CREATIVE COLLISIONS: Productive antagonisms is a mode of knowledge exchange and production with and through difference across boundaries of disciplines and more. I first conceptualised the term with UCL geographer Dr Alan Latham and articulated this in a journal paper (Latham and Tan 2016). The term framed our curatorial and research collaboration of the RUN! RUN! RUN! International Festival of Running (2014). Itself an artful juxtaposition of concepts and practices from our respective disciplines and more including Chinese Daoist body-mind-world poetics, I have since extended the concept into a mode of learning and teaching, which earned me a Senior Fellowship from Higher Education Academy. Yet, productive antagonisms isn’t at all new, and has had other incarnations in the two decades prior, of my solo practice, with other framings such as ISLANDHOPPING which had a focus on geopolitical borders, power and memory (when I lived and worked in Japan 2002-2005).
LINKS: Click here for PDF of article ‘Running into Each Other: Run! Run! Run! A Festival and a Collaboration’ in Cultural Geographies (Sage 2016). Click here for article in situ (no paywall). Click here for other contents on this website unpacking productive antagonisms. Click here for 2020 film interview where I contextualise how productive antagonisms related to various paradigms I have created over the years including ISLANDHOPPING, ill-disciplined (Tan and Asherson 2018) and artful leadership (Tan 2020 and Tan and Northey 2020).
Caption: Rundown of RUN! RUN! RUN! International Festival of Running (2014) which welcomed 50 academics, artists and colleagues from the third sector.