Research Catalogue

This research focuses on safety with a very specific and comparative approach. The study is based on the analysis of innovative and reviewed cultural events and public art installations produced in three violent and unsafe African cities: Douala, Johannesburg, and Luanda. Cultural events and public art are not meant to produce safety: they are a space of experimentation with side effects: one of those is safety. Informal studies have assessed the experimental capacity of those experiences of producing livability, civil cohabitation and social cohesion, the main features of urban safety. The research involves sociology, economy, urban planning, visual arts and information design, and it is developed in collaboration with local partners. This project was conceived and supported by lettera27 Foundation and co-funded by the Swiss Network for International Studies.

The project explores the exhibition space as place and part of collective creation of knowledge. It focuses on the aesthetic experience as an epistemic practice, present both in the production of art and in its reception, during which the researching process of art continues. A screenplay constellation is used as a research method to perform the object of research (the exhibition space) as well as the research itself. Thus, production, execution, and presentation of the research process and of its results are intertwined.

I’ll be gone was a project in which two groups of students from different backgrounds and theatre traditions worked together with artist Peter Missotten to create a performance at the Maastricht Theatre School. In the project they explored virtual technologies as part of a larger project called The Virtual Body. In order to research the way in which virtuality was at stake in the project, a documentation of the working process was made. The documentation aims to discuss as well as embody issues that are also at stake in performance and virtuality – such as the relationship between real/non-real and live/non-live. Moreover, the documentation tries to take seriously questions about why, how and for whom one would want to maintain what to all intents and purposes has gone: I’ll be gone.