Research Catalogue

This thesis explores the layered and often ambiguous relationship between place, memory, and history in the southwest region of Poland, with particular attention to the city of Wrocław. Combining site-specific observation with theoretical reflection, it examines how everyday encounters with neglected, transitional, or repurposed spaces contribute to a sense of familiarity and belonging in a region shaped by post-war displacement, political upheaval, and economic transformation. Through examples such as a stadium which kept on changing its role, remnants of wartime infrastructure, and viral online videos captured in forgotten environments, the research investigates how traces of the past persist outside institutional archives and dominant historical narratives. Drawing on thinkers including Yi-Fu Tuan, Paul Connerton, and Henri Lefebvre, the thesis emphasizes the importance of lived experience, spatial practice, and the subtle cues embedded in the landscape. Rather than presenting a fixed interpretation of history, the work advocates for a more nuanced, open-ended approach—one that recognizes the complexity of the past as it is revealed through the overlooked, the accidental, and the intimately familiar.

neither fish nor fowl is an act of refusal, witnessing the growth of a NO toward Western industrial design from the point of view of a graduating student. By claiming, “I don’t want to design and produce anymore”, the discipline - known for being a problem-solving and sense-making practice - is called into question. This decision stems from the urgency to pause the relentless capitalist cycle of production and consumption of which design is a part. Consequently, a paradox arises to provoke thought: can we stand still in the midst of constant hyperactivity? The research highlights the process of this growth as the main focus of the project - the negative space normally overlooked in favor of an alluring outcome. It branches out through theoretical studies and an exercise-based practice of unlearning. Concepts such as nothingness, stillness, unproductiveness, un-functionality and no-senseness are explored in a space of co-creation and ongoingness.

'Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation: Toward non-local collaborative art practices' investigates the resonances of concepts from quantum theory in the realm of transdisciplinary practice-based artistic research. Throughout a series of protocols using diffractive methodologies, we intend to translate and embody concepts such as spacetime, entanglement, non-locality, uncertainty, indeterminacy, and superpositionality, and embed them as tools for our artistic practices. These concepts were chosen for their singularity in physics, but also for the ways in which they confront ontoepistemic pillars of ‘Modernity’, such as sequentiality, determinacy and separability. The research is carried out by a transdisciplinary non-local core ensemble formed by Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Packer, and Carla Zaccagnini. The cities we inhabit – Copenhagen, Sao Paulo and Malmö – have been our laboratories. Departing from tools and methods learned from each-other's disciplines, we have been creating scores that guide our simultaneous actions while walking on the street –interacting with public spaces and their characteristics– or while lying asleep –in the most private of spheres. On the one hand, in a practice we call ‘non-local walking’, scores conduct our collective experiencing of our cities, involving a diffractive methodology of reading and listening, and the entangled collecting of objects, words and other affections found in the urban terrain. On the other hand, the ‘entangling dream practice’ experiment is an attempt without aiming at success of meeting each other in our dreams. Both investigations are conceived as boundary-crossing transdisciplinary methodologies through which we create a relational, critical consciousness and sensing that stimulates unexpected outcomes, embracing failure. These scored performances have resulted in cartographies, drawings, moving sculptures, audio works and writings. Across these various materializations, unexpected connections, constellations, and coincidences e/merge, unveiling yet unheard polyphonies that give resonance to the urban and mental spaces, as potentized terrains awaiting (re)circuitry, and, as fields of forces that await to be (re)experienced.

In a hyper-individualised, market-driven neoliberal world where everyone is considered responsible for their own success and happiness, the notion of a common or collectively lived future seems either naive or — given the Eastern and Central European experiences of failed state socialism — totalitarian. To this, the natural and social sciences offer a counter-hypothesis: We already are interconnected in terms of biological matter, ecosystemic relations, climate systems, shared societal infrastructure, and even global financial markets. Socialised as individuals, though, we lack the tools to refer, relate, and act towards this reality. Monika, besides being an organically formed name for the artistic collective of me and my two artist colleagues (Matyáš Grimmich and Karolína Schön), is a lens and shared body through which I offer entry to this framework. This exposition follows an ongoing performative research project on models of relating — becoming ‘we’ on the planetary, social, and political scale. The research centres on concepts of the expanded self and politics of unity, focusing on testing existing models or developing new methods of becoming more-than-just-self. Its participatory installations, video works, workshops, and research performances were tested and presented in residency and gallery spaces. These outcomes are organised around three strategies — object and its use; situation and its record; story and its act of telling. Methodically, the exposition (and henceforth the whole research) uses poetic and prosaic language to address people as individual selves and poetically suggest what if we perform the multividual, rather than uphold the individual. This approach hopes to build affective relation towards the reality of a shared planet (Latour 2018), where all entities are connected and interdependent, with agency emerging from in-between, not from a particular ‘one’. Download Accessible PDF

The artistic works discussed in this article – two audio pieces and three experimental films – showcase a tangible connection with the tools, machines, and processes used in their making. The sonic works include Mes bronches by Henri Chopin and “Opus Putesco” by Jacob Kirkegaard. The films feature Noisy Licking, Dribbling & Spitting by Vicky Smith, Transit(ive) by Sarah Bliss, and a Darkness Swallowed by Betzy Bromberg, including a soundtrack by Pam Aronoff. The five case studies depict the technologically mediated human body as the source and basis of sound. This article aims to examine the complex relationship between materiality and hapticity. The theoretical approach will explore how performativity is embedded in the production of embodied sounds (and images) and why a dynamic view of materiality is essential. It will then discuss haptic vision and haptic listening, shifting the focus to the act of reception. As I will argue, engaging with the material through embodied forms of art production and reception has significant ethical and political implications.

Reworking the archival estate of the Turkish-born poet Semra Ertan, who has lived in West Germany as a so-called “guest laborer” from 1971 until her death by self-immolation in 1982, Cana Bilir-Meier’s film Semra Ertan (2013) pursues representational concerns via material means: in particular, via the materialities of sound cuts and tape hiss. This article brings Bilir-Meier’s sound work in dialogue with Tina M. Campt’s “listening to images” (2017) and Salomé Voegelin’s “sonic methodologies of sound” (2021) in order to develop a sonic method that accounts for the situatedness of historically and socially differently positioned listening subjects.