Research Catalogue

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.

I dedicate this work to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call for acts of restoration for our damaged planet. In my project, I choose song composition and performance as a way to find pathways for personal and collective restoration. Through the methods of artistic research I write songs inspired by my experience of ecological grief, academic reading, interviews to song composers, and journaling. As a contribution from my work, I present a new compositional methodology, Sonic Geographies of Hope. This methodology calls for song composers to write songs grounded in personal and collective grief of our damaged planet. I suggest that these type of songs can become an act of restoration and create collective resonance for more hopeful ways of existing and experiencing the world. This methodology is heavily influenced by the work of A. Hazelwood and her methodology Geographies of Hope in Praxis (2020). While I draw inspiration from this methodology, my work focuses mainly on emotional geographies. This work represents a starting point to explore song methodologies that can nurture immaterial geographies leading to concrete, structural ecological restoration. It is an exploration to find ways to restore yourself to continue to fight for the dignity of the places, more-than human life and people we love.

In this artistic research I approach performance art as a language formed through the interplay of materiality, duration, and multiple forms of agency. I adopt a linguistic lens, not to reduce performance art only to language, but to use it as an analytical tool to render its characteristics, regularities, and modes of operation visible. A work of performance art emerges within relations between the performer’s corporeality, materials, space, and time. It weaves together visual, conceptual, and embodied thinking, privileging ephemerality and immediacy over permanence. The audience is integral to the work, as performance is an ephemeral art in which performer and audience share the experience in the same moment. Documentation, especially photography and video, enables the reshaping of temporal and spatial relations, as the camera frames, selects, and reconstructs the situation. My inquiry focuses on relations among human, more-than-human, and nonhuman agents. I situate my practice within the field of new materialist and posthumanist contemporary art, where works take shape through multilayered collaborative processes across diverse agents. Performance studies serves as one of the conceptual frameworks.

”Vi använder ord för att nå varandra och för att förstå oss själva och världen. Orden är alltid kroppsligt förankrade och sammanbundna med tanken och viljan”, förklarade gumman. ”Men vad har det med mitt gestaltande att göra?” suckade skådespelaren. ”Allt”, svarade gumman och log. ”När människokunskap länkas till skådespelarkonsten blir den både konkret och magisk. Du förstår, kroppsliga kunskaper om språkhantering är mycket viktiga att ha med sig i det gestaltande ögonblicket. Det räcker inte att analysera den dramatiska texten eller att göra medvetna val. Det finns något i oss som är större, något som vi ska vara rädda om.” ”Vad ska jag vara rädd om?” ”Du ska vara rädd om dig själv. Om ditt konstnärskap. Om din röst”, svarade gumman utan att tveka. Vad är det som sker i övergången från skriftlig till muntlig gestaltning? Orden som i det vardagliga samtalet flödar fram i förbindelse med avsikten och känslan, förlorar under högläsning både sin självklarhet och spänst. Istället för att finna övningar som skyler över det som går förlorat, tycks det mig mer intressant och verksamt att försöka förstå vad som sker. Och hur det kroppsligt intuitiva skulle kunna tas tillvara. Min forskning har utmynnat i en saga. Sagan om skådespelaren som återfann sin röst. Om konsten att gestalta med röst och tal.

Calling Songs is a research into the possibilities of using the sounds created by insect and frog choirs in a musical composition/soundscape. An 8-channel speaker system was developed for this purpose, able to stand outside conditions and fitting into a natural environment. The voices of crickets and frogs have characteristics that make them sound almost electronic and therefore blend surprisingly well with the sounds that the muiscians of Zwerm can produce using effectpedals, loop-feedback, modular synthesizers and occasionally a guitar. The listener is invited to question the idea of culture versus nature. For the performers, the central question is how to give non-human life a voice in our artistic practice. Calling Songs is a collaboration between Johannes Westendorp, Zwerm and Pieter Verhees

This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, production, performance, and technology. This interview features Iosonouncane (Jacopo Incani), who reflects on the influences that shaped his formation, the balance between composition, production, and mixing, and the challenges of navigating today’s algorithm-driven music industry. He also discusses his approach to film scoring, the role of spatialization as a compositional parameter, and his views on new technologies such as artificial intelligence and immersive formats. His insights highlight the tensions between experimentation and market logic, as well as the need to preserve complexity and diversity as essential values in contemporary music-making.