Research Catalogue

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

'Empowering Collective Performing Arts: A Facilitator’s Collection of Voice and Dance Scores to Overcome Social Barriers' is a practice-led research project that explores the ways to encourage group connection through performing arts activities within diverse communities.

Wang Xiyao (1992) is a leading abstract Chinese painter based in Berlin, whose complex account of intercultural abstraction sees Eastern tradition deep in dialogue with contemporary Western language. It has replaced vivid, multilayered-meanings, deep personal experience, cultural memory, and common history, which have traditionally formalist postulates. Under the mentorship of Werner Büttner and Anselm Reyle and also inspired by Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, and Julie Mehretu, she began to elaborate a dynamic practice based on rhythmically interplaying color, line, and space. Many works are inspired by poetic and philosophical tradition, employing concepts such as Chinese Liu Bai (留白, intentional blank space) and moving into physical expression through dance and martial arts. In this respect, Wang's working process in creation corresponds to the concept of bodily perception in Maurice Merleau-Ponty and experiential aesthetics in John Dewey, considering immersion in the multisensory approach rather than pure visual contemplation. By an original synthesis in manifold aesthetic and sensory modalities, she thus develops multidirectional experiences, which are fascinatingly active and dialogic in the sense that they stir her viewer into an incessant questioning about form, culture, and consciousness.

Title: Solidifying the Ephemeral: The Alchemy of the Liquid Canvas Artist-Researcher: Giuseppe Rametta Giusirames 1. Professional Biography Giuseppe Rametta Giusirames is an Italian artist and material researcher whose practice lies at the intersection of contemporary art and chemical experimentation. Rejecting standardized industrial media, he develops proprietary material mixes, treating the creation of the "base" as an integral part of the creative act. His most significant breakthrough is a specialized technique designed to "solidify the sea," transforming the fluid and ephemeral nature of marine environments into a permanent, solid canvas. Through his work, he explores themes of environmental memory, the alchemy of matter, and the tension between natural flux and artistic preservation. His studio is a continuous laboratory where traditional aesthetic values meet innovative material engineering. 2. Research Statement This research focuses on the chemical and poetic transformation of natural and volatile elements. The core of the project is the stabilization of fluid environments through a unique technical process. Material Hybridization: Sea, Smoke, and Antisepsis My investigation extends beyond seawater to the stabilization of other volatile and antiseptic substances: * Seawater: Capturing the essence of the ocean to create a structural canvas. * Amuchina (Chlorine-based solutions): Integrating antiseptic elements to explore the tension between hygiene, sterilization, and nature. * Smoke: Attempting to fix the weightlessness of air and fire into a solid surface. By inventing these material compounds, I investigate how artistic practice can "fix" a moment of environmental flux without losing its vital energy. 3. The Poetics of Painting on the Sea For me, painting is not a gesture performed on a surface, but a dialogue with an element. To "paint on the sea" means to accept the fluid’s rebellion before fixing it into eternity. It is a poetic act of translation: capturing the rhythm of waves, the transparency of the water, and the ghost-like presence of smoke within the physical constraints of a canvas. This practice transforms the artwork into a relic of a moment that was, by nature, impossible to grasp. 4. Visual Documentation Per le tre foto che mi hai inviato, usa queste descrizioni: * Figure 1 - Organic Textures: A demonstration of how the proprietary mix creates an organic "skin," allowing pigments to settle in a cellular structure. * Figure 2 - Marine Diffusion: The interaction between color and the solidified sea base, mimicking the natural movement of underwater currents. * Figure 3 - The Molecular Membrane: A macro view of the stabilized material. This transparent, alveolate structure proves the successful transition from liquid/volatile states to a solid artistic medium.

This exposition is an archival gesture emerging from the Dramaturgical Ecologies research-creation collective. Rooted in the entwined inquiries of Blacknesses and Dramaturgy, it gathers the dialogues, encounters and an artistic residency that unfolded through the SSHRC-funded Murmurations project. Between the viscous resonance of okra and the shifting flight of murmuring birds, this exposition shares choreokratic ecologies - a garden of study where movement, thought, and relation co-compose. Here, Blackness becomes a method, a lens, a refrain, challenging the neutrality of the performer-dancer body and inviting modes of collective creation that are relational, porous, and opaque. Murmurations attends to what forms in the formless - like a swarm of birds: a living archive of bodies, voices, and ecologies composing a landscape.

With the artistic research project Costume Dramaturgies we explore the dramaturgy that emerges when performance takes an unconventional starting point: a costume – a thing. By approaching dramaturgy as an assembly of things, we shift perspective from the human to the non-human, giving agency to costume, props, and light in performance. We argue that the dramaturgy of things remains an under-researched area in the performing arts. The one-year project is funded by Stockholm University of the Arts and brings together 12 researchers from costume design, dramaturgy, mime acting, LARP, film direction, theatre studies, scenography, and performance art. This multi-perspective, poly-vocal approach aims to generate a nuanced understanding of dramaturgy of things, and includes workshops based on devising methods—most notably the Costume Jam Session, where participants interact with costumes through chains of action, followed by reflection on the dramaturgy that emerges. The project is a continuation of the artistic research project Costume Agency.