Amateurism

Being an amateur means focusing on the process, experimentation, learning, figuring things out (together). It means playing with skills and roles as activities rather than essentializing labels, while being open to fail, again and again, and realizing that there is no such thing as failure, as there are no set standards to be met. An amateur doesn't claim expertise, doesn't reaffirm the categories created by specialisation and the alienation and separation that come along, steals from disciplines and the undisciplinary. This is probably what attracted me to art in the first place, the freedom of being able to play with knowledges from different contexts without having to adhere to academic or professional rules and confinements, to embody theory through practice and think practice through theory, to recognize that their seperation is artificial, to maintain [[joy]] and playfulness in learning and creating (which go hand in hand). This way, I find myself free to mix and merge the abstract and the concrete, the academic and the the everyday/embodied/[[the common(s)]] knowledge, the fashionable and the outdated. The amateur refuses to settle with a fixed identity, to become graspable and marketable (as far as they can while feeding themselves), and embraces ambiguity. Being an amateur means focusing on the process, experimentation, learning, figuring things out (together). It means playing with skills and roles as activities rather than essentializing labels, while being open to fail, again and again, and realizing that there is no such thing as failure, as there are no set standards to be met. An amateur doesn't claim expertise, doesn't reaffirm the categories created by specialisation and the alienation and separation that come along, steals from disciplines and the undisciplinary. This is probably what attracted me to art in the first place, the freedom of being able to play with [[knowledges]] from different contexts without having to adhere to academic or professional rules and confinements, to embody theory through practice and think practice through theory, to recognize that their seperation is artificial, to maintain [[joy]] and playfulness in learning and creating (which go hand in hand). This way, I find myself free to mix and merge the abstract and the concrete, the academic and the the everyday/embodied/[[the common(s)]] knowledge, the fashionable and the outdated. The amateur refuses to settle with a fixed identity, to become graspable and marketable (as far as they can while feeding themselves), and embraces ambiguity. They describe themselves with what they do rather than define themselves with what they are.