Research Catalogue

How can I, as a workshop facilitator, create inclusive, inviting and transformative spaces for sparking moments of joy around diversity? How does my training as an artist, researcher and teacher inform and enable my role as a workshop facilitator, such that I can support radical expressions of self-acceptance? What are the limitations to my role, and what possibilities may lie ahead through continued reflection and practice? I have worked through these questions by exploring the concept of vulnerability through a/r/tographic theories and practices, with the culmination of my research and reflections shared in this exposition. Though I have long hosted workshops in marginalised communities as a means for building resilience and kinship, only in the past year have I begun to analyse, from theoretical and methodological perspectives, how and why certain approaches work. Again and again, my reflective meanderings take me back to a single core concept, namely vulnerability. By being vulnerable, one becomes open and raw, which — in certain conditions — can lead to curiosity, risk-taking and remarkable creativity. With such an open and desiring mind, creative practices like crafting can evoke radical feelings of joy and appreciation around a topic that otherwise may tend to conjure conflicting or undesirable feelings. Vulnerability is particularly important in my work because the primary focus of my workshops has been bodily joy. Largely, I have hosted workshops wherein we have explored positive feelings of one’s gender diverse experiences, expressions or identity through paper crafting. Recently, I have also begun hosting crafting workshops, in which we forest bathe (friluftsliv) then craft on the joy one has felt in communion with nature. Crafting becomes an extension of the self, a temporary reincarnation of our own materiality in which we bring to life an alternative understanding of our own potential. In this exposition, I address the questions above by drawing on two example workshops, Crafting Gender Diverse Joy, and Crafting Joy in Nature -- hosted in April and May 2025, respectively. The organisation of this exposition is inspired by L. Balzi’s ice cracks metaphor (2023), Irwin's rhizomatic walking method (2013), and LeBlanc's The Wake (2019). The workshop process as a whole is a reverberation of impulses rippling outwards without end. I navigate these reverberations through a visual mapping of a rhizomatic system of roots sprawling from a tree in Bymarka. The roots are vast web of connections, largely hidden beneath the ground as points of potential. With our imaginations, we can appreciate the complexity of this web, just as we can trace the multiple invisible processes that lead us to our eventual a/r/tographic choices. I invite you to wander across these knots and walls, encountering the various descriptive concepts, or 'centres of vibration', to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari (1994; in Irwin & Springgay, 2008). The layout is roughly guided by the three stages of the workshop process (planning, workshop, aftercare), sprinkled with key concepts, theories, and practices. I also include documentation from the workshops, such as photos and crafts (with permission granted). Enjoy your own wandering. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Simple page for presentation on 13/12/2023

The article unfolds how the combination of qualitative research and immersive performance has given Inga Gerner Nielsen insight into her audience's aesthetic perception and imaginary realm in a performance installation. It sets out by stating that to ask an audience open questions about a performance only provides testimony of the after-rationalizations of their experience. The author introduces a phenomenological interview method, which draws on sense-memory techniques directing the interviewee to produce thick descriptions; actualizing the lived experience in the interview instead. In response to Norman K. Denzin's call for a performative dialogical social science, she argues why interview material should be conceptualized as performance and how working artistically with the interview setup can serve to highlight the inherent power dynamics. The article ends with examples showing how the interview was turned into a central immersive element of Inga Gerner Nielsen ́s artworks.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 BA Photography Summary: "Why does she cry salty tears while he touches the sea". Follows a search for understanding how being in cold water has a relationship with humans. More specifically if the sea is for people to be in or not - the upbringing stories from Iceland and a Nordic background is noticeable in how the author approaches the subject of the sea. From the perspective of being cautious towards it, yet fearful and therefore the quest is giving contrast on how the sea shapes people. On an emotional level yet spiritually as well. Questions regarding people’s place within the social context and, with others. The personal writings is intertwined with challenges people face and how it’s displayed in the art world. Research into how artist have dealt with overcoming bigger forces than themselves. The social element of a sea swimming community is discussed where recent acknowledgment in a modern society to be in cold water is ever present. This is done by interviewing people who have been tuned in with the sea, a former sailor and a sea swimmer. The paper is divided into four chapters. Their titles serves the focus points. In Salt water, a look into the unknown, how artists deal with the sea as a natural force, admiration towards the sea with a connection to the emotional state. Community, is where the unknown offer a place to belong to, observing from a distance as well inside a sea swimming community. In Rituals, sea swim is investigated as a social act binding the community. Tales brings storytelling with focus on sailors and sea creatures.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 Master of Photography and Society On 12 May 2008, at 14:28 Beijing time, an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale struck my home province of Sichuan, China, killing 69,227 people, leaving 17,923 missing and injuring 374,643 in various degrees across China. At the time, I was at university in another city far from home. In this thesis, My beginning question is how to fit myself who is absent from this earthquake into its history and the memories shaped by it. As a practitioner and researcher of photographic images, I want to reach out beyond the physical and psychological distance to the real memories of the earthquake understand its impact by describing, speculating and analyzing ready-made images about it and by explaining my own visual strategies, such as making and reworking photographs on this topic. These images contain 1) group photos of local people before the earthquake who were separated from each other in life and death by the it, 2) video clips taken by television camera reporters and other anonymous people on the day of the earthquake, and 3) the visual outcomes produced by people who look at or photograph the earthquake ruins which turned into tourist attractions now. In these ways, I highlight that we can encounter actively that earthquake through dealing with photographs about it and new photographic actions since then, in order to find possibilities to shape the postmemories for those Chinese who, like me, were absent or irrelevant at the time of the earthquake. In September 2022, a new strong earthquake occurred in Sichuan. I regard it as a bridge to relate the 2008 earthquake to present-day China. At that time, China was still in the midst of an extremely rigorous Covid-19 prevention and control phase, with various restrictions trying to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 cascading from the top down. By putting the two earthquakes together to discuss, I argue that Chinese people should remember the disasters of the past so that we can find our place in new dilemmas to deal with them. We should face up to the pain others have experienced and are experiencing and reach out to help, instead of ignoring or avoiding our responsibility. As a Chinese studying an English-taught MA program in the Netherlands, the differences between the Chinese and English contexts, the temporal distance between the current Chinese context and the European historical context were gaps that I could not avoid in this thesis writing. These gaps are reflected by describing and reflecting on my act of going to the former site of the Auschwitz Concentration camp. Acting as a spokesperson, I brought the inappropriate reactions of some Chinese people in the present to the plight of their compatriots to that field of traumatic memories, emphasising the importance of confronting one’s own absence and distance from the disaster from the other’s side.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 Master Photography & Society Using photography as a point of reference, this master thesis explores the political, cultural and scientific structures which allow profit-making with human sickness in the German healthcare system. It is argued how photography — in the form of medical imaging — separates physically representable symptoms from patients and their lived experience, by that creating an abridged representation of life. As healthcare has been deliberately embedded in a profit-oriented market by politicians over the last decades, medical imaging today not only acts as an operational image that gives evidence helping to diagnose a patient, but also as an operational image which facilitates the commodification of the body. This puts the well-being of both patients and medical staff (and therefore society at large) at stake. In the context of this analysis the question arises how photography itself can act as a tool to bring these issues to discussion. Because visual makers themselves deal with the challenge of being part of a profit-oriented system, this demands reexamination of the stories considered worth telling.