Research Catalogue

This exposition documents my explorations of pondering with pine trees. Tämä ekspositio dokumentoi yritykseni miettiä mäntyjen kanssa. Den här ekspositionen dokumenterar mina försök att fundera med furor.

Illustration as research from within the field is of relatively new practice. The illustrators discourse on representation (Yannicopoulou & Alaca 2018 ), theory (Doyle, Grove and Sherman 2018, Male 2019, Gannon and Fauchon 2021), and critical writing on illustration practice was hardly found before The Journal of Illustration was first issued in 2014, followed by artistic research through illustration (Black, 2014; Rysjedal, 2019; Spicer, 2019). This research project developed as response to a rise in hate crime towards refugees and the targeting of European Jews in recent decade. A pilot project (This Is a Human Being 2016-2019) treated how narratives of the Holocaust may avoid contributing to overwriting of history or cultural appropriation. Asking how illustration in an expanded approach may communicate profound human issues typically considered unrepresentable, this new project hopes to explore representation and the narratives of “us” and “the others” in the contemporary world through illustration as starting-point for cross-disciplinary projects. The participants from different disciplines, have interacted democratically on common humanist themes to explore the transformative role of illustration in contemporary communication. our projects should afford contemplation of illustration as an enhanced, decelerated way of looking; and drawing as a process for understanding - a way of engaging in understanding the other, as much as expressing one’s own needs (McCartney, 2016). This AR project consisted of three symposia and three work packages, and the artistic research unfolded in the symbiosis of these elements. Our investigation of illustration across media and materials continues as dissemination and exhibitions even after the conclusion of the work packages in 2024.

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This publication presents the outcomes of the Connective Symposium, which took place at Fontys Academy of the Arts in Tilburg, in November 2022. The symposium was the first time that the professorship and research group Artistic Connective Practices, initiated in 2021, opened its work to the international field: We invited practitioners from all over the world to share their work and exchange about the concept of "artistic connectivity". "Artistic Connectivity Unfolding" is an attempt to share the experiences during the symposium with the broader artistic research audience, and to contribute to the body of artistic research work that is socially engaged. The exposition is potentially many things: In part, it is a piece of documentation of the symposium, in part reflections on and proceedings of it. It is also an explorative contribution to our emerging and unfolding discourse of artistic connectivity, — unfinished, fluid and moving — and thus a springboard for our future work on artistic connectivity.

The aim of this documented artistic research project is to investigate functions of directing within an expanded understanding of co-created performing arts. My main question concerns the following. What practices and principles of directing in co-created performing arts are revealed in the sample narratives, expositions and final productions of the thesis, and what do these say about transformations within different spatial and social contexts? The project process consists of four documented stagings and a final performance. It is this way I develop the concept “The Coteur” which stands for a directorial function combining a unique, biographical director function (The Auteur) with the openness of a co-created process formed around place, collaborators and contexts, where the development of an original work start without a script. Here I am interested in what I call ”staged absence” which I consider to be an artistic principle based on the removal of “the expected”. What happens, for example when the lead vocalist and the music are taken out of a popular song to leave behind a group of beat counting back-up singers, looking for their cue and a rhythm. Or when boxers are taken out of the ring and only the choreography of the referee remains. In my artistic research project I want to challenge the premises of co-creative performing art, and the director function, by also using forms for seminars and association meetings, to stage collective readings aloud, from manuscripts. This is combined with autobiographical and reflective writing, influenced by the principles for knowledge in practice, to uncover and develop artistic principles for a co-creative director function.

A six-part polyphonic setting of the ordinary of the Mass survives as a unicum in the manuscript 1967 of the Biblioteca Central de Barcelona, Spain. Although it is clearly the most significative piece of the manuscript, it has received comparatively much less attention from specialized ensembles than the rest of the repertoire contained therein. There might be multiple reasons for this, but the fact that the manuscript gives no hint about who is the composer of the mass seems to be the main one. Moreover, this kind of situation is quite common when dealing with early repertoires. This research aims to problematize this situation and to offer several practical, performer-oriented strategies out of it.