Research Catalogue

It is a foundational human trait to long for miracles. We yearn for the unexpected, something new to transcend our everyday life. As anyone who has planted a seed might know, the world is already brimming with wonders. Why, then, is this not enough? Why does it sometimes feel like we have lost the connection to something larger than ourselves, something supernatural or more-than-human? In this text I am exploring the human need for miracles through a queer lens. Through my live performance “The Weeping Madonna” (2025) I am investigating alchemy as a method to acquire knowledge about the world, and whether it is possible to use our imagination as a starting point for collective rituals in order to call forth a new reality; a futurity.

Initiated in 2020, Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orient to self, others, world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? A dorsal orientation foregrounds an active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

This exposition emerged from my participation in the second interval of the Simultaneous Arrivals (Simularr) Artistic Research Project—a research project inviting international artist-researchers to explore relational, situated, and process-based inquiries in dialogue with core researchers. Core researchers: Nayari Castillo, Hanns Holger Rutz, Franziska Hederer, and Daniele Pozzi. For the second interval, the visual artist and researcher Elena Radaelli and I were invited as visiting artist-researchers. (More information on Simultaneous Arrivals: https://simularr.net/about/) The exposition presents my process during the residency, i.e. my Traces and Paths Towards a Singularly-Plural Companionships. The eight-week residency (3 March-30 April 2024) took place across three sites: Graz (Austria); Lecce, San Cesario (Italy); and Klagenfurt (Austria). The exposition traces this journey through various mediums, including texts, graphics, video and audio material experiments, field encounters, and theoretical companions. My processes, are informed and shaped by my companion collaborators—human (research-creation companions), more-than-human, textual, and material—who co-inform and co-create the unfolding of the research.

In once-uniform, traces of life emerge a neighbourhood, built for order now breathes individuality over time, structure makes expression a slow transformation shaped not by plans, but by presence tiles, shadows, colors quiet gestures speak of daily routines people who made this place their own imprints, not imposed but lived together, form the memory of space a home grown into differencs

AS this is my final project about my final project at the University of the Arts in Iceland, it serves as a reflection on my own artistic process. AS I am completing my MA in Performing Arts, this moment signifies an ending, yet I feel I am still in the midst of processing it. AS I set out to create a documentary play rooted in personal experience, aiming to bring realism to the stage. AS I allowed myself throughout the process to repeatedly ask: what am I truly confronting? AS I came to realize that, in the beginning, I was not being honest with myself. AS I tended to lean toward abstraction, to fix things, to escape into dreams rather than meet myself with clarity. AS I was not truthful to my own state of being. AS a way to hold myself accountable, ÖR ultimately became a kind of encounter, with a meeting within a Program of Honesty. AS if ÖR blends inner and outer realities, flowing in a hybrid form of lived and performed experience. AS are my initials, it echos in my writings. AS an ongoing loop.

This exposition contains the documentation of Espen Aalberg´s artistic research project “Eastern Rebellion - with gamelan as inspiration for new musical expressions" "Eastern Rebellion - with gamelan as inspiration for new musical expressions" is focusing on a meeting point where Aalberg, as a musician and composer, has searched for inspiration in gamelan music, instruments, and concepts. Aalberg has a broad practice as a performer and composer/music creator with a professional career in both jazz and classical-contemporary direction. This experience, in collaboration with inspiration and instruments from gamelan, will be illuminated in different musical expressions and contexts.