Research Catalogue

In these works I have explored how I can relate to my environment through my daily practices of teaching, eating, animating etc. I begun the project by improvising lectures for various audiences I wanted to have input from. I have lectured to all possible enteties in the ecosystem I am a part of, from blueberries to colleagues to films. Every time something new continues to take shape. The exposition include essays, paintings and animations.

Devices that produce images, such as cameras and microphones, invite their users to engage with the world by enabling a network of relationships. By appropriating the concept of field from certain discourses of sound art and applying it to the moving image, visual artist Ellen Røed explores, in a series of collaborations, how camera based field recordings might operate across experience, mediation and representation. By considering the moving image as a form of site in itself, the activities of the project consider how moving images can manifest as a form of place on its own terms rather than as a mode of representing reality. The project builds on the capacity of video based art for enabling movement, transience, and body, in other words elements of performance characteristic to site. Image as Site is an artistic research project at Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH), funded by The Swedish Research Council and SKH.

Este trabalho, ainda em processo de construção, resulta de uma atividade da disciplina Epistemologia da Cultura, no âmbito do Mestrado Interdisciplinar do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Dinâmicas Sociais, Conexões Artísticas e Saberes Locais da Universidade Federal do Maranhão – UFMA. Emerge da experiência de vivenciar o Farol da Educação de São Bernardo - MA como patrimônio cultural e, simultaneamente, como espaço de criação, memória e reflexão. A investigação se inscreve no campo da pesquisa artística, entendendo que a arte não apenas representa o mundo, mas o interroga e o ressignifica. A proposta metodológica parte da experiência in loco, cujo primeiro momento consistiu na visita ao Farol, ocasião em que se delineou o patrimônio a ser submetido ao processo de ressignificação. Em seguida, elaborou-se um mapa mental que estruturou práticas a serem desenvolvidas no espaço, compreendendo as cartografias afetivas, a escuta performática, a equidade do olhar e a concepção do patrimônio como organismo vivo. Sob a perspectiva da pesquisa artística, entende-se que a produção de conhecimento emerge da experiência situada e da vivência estética, em que corpo, espaço e memória se entrelaçam em processos de criação e reflexão. Nesse horizonte, o estudo dialoga com Pierre Nora, ao tratar o patrimônio como “lugar de memória”; com Clifford Geertz, ao propor a descrição densa das práticas culturais; com Stuart Hall, ao compreender a identidade como processo em permanente reconstrução; e com Julieta Haidar, ao conceber a cultura como campo de significações em disputa. No âmbito da pesquisa artística, a reflexão ancora-se ainda em Henk Borgdorff, e Kathleen Coessens, ao reconhecer a criação como prática situada, ecológica e reflexiva. Dessa forma, a exposição apresenta os percursos de criação metodológica vividos no Farol da Educação, evidenciando como a prática artística possibilita a ressignificação do patrimônio, transformando-o em lugar de memória viva, criação coletiva e produção de conhecimento.

This thesis investigates the crisis of Regie (i.e. of the agency of directing) in a post-#MeToo landscape. It argues that the outset of this crisis lies in an expansionist gesture – rooted in the avant-gardist ambition to merge art and life – by which directors have conflated artistic mandate with managerial control; a gesture culminating in the toxic institutional cultures painfully exposed during the last decade. Starting from this point of no return, the thesis examines the question of how to acknowledge the fact of directorial power abuse without cutting our practices off from the potential – or even the necessity – of directorial agency as such. Its title “Reinventing Regietheater” thus carries the tension between a historical form of theater (generally known as “directors’ theater”) and a yet-to-be-found future expression. Conceived as artistic research, the discrete focus of the thesis is the rehearsal space and its confines. Within the micro-scale of the latter, the crisis of Regie reverberates first and foremost in the non-foreseeable instances of the actor-director interaction; namely in the increasing scrutiny applied to the tool of improvisation. In contrast to the prevailing strategy of eroding the rehearsal space’s symbolic boundaries (in the interest of directorial accountability), the thesis conceptualizes – practically as well as theoretically – a “Space of Rehearsals” as a heteronomous zone of safe but ecstatic play. This “Space of Rehearsals” is constructed through a rehearsal method informed by the psychoanalytic concept of transference as well as the interaction framework “Wheel of Consent”. To answer its main questions, the thesis presents a “written part” as well as a set of “online resources” containing the documentation and “re-stagings” of the practical experiments. Four “books of Regie” present methodological reflections, a critical genealogy of a theater of directing (based on the author’s symptomatic practice) as well as the central concepts. Three so-called “Pre-studies”, devised through practical work with professional actors/collaborators form the empirical basis of the thesis, sketching out different possibilities for the actor-director relation in a re-invented Regietheater. In the proposition resulting from the above, directorial agency does not necessarily sit with the director. Nevertheless, the disciplinary divide between actor and director is upheld; as well as the radical asymmetry in the distribution of authorial power, albeit in temporally limited and co-curated iterations. The main argument of the thesis is thus that the artistic potential of the historical form of Regietheater can be salvaged without taking a revanchist or revisionist stance: the idiosyncratic directorial agency known as Regie has its place in consent-based rehearsal settings.

Abstract This Research Catalogue exposition with audio-visual examples documents ongoing research into artistic interactions helping to ascertain and streamline prosocial and empathic behavior in groups with divergent backgrounds and modes of thinking and how these skills can benefit the artistic endeavors positively. Promoting intersociality and an empathic approach to collective music making amongst individuals who represent different schools of musical thoughts and styles or expertise, as well as bringing to the table divergent cultural backgrounds and individual characteristics is the aim of Ensemble Improvisation Experimentell (E i E), founded and lead by me at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna (MUK) since February 2021. In a world of pandemics, climate crisis and war it may seem idealistic, even fanciful, to search for moments of ‘shared empathy’ or creative symbiosis amongst musicians in professional exchanges and its influence on artistic experience and outcome, without immediately searching for ways of dimming the fire of destruction through war and climate crisis that our global society faces. However, finding micro-solutions through artistic endeavors and promoting a more sustainable future for the arts themselves in general, and specifically for the genre of contemporary music, is a valuable goal and tool for infiltrating humanism with sustainable thinking and acting patterns. Extensive video and audio documentation of practice sessions and performances, as well as exemplary images are attached to this exposition.

The project is a semi-graphic notification of the artist/author’s initiatives to stretch fiction – so-termed analogous to the stretcher component of an umbrella – in his language-based and visual practice. The referenced time-frame is from 2014 through 2025. The contention is that if one considers oneself as subject within one’s work, amidst whatever the work's more objective concerns, then it is a fairly obvious next step to third-person oneself – in the sense that a writer such as Fernando Pessoa invented heteronyms. While in visual practice such a prospect is, arguably, more difficult to articulate, a fictional element instilled in art- or other academic writing already has certain precedents in more experimental writing in the latter fields. If, as in the artist/author’s case, such writing is an adjunct to one’s visual practice, then a fictional characterisation of oneself as another can comment on and variously inhabit one’s visual work. Unlike how characters often populate fiction, however, the artist/author’s strategy is to only partly develop them, hence having them oscillate as, themselves, a question of relevance.