Research Catalogue

SWEAT - YoNoSudoBrillo Two weeks workshop held in Benidorm, Spain, in August 2024. In the context of EASA, European Architecture Students Assembly 2024 event. Tutored by Diana Ferro and Angelo Ciccaglione. 𝐼𝓉’𝓈 𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝒶𝒷𝑜𝓊𝓉 𝑒𝓂𝒷𝓇𝒶𝒸𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓇𝑒𝓁𝒶𝓍𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃. 𝐿𝑒𝓉'𝓈 𝑒𝓂𝒷𝒶𝓇𝓀 𝑜𝓃 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓈 𝒿𝑜𝓊𝓇𝓃𝑒𝓎 𝑜𝒻 𝓌𝑒𝓁𝓁𝓃𝑒𝓈𝓈 𝓉𝑜𝑔𝑒𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓇. In a sauna, people meet strangers and exchange stories while absorbing heat being naked and sweaty. In this workshop we brought the sauna to a step further: we absorbed heat, stories, gestures, words, objects, skills, dreams and sweat them out to other people, re-enacting what we have learned. Also naked, why not. We learnt how to live, how to breathe, how to make a kebab, how to embody old wisdom, how to tie shoes the proper way. All you need is a fan, a towel and a body. A kebab stick, a drink, some snackies. Participants developed a deeper perspective on what it means to operate within a complex identity such as the city and gained skills to open their own kebab shop.

A new filigrane sound object (or series of objects) in the making, w.i.p.

Improvised ambient music making is a multi-dimensional process where the musical and the artistical skills are implemented into a dance between the mind of the performer and the creative use of technology. Both the mind and the machine together create a symbiotic relationship which over a course of a longer improvisational process produces a calming effect on the body and the mind, a sensation which in this artistic research is referred to as ”the slow buzz”. Over an 18-month period from June 2023 to December 2024 I practiced the creation of improvised ambient music by keeping a routine which included mechanical guitar warm ups, a meditation session and a recording session for an improvised ambient music track. This routine laid a solid foundation for my artistic work, generating all in all 360 improvised ambient tracks, which were all listened and analysed along the way. All the know-how and the musical style that emerged from this routine eventually led to the creation of a continuous, flowing form of improvisational live-ambient music. I then rehearsed, filmed, and analysed the resulting ambient music 40 times during the autumn of 2024 in order to gain insight into the mindstates that are affiliated with the creation of improvised ambient music. The final outcome of this artistic research process was then to be presented in the form of a solo concert during the Global Spring Festival, on the 15th of May 2025.

Drawing from samizdat literature, contemporaneous interviews, and musical recordings, this paper investigates the reception and creation of “new jazz” in late socialist Leningrad. Figures of interest are critic Efim Barban and pianist Sergei Kurekhin. In my analysis, I read an understanding of “freedom” in this instance as more than simply a freedom from state socialism and position these works in a larger discourse regarding “the emancipation” of European jazz from African-American hegemony. This analysis reveals that new jazz was an amorphous concept in its circulating from Barban to Kurekhin and back again, its meaning shifting between the aesthetically universal and culturally particular. This enlivens understandings of avantgarde jazz in the late Soviet imagination – most often framed as a part of the “imagined West” (following Yurchak 2006) – by illustrating that new jazz carried a more complicated imagination variously projected as a universal, a European, and a Soviet/Russian musical form (rather than an American importation).

Whereas the sonic experimentations at the dawn of the October Revolution have been extensively documented, little research has been conducted on practices at the intersection of sound and art during the USSR dissolution. This article explores the political significance of sonic practices –alongside their cultural, artistic, and sensory dimensions– in late Soviet Russia's unofficial art scene, examining the case study of the New Artists group in Leningrad and their shift from mocking avant-garde legacies to a more organically interdisciplinary approach, presumably initiating rave culture in the region. This shift, along with the re-appropriation of cosmism, is framed as a sonic fiction made of music, dance, art, queer inclusivity that aimed at transcending the Iron Curtain and extending conceptually to the Universe. In particular, the paper aims to highlight the decisive influence, often overshadowed by the figure of Novikov, of musicians Valeriy Alakhov and Igor’ Verichev (New Composers) in such evolution by informing the group's poetic strategies and compositions in accordance with their sonic thinking and imagery. The understanding of “togetherness” as constitutive element of late Soviet underground culture and of the hypernormalized official ideology’s de-territorialization (Yurchak 2006) also demonstrates, through J.-L. Nancy’s theory of communal bodies, the role of participatory and corporeal sonic experiences in creating sonic fictions from “interplanetary sounds” able to penetrate socio-cultural dynamics. The artists’ “ubiquitous” (vsyochestvo) principle of absolute synthesis of the arts is thus extended to the realm of sonic materiality, multisensoriality and sonic agency, articulating afresh its appellation of “new avantgarde” of the empire’s dissolution. This article delves into the New Artists' initial evolution before their transition into the more reactionary "New Academy" formation, as some artistic strategies, successfully subversive under Gorbachev, faltered in the post-Soviet landscape and strengthened reactionary forces now intertwined with the ruling power. A forthcoming publication in the Journal of Sonic Studies (Dalla Bontà: 2024) will delve into this subsequent phase during the 1990s, offering insights into the intricate dynamics driving this seemingly contradictory development in the group and in certain figures in the Russian underground scene.

L’idée du passage par les étapes de foi-incrédulité est que la croyance en Dieu est une culture de doute athée.