Ruari Paterson-Achenbach

Ruari Paterson-Achenbach is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Their work engages with experimental sound practice to think about memory, resistance and the radical potentials of social life. 

Through an intimate, affective engagement with Outsider Music, their PhD project hopes to uncover an alternative archive of experimentalism, unveiling radical potential for creativity within and through non-normative social life. Following on from Outsider Art, Outsider music is broadly understood as self-taught or naive musicians working outside of normative institutional frameworks, or conversely non-normative bodies attempting (and often failing) to work within these frameworks. Outsider music’s recorded archive consists of a collection of ephemeral sonic objects, often once deemed insignificant, without ‘use’ or ‘value’ which nonetheless contain incredible resources for alternative conceptions of creative practice.

In looking at the forms of sonic practice and intimate archiving present in Outsider Music, they are fascinated by accidental revolutions expressed through sound. To explore the ‘accidental experimentalism’ in amateuristic or naive creative practices, they will engage with queer and black feminist interventions in archival practice. They want to identify these accidental experiments as ‘World-Making’ projects (after Muñoz, Berlant & Warner) finding in them generative potentials for future experimental creative practice. 

Ruari was also a ‘New Creative’ and has produced works with and for the ICA, BBC and NTS Radio. They have performed in spaces such as Tate Modern, the London Contemporary Music Festival, Cafe OTO and the Heong Gallery. They love to find joy and beauty in the everyday.