Research Catalogue

This exposition emerged from my participation in the second interval of the Simultaneous Arrivals (Simularr) Artistic Research Project—a research project inviting international artist-researchers to explore relational, situated, and process-based inquiries in dialogue with core researchers. Core researchers: Nayari Castillo, Hanns Holger Rutz, Franziska Hederer, and Daniele Pozzi. For the second interval, the visual artist and researcher Elena Radaelli and I were invited as visiting artist-researchers. (More information on Simultaneous Arrivals: https://simularr.net/about/) The exposition presents my process during the residency, i.e. my Traces and Paths Towards a Singularly-Plural Companionships. The eight-week residency (3 March-30 April 2024) took place across three sites: Graz (Austria); Lecce, San Cesario (Italy); and Klagenfurt (Austria). The exposition traces this journey through various mediums, including texts, graphics, video and audio material experiments, field encounters, and theoretical companions. My processes, are informed and shaped by my companion collaborators—human (research-creation companions), more-than-human, textual, and material—who co-inform and co-create the unfolding of the research.

Supplement to the presentation proposal 'Anatomy of a (Musical) Ethics Lab'

'Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation: Toward non-local collaborative art practices' investigates the resonances of concepts from quantum theory in the realm of transdisciplinary practice-based artistic research. Throughout a series of protocols using diffractive methodologies, we intend to translate and embody concepts such as spacetime, entanglement, non-locality, uncertainty, indeterminacy, and superpositionality, and embed them as tools for our artistic practices. These concepts were chosen for their singularity in physics, but also for the ways in which they confront ontoepistemic pillars of ‘Modernity’, such as sequentiality, determinacy and separability. The research is carried out by a transdisciplinary non-local core ensemble formed by Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Packer, and Carla Zaccagnini. The cities we inhabit – Copenhagen, Sao Paulo and Malmö – have been our laboratories. Departing from tools and methods learned from each-other's disciplines, we have been creating scores that guide our simultaneous actions while walking on the street –interacting with public spaces and their characteristics– or while lying asleep –in the most private of spheres. On the one hand, in a practice we call ‘non-local walking’, scores conduct our collective experiencing of our cities, involving a diffractive methodology of reading and listening, and the entangled collecting of objects, words and other affections found in the urban terrain. On the other hand, the ‘entangling dream practice’ experiment is an attempt without aiming at success of meeting each other in our dreams. Both investigations are conceived as boundary-crossing transdisciplinary methodologies through which we create a relational, critical consciousness and sensing that stimulates unexpected outcomes, embracing failure. These scored performances have resulted in cartographies, drawings, moving sculptures, audio works and writings. Across these various materializations, unexpected connections, constellations, and coincidences e/merge, unveiling yet unheard polyphonies that give resonance to the urban and mental spaces, as potentized terrains awaiting (re)circuitry, and, as fields of forces that await to be (re)experienced.

This research consists of the artistic and organizational process of creating a workshop called “Experimental music for children”. In this exposition you can read about how I and my fellow musicians created a workshop for children through eight workshop sessions that took place between February 2024 and January 2025. This resulted in an interactive workshop with children about co-creation, exploration and art making. In addition, this research explores how such a project affects my personal artistic development. In this exposition, you can read about the construction and development of the workshops, and how they evolved into a concrete artistic project. The data collected from the workshops was organised through the merging of critical reflection and analysis. The theoretical part of this research is based on literature and observations of experimental music, art for children and similar experimental music projects. These references serve as material for developing and concretising the artistic vision while shaping the project and ensuring its place in the artistic field as well as the realm of educational research.

One of the aspects Jimmie Blanton (1918–42), best known as Duke Ellington’s bassist between 1939 and 1941, has been most praised for is his tone, particularly its loudness, which has been characterised as “outsized,” “resonant,” “roaring,” and “huge.” While Brian Priestley (2009, 85) observed that tone is often “thought of as god-given,” I wanted to understand why and how Blanton’s tone was (perceived as being) different from that of his peers. I examined several possible impact factors, such as his performance technique and instrument, but found none differed significantly from those of his fellow bassists. Eventually, I (partially) found the answer by recreating Blanton’s music. In this exposition, I examine an experimental recording session by the Brussels Jazz Orchestra and myself on bass in which we recreated the circumstances of a 1930s–1940s Ellington performance, both live and in the studio, in a historically informed way, for example, by using historically appropriate instrumentation, repertoire, location, recording set-up, and performance practice. The outcome revealed that specific changes in the orchestra’s seating plan were key to Blanton’s perceived superior tone. Using media samples, I review the preparation, recording process, and results, drawing on a combination of visual analysis of historical photographs, complete participant observation, comparative auditory analysis, and formal and informal (semi-structured) interviews with participants.

With this exposition, we share the creative process that led to the composition and performance of Stretch, a piece by a jazz quartet led by pianist Piergiorgio Pirro. We will show that introducing theoretical models and paradigms from spectralism as a “foreign body” into the workings of a small jazz band illuminates a complex network of factors at play in the band’s music making, leading to a thorough reconfiguration in which new instruments get built and played, old habits need to be unlearnt, uncommon interactions emerge and theoretical frameworks clash in practice.