Research Catalogue

"Forma" is a visual inquiry on the limits of perception and understanding. It is about the moments when it seems we can grasp, understand, but the truth eludes us. About the hesitant movement that comes with this moment, about that mystery. Weight, strangeness, loneliness. Enchantment, silence, and a promise of something hidden, something that is far away, either too big or too small. About our perception and understanding of space. What is the void, what exists between things, what separates or unites them? Trying to show space, imagining shapes. In search of that emptiness, I found other things difficult to see, opaque things, abysses, darkness and too much light. I keep looking, in the night, in the snow, in the fog.

Sossego City is a disorderly, disproportionate, and noisy territory. Its urban fabric is a patchwork, torn by motorways and railways, where the frailty of small, improvised constructions and the heavy solidity of the infra-structures that dominate the landscape, involuntarily connect. It is a scenery made of contrasts, built in different scales, modes and times. This series is about a mode of inhabiting this strange and unpredictable territory, about the ways through which its inhabitants domesticate it and make it their own. Surprisingly, the word “sossego” [quiet] often comes up when they talk about the places where they live. Thus, in these images, urban speed and violence are a backdrop against which a sense of calm and time can nevertheless be perceived. These are small spaces where rural and urban, public and private blend together, signs of a mode of living that doesn’t correspond to the contemporary concept of urbanity. Degradation is obvious, and these places, located in eastern Porto, are likely to disappear. But something about this way of life, with obvious roots in a rural past, seems to question the future. “Sossego City” is a perspective on a moment of the history of this territory, and a reflection on the hints it may provide for a reinvented way of inhabiting urban space. Sossego City was first exhibited at Centro Português de Fotografia, in 2012.

“Limiar” is a personal approach to Rem Koolhaas's “Maison à Bordeaux”, exploring the house's physical and psychological boundaries and the subtleties of our relationship with space. Between interior and exterior, between intimacy and exposure, between light and shadow. This series was produced during a workshop held by École des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux and OMA

The 12th SAR Conference on Artistic Research of the Society for Artistic Research in 2021 was hosted by mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. It was oriented on the three attractors "care", "dare" and "share" and was the first SAR conference to be organized as a live online event. The online format also reached out in order to facilitate participation by individuals from new geographical regions and invited artistic researchers to share their work, processes, methods, discoveries, knowledge interventions, new insights, and understandings and to engage in exchange—in actions and words, and in ways complex and simple, conventional and unconventional, robust and fragile.
A selection of conference contributions has been assembled for documentation in this roof exposition managed by Jonas Howden Sjøvaag.

In short, the proposed work consists in a critical edition of Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Capricho diabolico, backed up by previous research in which I compare the manuscript and Andrés Segovia's interpretative edition. As a result of the significant differences between the two, I propose a version that is faithful to the original work, but without overlooking the collaboration between the two musicians.

What are the main theories on sound and musical perception? Is there a possibility for the composer to understand those ideas and use them as the basis for the organization of his craft? Would those be enough to create the musical ‘clarity’ I am looking for? Finally, can I find a way to formalize any of those theories in my composition practice? As a starting point for this investigation, part one establishes the philosophical ground for this investigation about clarity, particularly stressing the difference between intention and object, between form and structure, and their complementary nature and interaction with each other, before drawing a first idea on musical perception through the lens of Gestalt theory. Parts two and three detail the different elements that come into play while applying those ideas into my composition practice. I introduce a list of the parameters that will play a prominent role in the elaboration of the representation of the mathematical formulations seen in part four by developing further my understanding of the theories elaborated by Leonard B. Meyer around the idea of ‘expectation’ in his book Emotion and Meaning in Music, and articulating them from a practical point of view. The fourth and final part of this investigation exposes a mathematical representation of my thinking on those ideas in order to conceive and use them in my composition practice. This ‘model’, based on an understanding of what will be referred to as ‘motion’, is the ground for the elaboration of the musical shapes in my pieces.