Research Catalogue

I like to approach my body of work as being one big opera. Every object, wearable object or costume serves the opera. Every spatial costume a backdrop, every sculpture a prop, every wearable object a costume, every costume a character. One day I will make an opera consisting of all my works. Welcome to my world, welcome to my opera

Mesa de trabalho com inúmeros ícones identificáveis.

Photography with sound and net art, drawing, found folk sculpture with digital drawing, readymades, 2012, 2020, 2021. Accompanied by archival material. The exposition exposes the question of what is artistic research. Usurping the mini-essayist format, which is traditionally associated with research in say the area of philosophy, the exposition formally operates on different levels. I selectively included visual art research material from my own artistic archive, as well as anonymous material that's readily available from the internet and in film archives. In this way, I wanted to emphasise the role of archiving and using archives in the artistic process, as an element of artistic research and artistic production that might involve remediation. Taking that we live in a largely theoretic culture, which means that we use external information systems for storage and retrieval of written, visual and other material, the implication is that art is part of this theoretical system. Moreover, I specifically problematise the notion of value in relation to the visual arts by using the popular media figures of the counterfeit and the impostor, with reference to the so-called "impostor syndrome", correlated with being a minority of some sort in one's field: "A different thought is that two people may be answerable to the very same standard of success or competence, yet be subject to different epistemic standards for reasonable belief in their respective success or competence. This would be an example of pragmatic encroachment." (Katherine Hawley, "What is Impostor Syndrome?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93, 2019). I use visual art and figurative examples as illustrations, adapting from methods, such as the example, used in analytic philosophy. I suggest that some artworks operate as philosophical provocations of the archive. "The artwork just exists", as Frank Stella argued. In this view, I ordered this exposition as a design proposal for two independent, yet interconnected exhibitions: one for the final artistic exhibition show; and one as a general overview for the artist's studio, set up as a stand alone, if parallel, exhibition.

Documentation of the 'Expanding Public (Im)Possibilities' gathering, an international gathering of disciplines that perform public space | Organized by the Fontys Professorship Artistic Connective Practices, Fontys MA Performing Public Space and Fontys Journalism.

This exposition is the submitted PhD thesis for the doctoral degree in artistic research in Perfroming Art at Malmö Theatre Academy, Lund University December 2024. This artistic research was carried out between 2020 and 2024 and financially supported by Malmö Theatre Academy, Lund University, Sweden. Main supervisor: Sofia Pantouvaki Second supervisor: Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk The exposition is in three parts: FRAMEWORKS – contextualization the artistic research including description of the artistic method in the research. PROJECTS – containing descriptions and analysis of the three artistic projects "AweAre – a movement quintet", "Community Walk" and "Conversation Costume". CONCLUSION Abstract: At the heart of this research are relational encounters between people and textile materials. As the title, Crafting Material Bodies, indicates, the research explores how human bodies are crafted by material bodies (costume) and vice versa. In the research textile materials and people are my co-creators and as co-creators they are invited to relate to, affect and become affected by other human bodies and more-than-human materials. As the subtitle, exploring co-creative costume processes, indicate the main quest is to explore how we (humans) co-create with textile and costume materials and to explore how textile and costume materials become equal co-creating partners. In the artistic projects I invite fellow artists like performers and designers to explore specific connecting costumes (that connect two or more people) with me. As co-creators I invite them to engage, respond, inform, influence and/or interrupt our costume explorations in ways that matter to them and to critically reflect on our explorations. In the projects I study how listening become instances of relational acts between humans and more-than humans that evoke curious embodied and conversational dialogues Such dialogues are invitations to listen with the textile and costume materials, with (human) bodies, to share embodied experiences, to co-create and to elaborate on the various creative perspectives. During the artistic projects I act as more than an observing designer/researcher. I am the host that have crafted the connecting costumes in collaboration with the textile materials and as host I also actively take part in exploring what the costumes evoke and provoke. The goal is to explore how being a participating host affects the explorative costume situations. The research has four focal themes – crafting, listening, hosting and co-creating – which are explored though three artistic projects. The artistic project AweAre, a movement quintet, explores the act of listening, Community Walk explores the act of hosting and Conversation Costume explores the act of co-creating, while all three projects explore different aspects of crafting. As the themes are entangled, all three projects contain aspects of the four themes. With this research I suggest that it is critical that in co-creative situations we cultivate our listening abilities with human and more-than-human others, and I argue that textile and costume materials is a medium that enable us to do so. With this research my ambition is to formulate ideas on co-creative methods that value material-discursive listening and where the hosting attitude is orientated towards communal doings. The aim is that listenings and communal hostings become tools for designers to gain a deeper understanding of how costume affects performers, and the boarder scope is that the research contributes to discussions on how teams can collaborate with humans and more-than-humans in more generous and inclusive manners. One example is that we acknowledge that our different disciplinary perspectives are creative possibilities in our common doing and that we recognise that how we share and exchange our differences has an impact on how we flourish co-creatively with our human and more-than-human co-creators. ISBN: 978-91-88409-39-3

Transforming with the Artistic Palette ‘Transforming with the Artistic Palette’ is my PhD project in artistic research, a practice-led exploration of performer creativity, agency and collaborative composition, carried out at the Norwegian Academy of Music in the years 2018–2024. The central idea of the project is the conceptualization of the artistic palette. The artistic palette comprises the skills and abilities I use in creative work (skillabilities). It develops with the creative work I engage in and is active in imaginative as well as evaluative processes. The artistic palette has been explored in collaborative work with five composers as well as in an own composition. I have explored it as a multidimensional concept, comprising embodied, contextual, relational and intuitive dimensions. By engaging with the artistic palette, new sonic materials and work methods have been created and I have shared compositional processes as a co-composer. It is a poetic and dynamic concept that keep developing with my experiences. By using my artistic palette in shared work, I have explored and expanded my creativity as a performer of contemporary classical music. The five composers involved in the project come from a diverse background of styles, aesthetics and compositional approaches, as minimalistic music, improvisation and music theatre. Some of the creative partnerships build on previous work together. The works created in the project are Gradients (2023) by Karin Hellqvist and Henrik Strindberg, Solastalgia (2022) by Carola Bauckholt and Karin Hellqvist, One and the Other (Speculative Polskas for Karin) (2021–22) by Liza Lim with Karin Hellqvist, Eiksmarka Omland (2024) by Christian Wallumrød and Karin Hellqvist, Pango (2021–24) by Karin Hellqvist and Chain of Triggers (2024) by Manos Tsangaris and Karin Hellqvist. Through the artistic processes undertaken in this project, I have experienced a transformation of my performer’s role into an increasingly creative one. From seeing myself as a faithful performer of works, I have come to view myself as a creating artist involved in the whole lifecycle of the works I perform and co-compose. By exploring the artistic palette in shared work, thoughts about connection, identity, responsibility, empowerment, complementarity, taste, ownership and transformation has come to the fore in my practice. Those topics are discussed across the works created in the project. The methodology of the project is rooted in the specific forms of collaborative composition it comprises; engaging in improvisation, developing technological skills, accessing embodied performance materials, engaging in interdisciplinary work with a printed publication and developing connection through cyclical patterns of work where materials are circulated between participants. A curatorial process of selecting material for research has along with text writing, peer-review and publication processes been important research methods of the project. The structure of this reflection is a compilation of six case studies wrapped with an introduction and a closing discussion. The reflection has been created over the course of the project and includes four already published articles. The project is situated in a broad artistic- and research field with connections to other collaborating performers and composers, artist researchers who develop their performance practices, historical composer-performer collaborations and the rich artistic contexts of the involved artists. I draw on theories of collaborative composition (Taylor, Lim, Östersjö, John-Steiner), Werktreue (Goehr), embodied knowledge (Merleau-Ponty, Lüneburg), eco-anxiety (Albrecht) and identity (Hargreaves, Markus & Nurius).