquiries, we are keenly interested in the potential to nurture alternative pedagogical forms – ways of learning together that may engage with institutional settings, whilst simultaneously resisting total dependence on those contexts. The ethics of collaborative practice has increasingly become a key point of reflection for us – in particular, in relation to creating conditions that support a deeper understanding of accountability, nurturing a manifold approach to accessibility, and maintaining an affable interpersonal climate. In this respect, we understand the collective as a pedagogical form in itself – a vehicle and medium that seeks to generate questions around what it means to work with each other.

Our projects encompass exhibitions, printed matter, web articles, workshops and live presentations. Through these platforms, we bring our respective practices and areas of interest into dialogue with one another, often forming short and long-term constellations with other interlocutors and fellow artists. We seek to stimulate interaction and deeper engagement between diverse epistemologies, exploring how artistic sensibilities can meaningfully contribute to disciplines and discourses, including critical theory, (visual-)anthropology, and historiography. We believe that art can surely go beyond a mere aestheticising of these fields, and can uncover new perspectives, research techniques, and produce the kind of crucial questions capable of mobilising knowledge production.