Research Catalogue

Excerpt from my forthcoming research project How to be a medium? including the script of How (not) to be a puppet and its first act as audio play.

Jenny Sunesson (b. 1973) is a Swedish artist predominantly working with sound. Her practice ranges from field recording and live collages to conceptual sound art and video. Sunesson uses her own life as a stage for her dark, tragic and sometimes comical re-contextualised work where real and invented characters and derogated stereotypes, collaborate in the alternate story of hierarchies and normative power structures in society.

'Empowering Collective Performing Arts: A Facilitator’s Toolkit for Overcoming Language Barriers' is a practice-led research project that explores the ways to encourage group connection through non-textual, embodied communication within diverse communities. Drawing on work experience with immigrant children, refugees, and deaf/hearing collaborators—as well as recent research residencies with ASSITEJ Norway, The Flying Seagulls and Red Nose Emergency Smiles—the project contains a growing body of facilitation strategies as an open-source toolkit. Rooted in my personal experience of linguistic displacement and background in voice and dance, this project proposes a shift away from text-centric facilitation models toward approaches that prioritise emotional intuition and situational awareness. The project is underpinned by critical frameworks around embodied knowledge, power, and positionality, aiming to challenge colonial and exclusionary norms around communication. Ultimately, it seeks to empower facilitators and communities alike to trust in the expressive potential of the body and encourage inclusive, trust-based spaces for collective performing arts experiences.

The essays and expositions in this issue of HUB delve into the concept of Metabolic Media, exploring the interconnections between biological, technological, cultural, and ecological systems. Together, they offer a rich tapestry of perspectives, illuminating how processes of exchange, transformation, and interaction underpin the idea of media as metabolic and metabolising. Through this metabolic mosaic, this special issue of HUB presents a dynamic and interconnected view of metabolic media, celebrating how media processes reflect and influence the metabolic flows of life itself. Each contribution invites readers to rethink how artistic, scientific, and technological practices can illuminate the entangled systems that sustain and shape our shared existence. Against a background of shifting, strained or even pathological metabolic relations across scales, forms, zones and bodies, these reflections and interventions intersect with media techniques and technologies as traditionally conceived and emergent, immanent and immediate metabolic flows systems and processes.

Traces from the Anthropocene: Working with Soil Research Pavilion #3, Venice, Italy 2019 The video documents the artistic research project Traces from the Anthropocene: Working with Soil, that explores the relationship between humans and soil through a study of soil contamination in the Venice Lagoon area. In this research, ceramic artists collaborate with soil contamination experts focusing on the current state of the local soils and sediments, linking them with the anthropogenic impact in the area. The group of artists, researchers and MA students studied the soils and sediments of the Venice Lagoon using ceramic art and methods of soil contamination research. The video follows the artists on their sediment sampling fieldwork and documents the research environment, also recording the artists’ work at the Research Pavilion where they coiled large clay pots from local brick clay, and painted them with the contaminated soil. Working with Soil group: Maarit Mäkelä (PI), Riikka Latva-Somppi, Özgu Gündeşlioğlu and Catharina Kajander and students Tzuyu Chen, Pauliina Purhonen and Hanna Kutvonen. The project was led by Empirica research group of Aalto University’s Design Department and done in collaboration with the Finnish Environment Institute SYKE. The local brick factory Terreal SanMarco provided local brick clay for the artworks.

This project explores the theme of human fragility, examining its many dimensions through sculpture and painting. Fragility is not approached as weakness, but as a fundamental aspect of existence — a space of vulnerability, yet also of sensitivity, transformation, and creative potential. The works emerge from an intimate dialogue with the body, memory, and time: delicate or weathered materials — such as wax, plaster, paper, and fluid pigments — give shape to ephemeral figures, incomplete or transforming bodies, and marks that evoke the instability of identity and the constant interplay between resistance and collapse. Through this process, art becomes an act of listening and bearing witness — to what breaks, but also to what, in breaking, reveals a new possibility of presence.