Research Catalogue

Along the Arctic and sub-Arctic coasts of Alaska, Siberia, north-eastern China, Hokkaido, Scandinavia and Iceland, people have been dressed or shoed in fish skin for millennia. These items were sometimes decorated with a rich colour palette of natural dyes provided by nature. Minerals and raw materials of plant origin were collected from the riverbanks and processed by Arctic seamstresses who operated as designers, biochemists, and zoologists at once. Our exhibition describes the process and illustrates the historical use of natural dyes by Arctic groups originally involved in this art. During our research, an international team of fashion and leather researchers used local Arctic and sub-Arctic flora from Sweden, Iceland and Japan to dye fish leather. Several plants were gathered and sampled on a small scale to test the process and determine the colours they generated based on historical literature and verbal advice from local experts. The project builds on traditional cultural heritage that has enabled us to develop sustainable dyeing processes. The results are promising and confirm the applicability of these local plants for dyeing fish leather, providing a basis for a range of natural dye colours from the local Arctic flora. The aim is to develop moderate-sized industrial production of fish leather in this colour palette to replace current unsustainable chemical dyeing processes. The fish leather dyeing techniques explored on this exhibition depend on the specific geographical location, the natural resources available, the local tradition and cultural identity. The huge variety of sources of colouring materials used throughout history serves as a testimony to the ingenuity of people, who discovered and developed these dyestuffs. When synthetic dyes were discovered in the mid-19th century, natural dyes became less important, although today they are gaining popularity again thanks to the emerging sustainable movement. The exhibition aims to consider how the dyeing of fish leather might recognise and inspire deeper relational connections between people, and their environment. By working with natural raw materials and natural dyes we can ensure that the materials can be returned to the earth after a lifetime of use with a positive impact on ecosystem health. Conservation policies and management plans are also needed to sustainably preserve these ethnobotanical resources while supporting local livelihoods and maintaining cultural practices. The project represents an innovation in materials design driven by traditional technologies, addressing changes in interactions between humans and with our environment. The results indicate that new materials, processes and techniques are often the fruitful marriage of historical research into traditional methods and fashion, helping the industry move towards a more sustainable future.

50 A3 drawings black and coloured markers, including: 3 A3 collages on paper with newspaper cutouts and printed photos. 12 A4 drawings on paper with coloured markers, glued on A3 paper + 1 A3 with black ballpoint pen and markers, glued on A3 paper. 13 A3 drawings on paper with black marker, and red, pale blue, gold, pink and orange markers +1 A3 two-sided. 17 A3 drawings on paper with coloured markers. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover with red nail polish. 1 text drawing on sketchbook cover inside. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover back inside with black, orange and gold markers. 22 A4 drawings with ballpoint pen. 62 pocket sketchbook black marker and ballpoint pen drawings. Some of the above is preparatory work for 4 large prints and 13 paintings. The 12 A4 glued on A3 are preparatory work for a collage on panel. I made the art between 2023-2024, from the perspective of the observer. Most of the research material came out of crime and fraud reports. I started writing the blog afterwards, since the summer of 2024. I adopted the visual vocabulary of the graphic novel, which I partly studied and read a lot about, looking at different graphic artists' work, when I was attending classes at the University of Malmo, Sweden, in 2012, to familiarise myself with elements of game design. Much of this work is, amongst other, about children: how they love, amongst other. I wanted to emphasise that element, by intentionally applying stylistic elements from children's drawings, in a naive and loose architectural composition, using heavily the black marker and stick figures. Adopting this visual approach, I also wanted to evoke a comically sharp, but intimate twist, as commentary, in the British tradition of political satire, to the otherwise dark subject matter. Finally, this artistic style refers to the populist character of actors. The text is written like trip-hop songs: two of the pseudonyms I gave are the artistic names of musicians of colour from the British band "Massive Attack", formed in Bristol. I use heavily popular culture signifiers, names of fictional characters from film, television, music and painting, as reference to actual individuals. Parts of the analysis is inspired by Saul Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's example of mathematical calculation. I used plenty of popular and less popular literary and philosophical references, for the visual art and in the writing. Saul Aaron Kripke was the inventor of the possible worlds philosophical hypothesis, which was seminal for philosophers working in the area of contemporary analytic metaphysics, including the theory of counterparts and the theory of names. He died in 2022. Lauren Berlant was a cultural theorist and gender studies scholar. She died in 2021. The exposition is underpinned by an underlying Marxist interpretation that, in my view, is relevant not just to economists and political philosophers, but also to people working in different sectors of our modern economies of advanced capitalism, such as banking and cybersecurity. In the style of art, as painting, I was inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat's drawings and paintings, which are laden with input from popular media sources, like jazz music and television, recorded in an automatic and naive drawing manner, turned into abstracted paintings. For Nikos ('Ramadan', 'Mr X'), Filip ('Philip'), and Brandon ('Magna') - August, September, and October 2024. For "Daddy G" ('Isaac'), 'Eric' ("Her Man"), 'Prudence' ("'Rachel''s Beau", or "Her Man's alter-ego"), Julien ('Moussa') and 'Gaetan'- December 2024, January 2025, May and June 2025. Three men of colour and five white men. Who were also targeted, directly and indirectly. Who are not politicians, but are doing something political, so they must take care of what they do. See also exposition "The Loot", under 'Art and Activism Exposed as Research Blog'.

This exposition emerged from my participation in the second interval of the Simultaneous Arrivals (Simularr) Artistic Research Project—a research project inviting international artist-researchers to explore relational, situated, and process-based inquiries in dialogue with core researchers. Core researchers: Nayari Castillo, Hanns Holger Rutz, Franziska Hederer, and Daniele Pozzi. For the second interval, the visual artist and researcher Elena Radaelli and I were invited as visiting artist-researchers. (More information on Simultaneous Arrivals: https://simularr.net/about/) The exposition presents my process during the residency, i.e. my Traces and Paths Towards a Singularly-Plural Companionships. The eight-week residency (3 March-30 April 2024) took place across three sites: Graz (Austria); Lecce, San Cesario (Italy); and Klagenfurt (Austria). The exposition traces this journey through various mediums, including texts, graphics, video and audio material experiments, field encounters, and theoretical companions. My processes, are informed and shaped by my companion collaborators—human (research-creation companions), more-than-human, textual, and material—who co-inform and co-create the unfolding of the research.

Taking as a departure point my experience working with war survivors in Peru, this project investigates how art can enable the collectivization of mourning. I connected my interest in the act of mourning human losses with my experiences living in Athens, Greece, where I encountered depression as a common diagnosis on both the individual and collective levels. If being depressed relates to unresolved mourning processes, what are the objects of loss caused by economic crisis and political disillusion? How can art help us to mourn an abstract loss, such as a political project, a certain sense of dignity, a particular relation with time and nature, or a fixed role in the familial structure? How could mourning be shared to allow communities to reframe and re-signify those objects of loss, towards transforming our relation to the economic and political? Lost and Shared creates dialogue between theory and affective labour, through collective experiences that connect emotions, critical thinking, body and space. The intuitions and questions brought by conversations with Greek activists and artists are the core of the project. Later on, facing the impossibility of working as planned due to the pandemic, Lost and Shared was adapted to the new socializing conditions and to acknowledge how crisis and mourning had become a global concern. Thus, the project ends up proposing the idea of “fertilizing mourning” as a concept in the making - an open invitation to collectively create practices that help us reconsidering the entanglements between life, death, and regeneration. Urgent practices we need today in order to contest the increasing, global processes of loss caused by capitalism.

This study seeks to illuminate a body of forgotten repertoire, documented in the Dutch Republic's courts, theatres, military, amateur circles, and churches. Comprising of a dissertation and two appendices, this study explores how double-reed instruments were used in the Dutch Republic in the years 1677–1725, focusing on seven types and sizes of instruments made by Richard Haka (<1646–1705). This critical period in double-reed history marks Europe's transition from the direct descendants of Renaissance-type instruments to the French-style instruments of the high Baroque period. The Dutch Republic, being the origin of one quarter of all pre-Classical oboes and the earliest-surviving datable bassoon, was one of the first places to adopt these French instruments outside of France — though the older forms of double-reed instruments continued to be used throughout the period of study. One could question the need for having so many of these instruments in a region which is largely unexplored in terms of historical performance practice and repertoire. Double-reed players of the Republic served in a variety of capacities and could be found playing several genres of music, but due to the historically-inconsistent use of terminology, determining the exact introduction and extinction of these instruments is nearly impossible; however, by contextualising an array of seemingly-unconnected primary sources and analysing details in the iconography of the period, a more-informed perspective on the matter can be gained.

This paper discusses a creative collaboration between two design researchers using text-to-image prompts as a way to think across a range of ideas including the relationships between collage practices and AI image generation – both modes of image-making that create images with images – as well as taking an ‘anarchival’ approach to addressing absence in historical archives. Initial experimentation with prompt-based model DALL-E 2 involved writing multiple prompts to generate images of the extinct King Island dwarf emu; specifically, an emu taken to live in Empress Josephine’s estate outside Paris. There is little visual record of the dwarf emus, and what remains is ambiguous and factually inaccurate. The scarcity of visual reference material provides an interesting case study for how a generative image model might attempt to elaborate a new image about a historical event. The results provide material to help think about how image generation models work, and also how we might visualise the experience of an extinct species. Reflecting on the initial experiments, we began to consider prompting with large-scale image generation models as a way to think-with and speculate, rather than to merely generate. We employ two methods to critique the resulting images: visual content analysis and comparative analysis across image-generation models. We conclude that at a time of both deliberate and accidental miscommunication, it is important for those with expertise in how images ‘work’ to critique and analyse image-generating tools, and consider how working with generative AI might be included as part of an anarchival practice.