Research Catalogue

CITY AS SPACE OF RULES AND DREAMING promotes emancipation and democratisation in urban space by cross-examination through artistic research, empirical urban research, political theory and legal theory. The study strengthens polyphony of urban space and thereby develops a more just city It asks: How is urban space formed and shared, and who has access to it? What normative and de facto instruments regulate, control and inhabit this space? What kinds of processes, structures and spaces of inclusion and marginalisation, as well as disagreement and controversy are there in the city? What kind of fractures, escape lines and dreams are hidden in the normativity of urban space? What kinds of spaces of shadow, noise, potentialities and dreams are there and how do they actualise? The study reaches beyond established art-science boundaries by bringing new and more inclusive means of “soft law” to urban decision-making and inviting different neighborhoods to dream of their own dwelling-regions through imaginary urban archaeology and fictionalising democracy combining different artistic mediums. The project is coordinated by the Academy of Fine Arts (Doctoral programme) at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Other partners are Helsinki University Faculty of Law, Helsinki University Faculty of Arts/ Aesthetics and Aalto University Department of Built Environment. In Memoriam Ari Hirvonen (1960–2021) The responsible leader (PI) of the project is Maiju Loukola at the Academy of Fine Arts / KuvA, Uniarts Helsinki. The other research group members and co-initiators are Aino Hirvola (Dept. of built environment, Aalto University), Tanja Tiekso (Faculty of Arts/Aesthetics, Helsinki University Faculty of Arts/ Aesthetics) and Paul Tiensuu (Helsinki University Faculty of Law). Since 2023 Jaakko Ruuska (KuvA, Uniarts Helsinki), Henna-Riikka Halonen (KuvA, Uniarts Helsinki) and Niran Baibulat (KuvA/Uniarts Helsinki) have contributed as postdoc artist-researchers for shorter periods. Other collaborators include Stefan Winter, Zen Marie, Brigitta Stone-Johnson, Anita Zsentesi, Chris Butler, Jan Schacher, Josue Moreno, Denise Ziegler, Simon Critchley, Antti Nyyssölä, Gabi Schillig and Kristina Sedlerova. Villanen We dedicate this project to Ari, and to Stargazing

In this work, I want to show some excerpts from my grandmother's patriarchal resistance. The narrative and the photographs will be at the center. They will clarify Esters Lindberg's attempt to negotiate and renegotiate her position within the usual norm. The narratives and photographs will hopefully give an expanded understanding of what it could be like to live as a woman with a desire for freedom in Sweden during the early 20th century.

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.

Improvising Time is a practice-led research project investigating embodied temporality in the performance of solo dance improvisation. It explores two temporal concepts in Japanese Noh theatre — the sequencing concept of jo-ha-kyū 序破急 and the notion of ma 間, defined as interval — investigating how jo-ha-kyū and ma can be embodied for the temporal organization of solo dance performance when improvised before an audience. Grounded in praxis where theory is imbricated in practice, Noh performance theory is brought into a dynamic interaction with the fundamental theory of time in physics and a phenomenological approach to intersubjectivity. Using a multi-voice dialogic approach as a key methodology, the studio research examines the experience of improvisation from both sides — as improviser and as watcher — in collaboration with solo dance practitioner Janette Hoe. The research shows how, in the act of improvising, an embodied temporality of the improviser is created not only by an awareness of embodied processes but also by the potentiality of unknown improvisational material. Culminating in a major project, Solo Dialogue (2021), the research proposes a new framework of embodied temporality offering an insight into how improvisation can be temporally shaped and organized by prioritizing attentiveness and attunement to diversify performance material and enhance the intersubjective experience between improviser and audience. Download Accessible PDF

The impossibility of perfect translation is a widely acknowledged trope, yet translation remains a powerful act of meaning-making. This research-creation project investigates not what is lost, but what is gained through translation, by presenting and reflecting on our artistic re-interpretation of Dichterliebe, Robert Schumann’s nineteenth-century song cycle on texts by Heinrich Heine. Drawing on theories of translation by Walter Benjamin, Umberto Eco, and Hans Vermeer, we approach art song translation beyond its conventional linguistic scope, exploring it as a mode of modernization and gendered recontextualization. Our project, The Poet’s Love(r), features a new, singable English translation, alongside newly composed spoken poetry that gives voice to the song cycle’s historically silent female protagonist. In our methodological approach, we consider translation as a generative act within a broader artistic assemblage, incorporating artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images derived from the translated texts. These visuals, created with minimal textual prompts, offer a ‘post-human’ reflection on our hybrid nineteenth-century/twenty-first-century intervention, illuminating both the creative potential and the inherent biases of AI-generated art. Through an iterative process of artistic experimentation, pedagogical engagement with students at the mdw — University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna — and comparative analysis of contemporary Dichterliebe adaptations, we examine the strengths, limitations, and ethical considerations of translation as artistic research. Ultimately, we argue that translation — understood both linguistically and as creative transformation — can enhance access to art song’s multiple communicative layers (music, text, subtext), expanding its interpretative possibilities. By embracing a translational methodology, we advocate for a shift away from rigid notions of fidelity to historical works and toward a more dynamic, pluralistic engagement with musical tradition, informed by feminist, posthumanist, and experimental artistic perspectives. By situating The Poet’s Love(r) within a broader assemblage of interpretations — drawing on Paulo de Assis’s concept of musical works as decentralized, evolving entities — the project challenges traditional notions of fidelity and authorship in art song. It argues for translation as a vital creative practice that expands accessibility, deepens emotional resonance, and enriches the afterlife of canonical works. Download Accessible PDF

In a hyper-individualised, market-driven neoliberal world where everyone is considered responsible for their own success and happiness, the notion of a common or collectively lived future seems either naive or — given the Eastern and Central European experiences of failed state socialism — totalitarian. To this, the natural and social sciences offer a counter-hypothesis: We already are interconnected in terms of biological matter, ecosystemic relations, climate systems, shared societal infrastructure, and even global financial markets. Socialised as individuals, though, we lack the tools to refer, relate, and act towards this reality. Monika, besides being an organically formed name for the artistic collective of me and my two artist colleagues (Matyáš Grimmich and Karolína Schön), is a lens and shared body through which I offer entry to this framework. This exposition follows an ongoing performative research project on models of relating — becoming ‘we’ on the planetary, social, and political scale. The research centres on concepts of the expanded self and politics of unity, focusing on testing existing models or developing new methods of becoming more-than-just-self. Its participatory installations, video works, workshops, and research performances were tested and presented in residency and gallery spaces. These outcomes are organised around three strategies — object and its use; situation and its record; story and its act of telling. Methodically, the exposition (and henceforth the whole research) uses poetic and prosaic language to address people as individual selves and poetically suggest what if we perform the multividual, rather than uphold the individual. This approach hopes to build affective relation towards the reality of a shared planet (Latour 2018), where all entities are connected and interdependent, with agency emerging from in-between, not from a particular ‘one’. Download Accessible PDF