Research Catalogue

Building-Sound Compositions in (half-)public places: Starting from Graz, six vacant buildings in different European cities were researched as aural architectures and understood and experienced as an integral part of building-sound compositions. Techniques and strategies ​​were developed how sound art can react systematically to site-specific architectual conditions or how these environmental acoustic characteristics can become part of a previously non-existent composition.

GOON In 2023, at the age of 28, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. This life-altering event led me to take a closer look at my sexual desire, question my relationship with my genitals, and rethink how I perceive my gender identity. Today, as I navigate a healing period, I seek to explore sensuality as a space of resistance and emancipation. GOON is an attempt to free myself from the shame surrounding (my) queer sexualities. GOON is a research performance inviting the audience to look up close at the way they see and seek pleasure. With a choreographic approach, I am researching queer eroticism as a place of joy. Ignoring the constraints of sexual norms, this exploration focuses on shaping a body that is both playful and desired, despite its apparent dirtiness.

The EcoSomatics Conversations Series invites sharing of engagement, practices and thinking around environmental awareness through embodiment activities, dance and art. It posits a definition of EcoSomatics as of the body-mind-ecology and takes the form of open public dialogues between two (or more) people: independent artists, practitioners, and academics. The project was conceived by Dr Polly Hudson, (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham City University), and the conversations are co-convened with Dr Karen Wood, (Birmingham Dance Network and C-DaRE). The conversations took place virtually with a large international audience, and the podcasts are audio recordings of the live events. It is supported by funding from ADM Faculty Research Investment Scheme, Birmingham City University. Image by Ming de Nasty.

In the year 2088, the artist Poem Johnson dies at the age of 102. His estate bequeaths his artworks and papers to the Kamau Brathwaite Center for Research in Black Studies. The archive contains eleven artistic outputs spanning Jacquard-woven textiles, video installations, performance works, and an artist book. This is the speculative framework of Marc Johnson's practice-based dissertation, which examines how artists from diasporic communities can shape archival custody and posthumous reception of their work before institutional stewardship begins. The future-oriented framing draws on Kamau Brathwaite's concept of tidalectics, a geopoetic model of history that combines Einsteinian non-linear time with Caribbean routes and roots. Brathwaite argues that diasporic histories cannot be traced to a single origin point. In the context of African diaspora, where displacement and forced migration fracture linear genealogies, identity and history move in tidal patterns across multiple shores and temporalities. This dissertation reimagines tidalectics through material practice, using the speculative structure to displace linear historiography, interrogate the politics of memory-making, and challenge the assumed stability and permanence of archival records. The artworks trace a research journey of artistic experiments conducted between 2021 and 2026. The Sea is History (2024) is a series of Jacquard-woven textiles that engage the colonial legacies of industrial textile production and cotton economies while rendering the ocean as living archive. The loom's punch-card system is itself an early form of data storage, and becomes a site for counter-archival practice that reclaims colonial infrastructure to materialize suppressed narratives. Sun/Sum (2024) is a performance work developed through public rehearsals that privileges process over product, establishing rehearsal-as-research methodology where Afrodiasporic movement vocabularies circulate through iterative process rather than fixed performance scores. Riot/Uprising (2023) is a three-channel video installation that foregrounds the materiality of decaying footage from the 1971 Attica prison uprising, directing attention across screens through sound remixing. Through speculative fabulation, the dissertation generates a post-custodial future: practical frameworks for how artists from diasporic and Indigenous communities can intervene in preservation systems before depositing materials into institutional care, shaping how their work will be encountered, interpreted, and activated by future researchers and communities.

Mot bakgrund av utomhuspedagogikens positiva effekt på kreativitet så har jag i den här studien undersökt bildundervisning i skogen. I studien använder jag arbetsmetoden A/R/tography och den post-kvalitativa metodologin för att främja ett rhizomatiskt förhållningssätt till undersökandet och lärandet. Studiens fokus är att förändra mål, kravfyllda tankar och ramar för att ge plats åt mer undersökande, experimenterande och fantasifullt förhållningssätt till bildlektionen. Syftet är också att skapa händelser som kan stärka idéprocesser och öka närvaron med omvärlden under bildlektionen genom ett inkluderande och holistiskt tillvägagångssätt. Jag har arbetat med detta genom ett teoretiskt perspektiv som belyser mänskliga och icke-mänskliga aktörers roll i lärandet. Centralt i undersökandet av konstnärliga metoder och material har Jane Bennets begrepp “Thing-power” varit plattformen för att öppna upp en stark närvaro med material och omvärlden. Frågeställningarna som bearbetats är: Hur skapar skogen ett “lärandets rum” som främjar sättet att undersöka material i en bildpedagogisk process? Och: Hur stimulerar perspektivet "Thing-power" en utveckling av bildpedagogiska arbetsmetoder? Frågorna har jag utforskat genom en konstnärlig process med olika händelser som jag i arbetet satt ihop till ett lektionsupplägg i skogen. Två utforskande händelser bearbetas och analyseras utifrån begreppen thing-power, konst-som-görande, ännu-icke-sedda, släta rum och lerbaserad språklighet. Studien har visat hur en större närvaro och uppmärksamhet till de icke mänskliga krafterna hjälper till i konstnärliga processer och att skogen är en plats som gör det enklare att undersöka och experimentera med material på nya sätt.

'Latency Records: The Delay, an Inhabitable Field' analyses a fictional mediated environment by studying the lapses of time involved in its diffusion. Approaching media as a source for new habits of perception over a landscape, it is concerned with the electronic tools used for the representation of nature; in particular those applied for near-real-time broadcast from sensory meteorological tools, webcams or satellites. Introduced with seven images from audiovisual references, punctuated by fourteen quotes from various sources and interwoven to three poems written exclusively for the essay, 'Latency Records: The Delay, an Inhabitable Field' is inspired by humans’ incomprehension of the artificial structures in which they blindly place their hopes for representing the unrepresentable: a living image of the exterior world. In doing so, it delves into humans’ attempts to portray themselves in order to comprehend who they are. Therefore, 'Latency Records: The Delay, an Inhabitable Field' interrogates the instantaneity of these naturalistic archives, ultimately shaping our cognitive engagement with our environment—which acts both as a mirror and a departure from it.