Research Catalogue

This project combines artistic and anthropological research on spontaneous gardening in open public space, predominantly in Brno, CZ. The team, mostly comprising recent graduates and graduate students of the Faculty of Fine Arts of Brno University of Technology, chose gardens and plantings which were, in most cases, rather exceptional. Unlike most typical front gardens, the ones in this study are somehow peculiar, due to their location, their composition and planting schemes, their scale, or methods of those who garden there. The anthropologists on the team analyzed a Facebook group dedicated to street gardening and conducted several interviews, while the artistic team responded to particular places with which they interacted. Some results of this research have been presented to the public in the form of an application comprising an audioguide and an interactive map; this exposition in the Research catalogue documents some of these findings. The team Barbora Lungová is a visual artist and has taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology since 2007. Her field of practice is painting and art projects focusing on plants, gardening, and queerness. She is the coordinator of the Partisans with a Hoe project. Lucia Bergamaschi is a visual artist working across the media of photography, sound, and installation. She earned an MA in Fine Art at Università Iuav di Venezia and an MA in Law at Università di Bologna. She is currently finishing her MA studies at the FFA BUT. Nela Maruškevičová combines painting, installations, and glass in her artistic practice. She is a 2023 graduate of the FFA BUT. Kateřina Konvalinová is a visual artist interested in the overlapping spaces of art, communal life, farming, and ritual. She earned her MA in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and is currently a doctoral student at the FFA BUT. Iva Balcaříková is a graphic designer and a member of the team behind the curated audio walks created by Galerie Art in Brno. She is currently finishing her MA studies at the FFA BUT. Hana Drštičková is a visual artist and a social anthropologist interested in environmental and queer topics. She graduated with an MA in Fine Arts from the FFA BUT in 2022 and with a BA in social anthropology from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Masaryk University and is currently a doctoral student at the Gender Studies Department of Charles University in Prague. Anastasia Blokhina is a social anthropologist who graduated with an MA tfrom the Faculty of Social Sciences of Masaryk University in 2022. Polyna Davydenko is a photographer and a video artist who documents social and environmental issues in her work, most recently those connected with the war in Ukraine. Filip Dušek is a media artist who studied at the Department of Photography at the FFA BUT. The project was conducted under the Specific Research FaVU-S-23-8441 Program.

Documentation of preliminary steps and collection of musical material and related reflections during the first Term of the Master's Program in Improvisation and World Music. December 2022

Ongoing process. Workshops about public space developed with children and teenagers inhabitants of Bairro do Cerco, Porto, Portugal.

This exposition reports and assesses the experience of the project ‘The Creative Potential of Evolving Constraints in Peer-to-Peer Reciprocal Coaching: A Three-way Investigation’ (hereafter 3WI), funded by the Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University. 3WI was designed to gauge the utility of evolving creativity constraints — that is, deliberately adopted restrictions (whether self-imposed or suggested by another) to choices in a given creative project — in the development of projects by the three participants: a dance artist and filmmaker, a songwriter, and an academic video-essayist. The format of 3WI was as follows. At monthly meetings from September to December 2021, each participant presented work in progress and exchanged feedback with the other two participants. Each meeting culminated in the setting of tasks and constraints designed to guide the development of individual projects over the subsequent month. After an introduction to the format and aims of 3WI, the exposition begins with a description of 3WI’s procedural and theoretical coordinates: the Critical Response Process, a formalised protocol for eliciting feedback on creative projects developed by choreographer Liz Lerman; The Five Obstructions (Lars Von Trier and Jørgen Leth, 2003), a film which models the provision of creativity constraints; and theory and scholarship concerning the utility of creativity constraints. The exposition continues with a description of the projects being developed by each participant (a dance performance and dance film; two songs; two sections of an academic videoessay), and an individual and illustrated account of the feedback meetings and development of those projects over the course of 3WI. These accounts are followed by a discussion reflecting on setting and receiving constraints, and an assessment of the experience of the project. We conclude with some contemplation of the ethics of constraint-setting and the lessons of the 3WI experience for other makers. Constraint-based procedures are commonly employed and recognised as generative in artistic and design contexts, and they are also used in experimental academic work. 3WI was an attempt to test the utility of constraint-setting as a form of formative peer-to-peer feedback in the development of real creative projects. This exposition will be of interest to artists and academics interested in deploying creativity constraints for the development of creative and creative-critical projects. It will be particularly relevant for those who work in collaborative and interdisciplinary contexts. Download Accessible PDF

Agential Guts was an artistic multispecies practice of care; a messy entanglement with goats, soils, microbial companions, and gardening activities. The concern over biodiversity loss and many ecological crises caused by traditional farming led me to learn about alternative soil care and goat-keeping and to invent new modes of relating and caring in a multispecies context. The fieldwork drew from rewilding practices that strive to create biodiverse conditions. Configuring the meanings of multispecies assemblage beyond instrumentalising governance of different species, I followed what I called microbial desires in our relational enactments envisioning microbial and mammalian companionship from the more-than-human standpoint. My kin-making was my object of study from an academic perspective but the companion animals and microbes, soils, and plants were collaborators from the artistic point of view. The premises of new materialist and post-anthropocentric relational ontologies were embodied in our practice, where the matter was perceived as intelligent and affective, and thus able to lead to sources of novel ethical thinking-doing and art. I drew from the arts of noticing and considering collaboration as contamination (Tsing 2015) with messy, microbially saturated milieu. Acknowledging how scientific knowledge is always shaping our affective encounters, I also tried to speculate with what we know about microbes leaking between different bodies. In producing a situated knowledge platform, Agential Guts contributed to both art-based research and social studies of microbes by introducing a speculative and embodied way to create knowledge together with nonhumans. Download Accessible PDF

Living Lines of the Barely Noticeable is a long-term artistic research project aiming to develop distinct artistic approaches to relate to and interact with flying insects and provide the artistic research with a theoretical and practical context by reflecting on relationships and connections with the more-than-human world that occurred within the research. The research aimed to explore ways and manners, that can contribute to more meaningful relationships with a more-than-human entity. This resulted firstly in approaches that explored ways to relate to flying insects: reflective attempts studying glimpses and tatters of ‘insectness’ and the circumstances that shaped the way we related to each other. Secondly, I developed approaches that explored manners of being close to (or intimate with) flying insects. These approaches involved more active, hands-on experiments and attempts to interact with flying insects. Download Accessible PDF