magdalena walpoth

Role(s)

Over the course of several days, during the Show and Try Again event, I was concerned with the question of what role(s) I play myself in connection with the curatorial field research project, as a researcher, as a participator or as a private person etc. What roles are attributed to me? How do they change during the event? Who do we represent or who do we claim to represent? What do we trigger through our practice and the associated movements and how do we change the space (whereby space can be read as a research field)? How is my subjectivity perceived by the other participants? Which character mask—in the sense of a Marxist sociology—do I wear during the event? This also raises the question of collective perception and of how I can or must change my positionality depending on behavior patterns and social (hegemonic) structures. Using a series of photographs that I have taken of objects that I carried with me during the event or that were used in some other way, I try to investigate the question of my personal social role as a researcher. Together with the room sketches on which I have recorded my daily movements in the HGB gallery (a kind of auto-reflective motion detector) and excerpts from the thought log that I kept on the show day, they are supposed to be a kind of hypomnemata or Individual Mythology and act as a visual notebook for the website.
Through the daily repetition of the recordings, they also become Show and Try Again in the sense of a self-examination of your own perspective.This is intended to create a digital object that can be understood as making the research process visible.
The texts with which I overwrite the photographs are largely taken from the definition of social role given in Wikipedia.

A role (also social role) is a set of connected behaviors, rights, obligations, beliefs, and norms as conceptualized by people in a social situation.

It is an expected or free or continuously changing behavior and may have a given individual social status or social position.

The division of labor in society takes the form of the interaction among heterogeneous specialized positions, we call roles.

Roles included appropriate and permitted forms of behavior and actions that recur in a group, guided by social norms, which are commonly known and hence determine the expectations for appropriate behavior in these roles, which further explains the place of a person in the society.

Roles are occupied by individuals, who are called actors.

When individuals approve of a social role (i.e., they consider the role legitimate and constructive), they will incur costs to conform to role norms, and will also incur costs to punish those who violate role norms.

Changed conditions can render a social role outdated or illegitimate, in which case social pressures are likely to lead to role change.

The anticipation of rewards and punishments, as well as the satisfaction of behaving prosocially, account for why agents conform to role requirements.

Roles may be achieved or ascribed or they can be accidental in different situations.

An achieved role is a position that a person assumes voluntarily which reflects personal skills, abilities, and effort.

Roles can be semi-permanent or they can be transitory.

Roles are also frequently interconnected in a role set, that complement of role-relationships in which persons are involved by virtue of occupying a particular social status.