Research Catalogue

This exposition serves as an archive for the project "Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees", where Annette Arlander spends time with specific trees and poses for camera together with them. The exposition is under construction

This artistic research investigates the timbre of the violin in Ottoman music from the perspective of a musician outside the tradition. Its goal is not only to understand how this distinctive sound is created but also to experience how cultural, historical, and stylistic influences shape it. Approaching the tradition as both learner and artist, I learn from master musicians, immerse myself in traditional musical environments, and engage in reflective creative practice. I explore how violinists trained in Western classical music can enter this tradition respectfully, embody its nuances, and remain true to its core. Using four guiding frameworks—tacit knowledge, meşk - oral transmission, cultural immersion, and instrument modification—I document a journey of listening, learning, and transformation. This process integrates literature review, conceptual framing, artistic methodology, and reflective analysis, turning the violin into a space where diverse musical traditions engage in meaningful dialogue. Key outcomes of this study show that timbre in Ottoman violin playing is not fixed but culturally constructed and personally shaped. Timbre is deeply contextual, influenced by cultural models like the human voice and traditional instruments, and expressed through subtle choices in vibrato, ornamentation, bowing, and instrument setup. The expressive identity of Ottoman music relies on sensitivity and subtlety, with small variations significantly affecting the emotional and modal character of the music. Learning in this tradition depends heavily on embodied, tacit knowledge passed down orally through the meşk system, where core concepts such as makam nuance and microtonality are absorbed through long-term listening, singing, and playing alongside masters. Deep listening and cultural immersion were essential for developing stylistic understanding, revealing nuances that notation alone cannot capture.

Abstract The incentive for this research was to explore ways of integrating the physicality of singing into vocal education by means of the Musicality of Movement (MoM) approach. Musicality of Movement is a physical performance training program designed for musicians. Traditionally the importance of the physicality of singing is recognized, yet it remains underexposed in vocal training, which eventually can lead to inhibited vocal freedom and wooden or awkward performances. The Musicality of Movement approach (MoM) opens ways to freer, more imaginative stage presence, better physical awareness and more expressive singing. The working hypothesis was: Integrating the Musicality of Movement approach into classical voice education will offer singers tools to enhance stage presence, imaginative expression, clarity of performative skills and can create ways to find physical and mental wellbeing on stage. The hypothesis was confirmed by the results of the three interventions—consisting of MoM lessons and workshops—that were executed during the academic year 2023-2024, with three groups of voice students, in three different settings. Interviews and questionnaires were analysed to give an impression of how working with the MoM approach supported performative skills and stage presence. Positive results were obtained from relatively small groups of students which shows a need for future research over a longer period and with a larger research population. Most mentioned keywords to indicate what the MoM-lessons brought the students were body awareness, better breathing, performance skills and playfulness. The practicality of the approach was shown by the fact that participants mentioned to use the exercises in their individual vocal practice.

"Grain: Mediator Between East and West" is an image-led, cross-temporal exploration of bread wheat as both a commodity and a metaphor. Drawing on its historical and practical ubiquity as a staple grain in agrarian (Eastern) Europe, wheat emerges as the focal medium through which cultural and geopolitical narratives are revealed. What narratives does bread wheat carry, and what is entangled within localised perspectives? To what extent does the cultural history of grain intersect with modern grain infrastructures, whereby wheat transforms from an elemental medium into a mediator between East and West? Through thinking with and about grain, this work interrogates the gaps, overlaps and resonances between East and West, the post-war Soviet 1940s and the present day, repositioning wheat as a cultural mediator. This Master's project was conducted within the European Media Studies program at the University of Potsdam and University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, August 2025.

The dramaturgy of Conversation aims to tackle different approaches, analyses, and practices of conversations. Several forms of conversations and various related knowledges are questioned from different positions and perspectives. The data studied come from personal, external, or created (for and within the project) archives. In this project, researcher Ingrid Cogne analyses, develops or transforms, re-articulates and re-structures the ways in which one creates, inhabits, and facilitates conversations. The central question of The dramaturgy of Conversation as a methodology is HOW: How can the context, structure, location, and duration of existing or created situations of conversation support the (re-)articulation of the persons involved? How can one use or work with conversations? How can one read, inhabit, and embody the parameters of a conversation? How can one facilitate a conversation? How does a situation itself facilitate the meeting with knowledge? How can one create a situation of conversation that will be the facilitator itself? The dramaturgy of Conversation proposes situations, settings, and protocols of conversations that involve, combine, or isolate various languages (spoken, bodily, and written), “in-between” and relational knowledge, and dialogical methods and processes as well as formats of communication. The dramaturgy of Conversation is a methodology that focuses on “how” practical knowledge can be read, unfolded, and circulated within the “doing”. It is a research project that facilitates the access to the unknown and the inarticulable – navigating between quantity and quality, fiction and reality, material and immaterial, visible and invisible. This research is aproached by the author as the context wherein a self-reflective process can be (re-)articulated and CO- and reciprocal activations of hardly articulable knowledges can be performed. With this re/search, Cogne insists on the need of “conversation” to be practiced and considered as knowledge. Duration: 15.1.2019 – 14.1.2025 Project leader: Ingrid Cogne (IKW) Funded by: FWF - Austrian Science Fund | Elise-Richter PEEK (V709) Institution: IKW, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria

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