What could be the place of artistic research in current contemporary scholarship in the humanities? The following essay addresses this question while using as a case study a collaborative artistic project undertaken by two artists, Remco Roes (Belgium) and Alis Garlick (Australia). We argue that the recent integration of arts into academia requires a hybrid discourse, which has to be distinguished both from the artwork itself and from more conventional forms of academic research. This hybrid discourse explores the whole continuum of possible ways to address our existential relationship with the environment: ranging from aesthetic, multi-sensorial, associative, affective, spatial and visual modes of 'knowledge' to more discursive, analytical, contextualised ones. Here, we set out to defend the visual essay as a useful tool to explore the non-conceptual, yet meaningful bodily aspects of human culture, both in the still developing field of artistic research and in more established fields of research. It is a genre that enables us to articulate this knowledge, as a transformative process of meaning-making, supplementing other modes of inquiry in the humanities.

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In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Barthes introduced the fantasy as an important epistemological tool for the reading strategy he would try to develop in his lecture courses. The notion of fantasy oscillates between two important, but apparently irreconcilable intertexts: Lacanian psychoanalysis and Nietzschean philosophy. True to his desire for the Neutral, Barthes refused to choose between them and instead searched for a third term which would outplay the opposition. I argue that Barthes finally found this term in a revaluation of the imaginary and a plea for a return of the repressed 'ego' in literary theory, a 'romanesque' ego, which 'writes' itself in the search for a readable oeuvre.

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