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.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 Master Photography & Society As photographers we make, sell and consume digital images, and the digital space and its audiences are growing exponentially. But every conversation on circulating photography centres on the object, about books or exhibitions. It seemed like there are images, and there is photography. Why are the two diverging? Radio evolved into podcasts. TV turned into TikTok. This thesis, then, sets out to ask what it is that photography says it does, or thinks it does, and what it actually does in the age of the smartphone. Critics love to tell their readers that photography is dead, but for some reason you can find all those same critics cheerfully posting their lunch on Instagram. This thesis is an invitation and a challenge to photography, to admit that things have changed and to embrace this as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 MA Photography and Society This study examines what roles images can play in the disclosure of discipline within the Dutch political settlement known as the polder model. On November 24, 1982, the Accord of Wassenaar formalised the contemporary Dutch socio-economic and political character by adopting a method of corporatist consensus seeking and decision making between capital, the state, and labour called the ‘polder model’. The polder model has its origin in the creation of a key feature of the rationalised Dutch landscape, reclaimed sections of formerly submerged land known as ‘polders’. This study draws a connection between the signing of the Accord of Wassenaar and the historically rooted labour discipline of residents of the artificial landscape of the Netherlands. Incorporating archival material, visual experiments, case studies and descriptions of field visits, this study reflects on the role of the praxis of the image maker through artistic research, and emphasizes the disciplined character of the Dutch landscape. These concerns are examined through discussions of the artificiality of nature in the landscape, the grid, the signing of the Accord of Wassenaar, and invisible labour. Through visual interventions in the materiality of cartographic and national archival material, this study argues for a more broadly-encompassing praxis of the representation of power mechanisms in the artificial Dutch landscape. Through the juxtaposition of different visual interventions in the Dutch landscape, an alternative situational understanding of the position of the viewer in relation to the polder is proposed.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023-BA Photography This is the search for what is left of the myth of the Witte Wieven, in the landscapes of the Netherlands. Historically there are theories about who the witte wieven were, and still are. One of them is that they once were wise female herbalists and healers. It was said they had the gift for looking into the future. Another theory is that they stem from forest spirits and goddesses, something our neighbouring countries still believe. In the Netherlands the collective memory of the women is based on the image of scary ghosts, witches or mist figures. History tells us something different. I use the folktales as a guide and travel to the places mentioned. Strongly intertwined with the history of the Dutch landscapes, ancient nature and the east of the Netherlands, the witte wieven show the magical side of this ‘rational’ country. As the search continues, some themes keep recurring: the memory of the landscapes, the importance of female voices in storytelling and their structural silencing throughout history. Clues, maps and the original folktales guide me to fairy tale- like encounters and push me to reflect on fact, fiction and the space in between. Using the camera to document the remnants of this myth, another world is created where the borders of what is ‘real’ fade. A new narrative where they are being remembered in a way they still have their magic. To keep the witte wieven close, I started to collect materials from the places where the witte wieven live: pebbles, twigs and water. Trying to conserve and protect the memories they have in them. The spirits of the women are still there to be found in flowers, trees and rocks. It is important for us to remember, for the women and their story will not fade away over time.