Research Catalogue

My practice-based arts research proposes to create a toolkit to decentralize art activism using hand-crafted textiles from an intersectional, feminist, decolonial and anti-capitalist framework. When I say that I want to decentralize art activism, I aim to increase access in terms of location, timing and risk, so that people who do not live in major metropolises, centres of power, who work when most protests happen, or who for various reasons are not able to risk possible arrest that normal protests may present, can still engage in artistic protest. My praxis will embark on a series of art activist actions that utilize various methods of decentralization, creating a handbook that displays and analyses these methods. The ways in which textiles are particularly suited to decentralize art activism, through subterfuge, slow time, and haptic relationship will be explored within the praxis. Answering the seemingly peripheral question of whether or not art activism is compatible within a gallery space imperative for the main theme of my research, which is decentralization of art activism. If art activism harmoniously exists within a gallery exhibition, then the easiest way to decentralize it is to send the art activism to exhibit elsewhere. My initial findings within the research suggest that act activism mostly cannot exist within sanctioned art exhibitions and therefore exhibitions are not an effective way to decentralize art activism. My toolkit is inspired by practical how-to-guides of art activism (Boyd and Mitchell, 2012; Duncombe and Lambert, 2021; Aylwyn Walsh et al., 2022) and through textile practises such as Tanya Aguiñiga (B. 1978-), the Craftivism Collective (2009-), Aram Han Sifuentes (B. 1986-), and Sandra Suubi (B. 1990-). The critique on capitalism’s infiltration into the artworld and art activisms roll because of this that is reflected in Alana Jelinek’s ‘Lifelike art’(2013), Gregory Sholette’s ‘bare art’(Ch(Charnley, 2017)); and Brian Holmes’ ‘Liar’s poker’ (Holmes, 2010) and it helps shape my art activism practise.

In progress Dorsal Practices — Murky Back Thinking is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orientate to self, others, world. How does cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? The dorsal orientation foregrounds active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a backwards-leaning orientation support an open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

This is an archiving project initiated by Siobhan Davies Studios, UK. The Archiving of the performance work "Truth and Transparency" Questions what it means to archive dance as well as what happens when a dance is archived acknowledging that some types of choreographers' work have historically been archived while other types of choreographers have not. What does it do to a dance and choreographer to be archived? This project is also interested in the changes in the creative process of performing the dance which was first choreographed in 2007 and is now being given new life through this archiving project. Truth & Transparency (2007): a performance work for three (two performers and one dancer manipulating projected image onto the performance space using a mirror). The work was inspired by Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ and Adesola’s reflections on bringing up their own children as two masculine presenting Black youth at the time. The piece researched Step and Crumping dance forms as well as foreshadowed new technology using projection in real-time to manipulate the audience’s perception of dancers and space.

More Than Meets the Eye: Capturing Invisible Flows and Processes: For my doctorate, I created four films and one photo-text installation that engage with invisibility in various ways. My research for the film "2°", which seeks the impact of human interaction with changing geographies, took me to an altitude of 3,500 meters above sea level. In my investigations, I traveled as far north as the 51st parallel to produce the film "In the Ice, Everything Leaves a Trace", and the photo series "The Other Side of Ice", examining the economic exploitation of the Arctic. My research also led me to a place where the wind is harnessed for filming, inspiring the creation of the film "Memories of a Past Future", and to a location where filming is no longer possible, yielding images used in the production of "Unlearning Flow". The decisive events of our time are often not visible. My research revolves around making this invisibility negotiable. These occurrences possess a fascinating duality, simultaneously feeling both familiar and foreign. While we are intimately connected to them, they represent global processes that escape complete comprehension. They are complex chains of causality that have become inscrutable to individual perception. Invisible events cannot be addressed through individual images or shots. Instead, it's the montage techniques of demontage, soft montage, and the productive gap that I employ. It is these working methods that allow me to approach the invisible, partially capture it, and make it negotiable. These forms of montage are also mirrored in the written part of my dissertation. The written section of the doctorate brings together various text elements that influence each other and create cross-references within the individual works. The the written part contains conversations with other artist researchers contextualize my work within my field but also to build a forum to negotioate my work.

Horn players have the duty to play the Wagner tuba when the repertoire demands it, but do they really know how to do it and how to adapt to the change of instrument? Mastering the Wagner tuba and feeling confident on stage can be a difficult task. Not having one's own instrument, nor subjects or teachers dedicated to the teaching of this instrument complicates its knowledge and preparation. Therefore, this research aims to facilitate and educate in this process, providing the most relevant information both intellectually and practically and offering a complete overview of it. Following an inductive methodology based on written sources, an exhaustive technical analysis and the experience of professional horn players, it tries to answer questions such as why Richard Wagner created this instrument, what role it plays in the orchestra and what demands its performance requires. For all this, if you are a horn player and have to play the Wagner tuba or have already played it but have had no previous education, the results of this research will guide you in the process and will make you obtain a higher level of interpretation and knowledge.

Informed by queer life practices, theories, and affinities, this documented artistic research project (doctoral thesis) draws from new materialist and post-humanist discourse in order to reconsider what role visual media play in the historical need to separate the human and the environmental. It asks, how do we challenge prevailing perceptions of film and photography as inexorably linked to ideas of progress and modernisation, to linear temporality, spatial separation, and to land-based thought? Based on the acknowledgement that we need to rethink our position as humans within the multiple habitats that make up the world, I investigate the ways in which the apparatus of film, rather than being an extension of human perception, attests to the material interdependences and co-productions that hold a potential for converging human and nonhuman perspectives. "Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images" considers the cinematic space of the ocean alongside Jean Epstein’s film "Le Tempestaire" (1947); it follows early photographic chemical methods involving seaweed to both develop film and to examine the technical intra-activity of human and nonhuman regimes as part of photography itself. Within the scope of this research, I argue and demonstrate how film engages in a sensory and reciprocal involvement with the material world, one that addresses the ability to sense, not just with one’s eyes, but with the entire body. "Tidal Zones" are real locations, the habitat of a multitude of organisms, and the home of seaweeds. It is a place that is neither land nor sea but constitutes a zone with its own specific relationships and living conditions. In its refusal to be either or, it forms a (non-binary) temporal figuration between presence and absence, solid and liquid, life and death, dictated by the motions of spiral and circular time. This space, "Between Life and Images", is the chemical rockpool (the darkroom) out of which photography and film grew. The PhD submission consists of four film-works, "The Etna Epigraph" (2022), "Seaweed Film" (2023), "Coenaesthesis – It Is Not Even True That There Is Air Between Us" (2023) and "The Spiral Dramaturgy" (2019) along with the exhibition "The Tidal Zone" shown at Index - The Swedish Con-temporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, from 25 November 2022 to 12 February 2023 and at Havremagasinet, Länskonsthall Boden from 14 October 2023 to 11 February 2024. The films and documentation from the exhibitions are included in the submission, which also includes an “Opening Letter” and two texts called “Filming with the Ocean” and “Methodology of the Spiral”. This dissertation has been carried out and supervised within the graduate programme in Visual Arts at the Royal Institute of Art. The dissertation is presented at Lund University in the framework of the cooperation agreement between the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, and the Royal Institute of Art regarding doctoral education in the subject Visual Arts.