Research Catalogue

This thesis explores how late-diagnosed autistic individuals and their close circle can redesign their relationship after their diagnosis through communication that aligns with autistic ways of being. Grounded in the neurodiversity paradigm, the social model of disability, and the double empathy problem, the research combines interviews, co-creation sessions, and visual storytelling to uncover emotional and relational dynamics during post-diagnosis identity shifts. Through a neurodivergent lens—rooted in sensory awareness, pattern recognition, and visual thinking—this work challenges deficit-based narratives and proposes a compassionate, co-created communication framework. The goal is not assimilation but mutual understanding: enabling autistic individuals to embrace their authentic selves while guiding loved ones to meet them with compassion and openness. Ultimately, the project reimagines design as a tool for creating connection, not correction—honouring difference, restoring balance, and building inclusive systems where all ways of being are valid, visible, and valued.

In our exploration of the spatiality of language and, specifically, the activation of the site where writing "makes" rather than takes place, we propose a multilayered experience of the book as an object, as well as a geometrical, topological, and especially performative space, which we understand as an "ecology of the book". Extending this practice beyond the book's margins, yet simultaneously embedding it within the material and technical affordances of the book’s medial articulations, we evoke a "new" ecology—one unfolding alongside the interaction-landscape and its actual and invented inhabitants, as well as the techniques of its production. Texts, drawings, figures, figurations, methods, and both human and non-human authors weave together the heterogeneous texture of the book’s "new" ecology. In our monographs, "Fauna. Language Arts and the New Order of Imaginary Animals" (2018), "Flora. Language Arts in the Age of Information" (2020), and "Fiction Fiction. Language Arts and the Practice of Spatial Storytelling" (2023, De Gruyter/Edition Angewandte), we explore and map the territory of language arts. This approach manifests, on the one hand, through the transgression of traditional scientific methodologies and a shift in models—from thinking-of-the-other toward thinking-with-the-other, and on the other hand, through the agency of our eponymous characters, Fauna and Flora, who not only title our books but also act as conceptual operators—figures that navigate, perform, and activate the very spaces our texts explore. Applying Michel Serres' methodology of thinking by inventing personae, these characters move within and percolate through the margins of text (written, figural) and space (concrete, fictional), reconfiguring the notion of authorship and placing literary texts and digital drawings within the frame(less) collective of more-than-human and more-than-organic actants.

This exposition contains documentation of the artistic result of Magnhild Øen Nordahls artistic research PhD project Unmaking Abstractions. The exposition also contains the artistic reflection for the same project. On the exposition's landing page the reader can access its different components by clicking different sides of the unfolded cube. The rotating cube in the upper right corner will bring the reader back to the landing page.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 Master Interior Architecture (INSIDE) Today, one percent of humanity is displaced and there are twice as many forcibly displaced people than in 2011 when the total was just under 40 million.  Many possible solutions are being given to the extent of providing shelters for migrants in precariousness. Many of these solutions seem to attempt to normalise precarity. But so little attention has been given to the perception the migrants have of that precariousness.   Then how can my response to such phenomena go beyond merely providing shelter to understanding the relationship between displacement and belonging? This research explores new processes towards knowing and claiming territory; it speculates on the domestic environment that may emerge through processes of listening, tracing and drawing together with those living on the front line of precariousness inside refugee camps.   To this extent this research will draw a new way of looking at hospitality as a tool for refugees to gain empowerment in the camps. How would that be for a refugee, to be a host in a hosting country?   

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 Master Photography & Society This thesis is an exploration of escapism, of clashes between the everyday and the sublime, of the concept of stargazing, human connection with stars, escapism and fiction. It is a thinking process behind creating a body of visual photographic work while also an individual set of reflections and arguments around the themes of stargazing, astronomy, photographic representations, darkness, and personal experiences. Through the photographic encounters and meetings with creators of hand-crafted planetariums, planetarium guides, star gazing passionates, amateur and professional astronomers and astrophotographers I follow the theme of stargazing, and through that fascination – the concept of positive escapism. With the use of photographic processes I document, I stage, I manipulate the images. This thesis results from my desire to challenge prominent binary narratives and welcome an act of speculation, of poetry, of reimagining andreclaiming realities.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 Master Photography & Society Welcome to the TROPICAL TRAUMA MISERY TOUR. I invite you to take this tour through aroofless theater called media, the stage representing the farce and media opportunism ofthe Brazilian president and far-right populist, Jair Messias Bolsonaro—The Myth.In 2018, Bolsonaro was stabbed during a presidential rally campaign. Against a backdrop ofpolarization, micro-narratives, and misinformation,The Mythstarred in an online politicalcampaign where he had complete control over his narrative and self-presentation. This tourinvestigates how the ambiguity of the stabbing event exposes the network propaganda in theBrazilian political game.Through a speculative documentary photography practice, this piece overcomes the politicalillusions and dissemination of nonprogressive values of digital populists. The fictionalizationof the real is a form of resistance towards such ideological shams and manipulations. Itdevolves into a meta-play, a farce within a farce.