Research Catalogue

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.

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 artistic works discussed in this article – two audio pieces and three experimental films – showcase a tangible connection with the tools, machines, and processes used in their making. The sonic works include Mes bronches by Henri Chopin and “Opus Putesco” by Jacob Kirkegaard. The films feature Noisy Licking, Dribbling & Spitting by Vicky Smith, Transit(ive) by Sarah Bliss, and a Darkness Swallowed by Betzy Bromberg, including a soundtrack by Pam Aronoff. The five case studies depict the technologically mediated human body as the source and basis of sound. This article aims to examine the complex relationship between materiality and hapticity. The theoretical approach will explore how performativity is embedded in the production of embodied sounds (and images) and why a dynamic view of materiality is essential. It will then discuss haptic vision and haptic listening, shifting the focus to the act of reception. As I will argue, engaging with the material through embodied forms of art production and reception has significant ethical and political implications.

Reworking the archival estate of the Turkish-born poet Semra Ertan, who has lived in West Germany as a so-called “guest laborer” from 1971 until her death by self-immolation in 1982, Cana Bilir-Meier’s film Semra Ertan (2013) pursues representational concerns via material means: in particular, via the materialities of sound cuts and tape hiss. This article brings Bilir-Meier’s sound work in dialogue with Tina M. Campt’s “listening to images” (2017) and Salomé Voegelin’s “sonic methodologies of sound” (2021) in order to develop a sonic method that accounts for the situatedness of historically and socially differently positioned listening subjects.

This article discusses sonic materiality through Alfred North Whitehead’s organicist materialism. The sonic materiality that is here outlined is not related to sound vibration. Materiality should here be understood in the sense of actuality and concreteness. Anything that produces an effect bears a qualitative difference. The actualization of qualitative difference is concreteness. It is in this sense that sonic materiality is developed in parallel with spatiality. The liveliness of this space emergence is that of affect; its concreteness is that of affect. It is based on Affect theory that we may understand its experience as an immersion in a concrete but abstract qualitative difference, an abstract materiality. Thus, the sonic materiality departs from a conventional conception of objects to foster a sonic object that constitutes itself through relationality and extensive connections. The empirical concept of affective territory speculatively attempts to grasp the spreading out of affect expressiveness through these connections to track its effects in experience.