Research Catalogue

This exposition documents my explorations of pondering with pine trees. Tämä ekspositio dokumentoi yritykseni miettiä mäntyjen kanssa. Den här ekspositionen dokumenterar mina försök att fundera med furor.

In the vibrant setting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, the European Researchers’ Week 2025 will transform the Campo Boario venue into an open laboratory where science, art, and community come together. From the 24th to 26th September, several activities—including talks, interactive and multimedia installations, hands-on workshops, audiovisual performances, and roundtable discussions—will guide the public on an immersive journey across disciplines.

This artistic research project deals with Indaba, a performance for young audiences. Indaba is an isiZulu word for a meeting or discussion where the right people meet at the right moment to figure out things that concern them. Our performance Indaba explores questions like: How does it feel to be Finnish, or African, or both? How do many identities fit into one person? This artistic research and performance investigate important and underrepresented topics in the Finnish context: a sense of shared space and questions of mixed identities. The research question addresses shared space as follows: “What kind of tools and skills are helpful in creating a sense of shared space in a performative setting?”. The research takes a closer look at a series of five alternating and interconnected indabas and reflection sessions with the performer-trio: Pietari Kauppinen, Kasheshi Makena, and the author of this exposition. This written work also maps out some key conversations and concepts that our indaba and this artistic research connect to, such as third space and intersectionality. The main research findings are a practical tool for establishing a way of sharing space and the importance of the performer's responsibility in making meanings. Relevant skills that emerged from these findings include observation skills such as being alert and sensing what meanings things carry in the context at hand, and proactive skills such as the ability to respond in the moment.

The histories, stories, and names of Chinese railroad workers who dedicated their lives to constructing the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad have remained in the shadows for over a century. Completed in 1869, the railroad was a monumental achievement in America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ during the nineteenth century. But despite their contributions, the Chinese laborers have not received the recognition they deserve. This project seeks to remember Chinese railroad workers via arts-based research methods (ABR). Archives are not merely repositories of the past but also products of political power. In this light, the project poses a key methodological question: How can art-making critically reconfigure the power of archives and lost history? We seek to ask questions, initiate a dialogue, acknowledge the absence, and give form to the invisible. Building upon the historical recovery work of previous scholars, we reconstruct fragmented pieces through remixed artworks. The current article highlights key artworks that demonstrate the scope and variety of a much larger project (Yu 2025b). We dedicate this work to the Chinese master railroad builders––to the great-grandfathers––whose stories and names demand remembrance.

The concept of spatial context is often presented and visualized commonly through its relation to the built environment. Its significance predominantly plays a fundamental role in understanding the world and forming relations between various diverse experiences, and interpretations of reality. These influences, in which knowledge is produced and transformed by inhabiting the process of being seen, felt, and perceived, overlap where the notion of time unfolds intricate reflections of itself regarding happenings, entities, and physical elements. By exploring the spatial context in a non-linear timeline, it is possible to identify unique hidden dimensions that enrich the understanding of the totality that is related to spaces and their surroundings. This nonlinearity is achievable through the phenomenological understanding of lived spaces which brings mental, physical, and sensory, at the same time largely subjective realities to conceivable participation. With these guidelines, this research consists of an artistic exploration that aims to visually investigate artistic methods and processes of revealing extended visual qualities of mental space, and what type of connections are intertwined within its architectonic surroundings. My aim is to phenomenologically uncover hidden dimensions inherited within mental space. Therefore I destabilize conventional meanings of space by visually exploring and rendering the mental and emotional geographies that shape our lived experience, internalizing and revealing the constructedness of mental spatiality through an artistic process that reflects psychogeographic embodying. By challenging linear and objective representations of space by engaging in an artistic exploration of mental and emotional landscapes, I unfold non-linear timelines, subjective lived experiences, and the overlaps of perception and time, where memory and the present co-narrate within us.

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