Research Catalogue

Excerpt from my forthcoming research project How to be a medium? including the script of How (not) to be a puppet and its first act as audio play.

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.

This video essay explores the sacred landscapes of Delphi and Delos, studying their historical significance as a centres of female knowledge, through embodied, intuitive, and affective engagement. Thinking about Ada Lovelace’s notion of poetical science, the site visits seek to trace the contextual and geographical roots of this concept. The film approaches knowledge as a sensuous, relational and embodied process, one that resists dominant rationalist and technocentric paradigms. The voiceover, recorded in Greece, threads reflections from Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa (1976), Karen Barad’s Diffracting Diffraction (2014), and Sasha Biro’s The Oracle as Intermediary (2022) from Otherwise Than Binary, New Feminist Readings in Ancient Philosophy and Culture Decker, J.E., Layne, D.A. and Vilhauer, M. (2022). Through these situated readings, the film proposes curating research and thinking through place as not merely interpretive but performative: an intra-active practice between self, site, and matter. The work explores myth and reverie, positioning the body in context as instrument. It proposes an expanded curatorial methodology rooted in presence, sensual attention, and poetic science - where intuition is included, and the landscape is approached as co-creator.

Projektet avser att lyfta fram betydelsen av skådespelarens kroppsliga kunskap i förhållande till repetitionsarbete. Som regissör och pedagog och i samarbete med professionella skådespelare ville jag fånga och kommunicera mina arbetsmetoder. Detta med förhoppning om att generera ny kunskap i frågan om skådespelarens fördjupade gestaltningsarbete av dramatisk text med och via kroppen som instrument. Kroppen är skådespelarens instrument. Jag ser kroppen som ett kärl, en källa att hämta från och ösa ur. Ett instrument som har förmågan förbinda de analytiska tankegångarna med det undermedvetna, med instinkterna och det öppna hjärtat. Min ursprungliga forskningsfråga för detta projekt var att undersöka det glapp som uppstår mellan kroppsliga impulser i ett undersökande led i arbete/improvisation och när det ska överbryggas till en ”färdig” gestaltning av ett dramatiskt verk. Denna frågeställning tog mig vidare till att undersöka en repetitionsteknik som skulle öppna möjlighet för skådespelarna till att öppna sig för och omfamna sin kroppsliga kunskap och kreativitet. Utan att bortcensurera sina uttryck genom textanalys och det logiska tänkandet. Möta en text på kroppsliga villkor. Jag kallar det för ”kroppslig läsning”.

This artistic doctoral research approaches art, not as a variety of artworks or performances, but as a variety of collective bodies that are summoned. It addresses the subordinate and complicit way collective audience bodies form in relation to artistic performances. The commentary introduces the concept of an “audience body”, emerging when individual bodies gather to become an audience. Audience bodies are described through preconditions that are needed for one to appear, conditions that contribute to its subsistence and variables that determine the primary qualities and the degree of actuality of that audience body. More specifically, the commentary addresses the local genre of “esitystaide”, developed especially in the Helsinki-area during the last 30 years. Neologism “beforemance art” is introduced due to a lack of an English equivalent. Esitystaide/beforemance art is the artistic context of this study and is presented as a genre of art, in which the complicity of audience bodies is a fundamental material of artistic creation. The Finnish word “esitys”, being the medium of the genre of esitystaide, is defined as the sum of a performance and an audience body. The theoretical approach towards audience bodies is presented as impartial with regard to different genres of art, but the practice of research favours esitystaide/beforemance art. This leads to political conclusions that defend the exposed complicity of and the experimental relation to audience bodies which are characteristic for this specific genre. This theoretical argumentation has been developed through an iterative series of 30 drafts and two examined artistic parts, made by the author, as well as through a parapractice of audience membership. The drafts and examined parts are works of esitystaide/beforemance art, in which printed or digital texts are staged in different ways for audiences to read. The works and the thinking developed in them have been significantly affected by dialogues with audience members and their feedback. The commentary discloses how the process of thinking, resulting in the main arguments of the work, has evolved through this artistic research practice and how temporal, spatial, textual and material design of the events has been developed to address more adequately the phenomenon of an audience body. The parapractice of audience membership is introduced as a term describing the attendance of artworks made by others—a way of accumulating knowledge parallel to and yet different from practicing art. The arguments made in the commentary aim to provide conceptual tools for artists, scholars and pedagogues who attend the phenomenon of audience in their work. They can also serve as a basis for further research on the political significance of esitystaide/beforemance art and related art forms. Methodologically, the research offers an example of an iterative and dialogical artistic research practice and its presentation; the relationship between art and theory unfolds as both fruitful and troubled. Through the introduction of the parapractice of audience membership, it argues for using art, equally to the use of bibliographical materials, as reference material of artistic research. Through the use of a Finnish term and its local context as part of concept-creation in English, the work defends the importance of local thinking, which links artistic research to the land upon which it takes form.

This project was born from an old discomfort, but only found form when the body — finally — began to speak. A body that, for years, was shaped by obedience, guilt, and restraint. A body that served more to please than to exist. The Body That Never Was is not merely a visual installation. It is a passage. Each frame carries fragments of a story interrupted, silenced, violated — but once told, it becomes a material of resistance. These pieces are not illustrations of pain. They are gestures of defiance. They are symbolic bodies constructed from layers of memory, lived experiences, open wounds, and poorly healed scars. Within them, there are traces of abandonment, escape, abuse, and the absence of protection. But there is also something else: the impulse to persist. The project arises from deeply personal stories, yet it offers a mirror in which other women may recognise their own paths — without fear, without shame, without the guilt inherited from centuries of silence. Here, art does not seek to console. It seeks to expose what was hidden, to name what was smothered, and to open space for other possible forms of existence. More than a healing process, this project is a rite of insurgency against the mechanisms that perpetuate pain as destiny. Here, the wounded matter rises as discourse.