recent activities
Tracing Around
(2025)
Michał Betta
This thesis explores the layered and often ambiguous relationship between place, memory, and history in the southwest region of Poland, with particular attention to the city of Wrocław. Combining site-specific observation with theoretical reflection, it examines how everyday encounters with neglected, transitional, or repurposed spaces contribute to a sense of familiarity and belonging in a region shaped by post-war displacement, political upheaval, and economic transformation.
Through examples such as a stadium which kept on changing its role, remnants of wartime infrastructure, and viral online videos captured in forgotten environments, the research investigates how traces of the past persist outside institutional archives and dominant historical narratives. Drawing on thinkers including Yi-Fu Tuan, Paul Connerton, and Henri Lefebvre, the thesis emphasizes the importance of lived experience, spatial practice, and the subtle cues embedded in the landscape.
Rather than presenting a fixed interpretation of history, the work advocates for a more nuanced, open-ended approach—one that recognizes the complexity of the past as it is revealed through the overlooked, the accidental, and the intimately familiar.
neither fish nor fowl
(2025)
Eleonora Gasparini
neither fish nor fowl is an act of refusal, witnessing the growth of a NO toward Western industrial design from the point of view of a graduating student. By claiming, “I don’t want to design and produce anymore”, the discipline - known for being a problem-solving and sense-making practice - is called into question. This decision stems from the urgency to pause the relentless capitalist cycle of production and consumption of which design is a part. Consequently, a paradox arises to provoke thought: can we stand still in the midst of constant hyperactivity?
The research highlights the process of this growth as the main focus of the project - the negative space normally overlooked in favor of an alluring outcome. It branches out through theoretical studies and an exercise-based practice of unlearning. Concepts such as nothingness, stillness, unproductiveness, un-functionality and no-senseness are explored in a space of co-creation and ongoingness.
Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation - Toward Non-Local Collaborative Art Practices
(2025)
Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Lucien Packer Yessouroun, Carla Zaccagnini
'Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation: Toward non-local collaborative art practices' investigates the resonances of concepts from quantum theory in the realm of transdisciplinary practice-based artistic research. Throughout a series of protocols using diffractive methodologies, we intend to translate and embody concepts such as spacetime, entanglement, non-locality, uncertainty, indeterminacy, and superpositionality, and embed them as tools for our artistic practices. These concepts were chosen for their singularity in physics, but also for the ways in which they confront ontoepistemic pillars of ‘Modernity’, such as sequentiality, determinacy and separability.
The research is carried out by a transdisciplinary non-local core ensemble formed by Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Packer, and Carla Zaccagnini. The cities we inhabit – Copenhagen, Sao Paulo and Malmö – have been our laboratories. Departing from tools and methods learned from each-other's disciplines, we have been creating scores that guide our simultaneous actions while walking on the street –interacting with public spaces and their characteristics– or while lying asleep –in the most private of spheres.
On the one hand, in a practice we call ‘non-local walking’, scores conduct our collective experiencing of our cities, involving a diffractive methodology of reading and listening, and the entangled collecting of objects, words and other affections found in the urban terrain. On the other hand, the ‘entangling dream practice’ experiment is an attempt without aiming at success of meeting each other in our dreams. Both investigations are conceived as boundary-crossing transdisciplinary methodologies through which we create a relational, critical consciousness and sensing that stimulates unexpected outcomes, embracing failure.
These scored performances have resulted in cartographies, drawings, moving sculptures, audio works and writings. Across these various materializations, unexpected connections, constellations, and coincidences e/merge, unveiling yet unheard polyphonies that give resonance to the urban and mental spaces, as potentized terrains awaiting (re)circuitry, and, as fields of forces that await to be (re)experienced.
recent publications
How do chairs lead to extinction?
(2025)
If applicable
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2025.
BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design
Summary (8968 words)
my Mothers
(2025)
Timour Bonin
This thesis explores the interwoven relationships between women, the textile arts, and its heritage, through a personal familial lens. Beginning with the question of the importance textile-making has held in our lives, I investigate whether engaging in crafting practices can reconnect us with tradition and allow us to re-root ourselves in the lives of our ancestors.
Drawing from both historical context and intimate family stories, I trace the lineage of textile practices among the women in my family - my Mothers. These include my mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, whose experiences with sewing, knitting, crocheting, and weaving shaped their identities and daily lives.
For many of them, textile-making was an act born of necessity, a survival skill often dismissed as “women’s work” within a patriarchal framework. For me, it is a conscious act and a choice - an exploration, a reclamation, and a form of personal and cultural healing.
Through self-taught practice and reflection, I came to realise how textile traditions carry knowledge, strength, and connection across generations. My research, grounded in both historical analysis and storytelling, shows how making can become a language of remembrance and resistance, a way to bridge fragmented identity and reclaim belonging.
In honouring the textile legacies of the women who came before me, I have tied myself into their story, not by romanticising their struggles, but to acknowledge their creativity and resilience. With each thread, I reconnect to a maternal lineage that continues to live through my hands.