Research Catalogue

Conceived and co-organised by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin, this Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) provides contexts for coming together via the exchange of language-based research. The intent is to support developments in the field of expanded language-based practices by inviting attention, time and space for enabling understanding of/and via these practices anew.

Este projeto nasceu de um desconforto antigo, mas só encontrou forma quando o corpo — finalmente — começou a falar. Um corpo que, por anos, foi moldado pela obediência, pela culpa, pela contenção. Um corpo que serviu mais para agradar do que para existir. O Corpo que Nunca Foi não é apenas uma instalação visual. É uma travessia. Cada moldura carrega fragmentos de uma história interrompida, silenciada, violentada — mas que, ao ser contada, transforma-se em matéria de resistência. As peças não são ilustrações da dor. São gestos de enfrentamento. São corpos simbólicos criados a partir de camadas de memória, de experiências vividas, de feridas abertas e cicatrizes mal formadas. Há nelas vestígios de abandono, de fuga, de abuso, de ausência de proteção. Mas há também outra coisa: o impulso de continuar. O projeto parte de histórias profundamente pessoais, mas oferece um espelho onde outras mulheres possam reconhecer as suas próprias trajetórias — sem medo, sem vergonha, sem a culpa herdada de séculos de silêncio. Aqui, a arte não quer consolar. Quer escancarar o que foi escondido, nomear o que foi abafado, e abrir espaço para outras existências possíveis. Mais do que um processo de cura, este projeto é um rito de insurgência contra os mecanismos que perpetuam a dor como destino. Aqui, a matéria ferida se ergue como discurso.

This exposition presents a format designed for experiencing and experimenting with writing as a collective practice of weaving textualities from different sources. The format consists of an iterative process to be implemented in a workshop setting. It is based on implementations that have taken place in different contexts in the fields of higher education and research in the arts, and is intented as an invitation to further adopt and adapt the format in transversal settings.

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.