Research Catalogue

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.

I dedicate this work to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call for acts of restoration for our damaged planet. I choose song composition and performance as a way to find pathways for personal and collective restoration. Through the methods of artistic research I write Songs inspired by my experience of ecological grief, academic reading, interviews to song composers, and journaling. As a contribution from my work, I present a new compositional methodology, Sonic Geographies of Hope. This methodology calls for song composers to write songs grounded in personal and collective grief of our damaged planet. I suggest that this type of songs can become an act of restoration and create collective resonance for more hopeful ways of existing and experiencing the world. This methodology is heavily influenced by the work of A. Hazelwood and her methodology Geographies of Hope in Praxis. While it is inspired by it, it focuses mainly on emotional geographies. This work represents a starting point to explore Song methodologies to nurture immaterial geographies for concrete, structural ecological restoration. It is an exploration to find ways to restore yourself to continue to fight for the dignity of the places, more-than human life and people we love.

The audio essay Sonic Fictioning: Podcasting as a Lure for Feeling introduces the concept of sonic fictioning through Schizopodcast – a sonic artwork presented as a web application and later published on Research Catalogue: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1894089/2463127. Schizopodcast: A Podcast is a Podcast is a Podcast builds on Deleuze-Guattari’s ontology of immanence, viewing nature as an autopoietic force. It frames sonic fictioning not merely as an abstraction but as a resonant dispositif, shaped by its physical, cultural, and political contexts. Rather than opposing lived experience in late capitalism, sonic fictioning enacts a speculative flight, a ‘lure for feeling’ in the Whiteheadian sense. Used as a verb, fictioning is a practice of fabulation that connects to the real through sound, challenging the opposition between fiction and reality, producing or altering worlds. Schizopodcast asks how one might live, and how sonic fictions affirm this question. It examines the philosophical and practical implications of sonic thinking in reflecting on perception, understanding, and loopholes. The audio essay continues this exploration of sonic fictioning’s aesthetic and epistemological aspects as a lure-for-feeling. Though speculation may not reveal truths, it highlights fiction’s aesthetic value and its conveyance of corporeal knowledge.

This research explores how choreomania - the historical phenomenon of uncontrollable, communal dance “plagues” that emerged in the Middle Ages - can inform and shape my artistic practice. Central to this inquiry is the question: how does choreomania influence my creative process and the way I shape my performance practice as a classically trained pianist? The study unfolds three main blocks. First, an essay examines the conceptual formation of choreomania, its contemporary relevance, and its impact on my artistic work. Simultaneously, I observe and document the creative processes of artists-in-residence during my internship at the residency programme "Choreomania - Bodily Excess, Collective Unrest". The thrid block involves an experimental playground consisting of several performance try-outs, each rigorously documented, analysed, and reflected upon. Adopting a rhizomatic approach, I explore performance-making as a fluid, irregular process. The resulting performances weave together classical piano, improvisation, movement, voice, collaboration, live-electronics, audience engagement, and the submerged elements of choreomania. The research culminates in a synthesis and reflection of the entire process, offering new insights into performance-making.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, cellists were trained to provide chordal continuo realisation for recitativi in various parts of Europe. In other words, when they accompanied an upper voice, players would create a harmonically rich texture to better support the line above them, filling in chords rather than playing single bass notes. My research aims to trace the origins of this practice, examining pedagogical materials from the Neapolitan conservatories at the end of the 1600s. First, we investigate sections of the Montecassino Manuscript MS 2-D-13 (1699), analysing cases when Neapolitan-trained cellists needed to conjure up music beyond the written bass line. Selected works by prominent cello virtuosi and pedagogues of the time (Rocco Greco, Gaetano Francone, and Francesco Supriani) help us grasp how the violoncello gained the possibility of playing sophisticated improvised lines upon a bass and even (dare we say) partimenti. The second part of my research takes us forward in time to the second half of the eighteenth century. We discover how Salvatore Lanzetti and Antonio Guida continued the pedagogical traditions established by the preceding generations of Maestri, crafting methods that trained cellists to employ the rule of the octave in order to get comfortable with chordal improvisation. Ultimately, these explorations aim to suggest how the ground may have been fertilized for the growth of the aforementioned recitativo practices in the late 1700s, treating chordal continuo realisation as a result of a dynamic process across generations rather than an isolated phenomenon.

This exposition is part of the peer-reviewed article: Østern, T. P., Reppen, C., O’Connell, S., & Daneberg, M. (2025). Choreographer/researcher/teacher: Developing a/r/tography as an approach to dance pedagogy at Stockholm University of the Arts in a professional learning community of teachers. Nordic Journal of Art & Research, 14(2). https://doi.org/10.7577/ar.5460 This exposition explores my a/r/tographic design dive as course coordinator of the course "A/r/tography in theory and practice in higher education" (7.5 ects) at Stockholm University of the Arts. The decision to create and offer this course arose from a large collaborative change project at the former Department for Dance Pedagogy. The project led to a revision of the BA in Dance Pedagogy into an a/r/tographic study program, emphasizing the entangled roles of choreographer, researcher, and teacher. The course was developed to support professional development in a/r/tography for staff teaching across arts disciplines in higher education. As course coordinator, I dove into the course design a/r/tographically.