Research Catalogue

In the Mirror of Care Work researches skills within Nordic interactive performance practices. Using the mirror as a metaphor for visualisation and connection, artist Inga Gerner Nielsen brings into conversation the work of nurses and interactive performers. By inviting in the perspectives of care workers and looking into the history of their profession, Inga engages in discussions about the politics, mythologies and poetics of her own field. What do we see when we look in the mirror, and when that mirror is a nurse? Do we, as performers – like the nurses were once said to – abide by the feeling of a calling? Does this involve a kind of spiritual care for our audience? And what of the nurses’ working conditions should we perhaps try to adopt as (care giving) performers? The project visited Stockholm (MDT) in September 2023 and Helsinki in January 2024 in a two-day symposium to meet and exchange with local artists about the aspect of care work in their artistic practice . The project is based in a long-term collaboration with the nursing school at UCN Hjørring & Thisted in the north of Denmark. Together with teacher of the History of Nursing, Helle Kronborg Krogsgaard, Inga gerner Nielsen is developing ways of integrating interative performance excersices and visual art into the teaching of 1.st, 4th and 7th semester nursing students.

Sculpted and painted wood, combined with treated rusty objects. Duct tape with boat paint models for metal sheet sculptures, 2020. Digital drawings, 2021, 2023. Dutch steel sailing boat part-restoration and renovation, Amsterdam (with Sean A. Hladkyj), 2019 until summer 2020. I exposed relief and improvised sculptures made with industrial paints, as well as found objects, to weather conditions, including heavy rain and wind, over a few months on a floating timber raft. Working with the changes the weather was causing to the ad hoc studio, I made changes until the painting was finished, photographed, then dumped. Someone collected the relief. I applied the colours from those available in a symbolic manner, abstracting the view of a ghetto in a large city. The objects stand for the landmarks. The pieces would comprise of the scenography for a theatre performance, informed by my conversations with a theatre lighting technician. The performance would also include a donation event of the art objects. See external link for the theatre play, based on the tradition of the philosophical dialogue and employing the idea of performing philosophy to make it accessible to a wider audience. Political asylum has been traditionally offered to people who flee from their countries of origin and citizenship, because of violations of their dignity, which is a human right, and other basic human rights, such as safety and liberty, due to their political beliefs and related activities, if any. Currently, seven human rights of mine, five basic, have been infringed in the United Kingdom, where I have been a citizen since 2011; the origin is my native Greece. Political asylum is only offered to people, who are non-citizens of the country where asylum is sought from. At the same time, political asylum has become harder to offer, due to the global nature of persecution of whoever is perceived as a dissident by authoritarians. Since 2020, Forza Nuova, the Italian affiliate of the Greek Golden Dawn, with contacts in the Middle East, specifically Hezbollah, has participated in the organised international criminal case, of which I have been the target, originating from my native Greece, "accelerating" in the Netherlands and the UK in 2020, Covid-19. This happened with the theft of my personal details, specifically my Greek driver's license number, by Italians, in Amsterdam, in the winter of 2020. My number was used on four fake Italian driver's licenses,in my name known as (aka), for criminal activity in the UK. My name known as (aka) was also used on four fake Italian passports for fictitious female Albanian citizens, succeeding two fake Albanian and a fake Kosovo passports for three of the four Greek teenage users, with different details than the fake Italian ones, which three of the four teenagers had: the youngest one, also had another fake Albanian, preceding the fake Kosovo, again with different details than the other fakes she had. A deceased Belgian filmmaker's, Chantal Akerman's, life and health insurance was falsified by the use of the two fake Albanian passports in 2018 and extended with the fake Kosovo, for the youngest, in 2019. Forza Nuova is suspected of being connected to two abductions: one domestic of an Italian citizen circa 2020 and one in Holland of a Spanish citizen circa 2022. Notably, Roberto Fiore, Forza Nuova's neo-fascist leader, inherited briefly Alessandra Mussolini's post in the EU parliament. All the more so, after mediation with the Albanian government, the Italian government settled in the autumn of 2024 one remaining fake Italian passport for a fictitious Albanian citizen, probably in connection with Golden Dawn, who had their own three MPs in the EU parliament. Rumours have it that Fiore was once upon a time an MI6 agent. It is confirmed that he has ties with the British National Party (BNP), the British XRW component. Italian Jews, including Greco-Italian Jews, were persecuted by the Catholics and almost exterminated in the late nineteenth century. My great grandfather, from my father's side, with the first name Gianni, went to my native Greece, from the North of Italy, around that time, He became Hellenicised and adopted the Greek Orthodox religion. We don't know his surname. The Jews is the archetypical diasporic population historically speaking. The Holocaust and the Slavery past are the black marks of modern historical times. Drawing on the philosophical notion of impossible objects, the works attempted an indirect postcolonial critique: a suggestion for alternative, autonomous and communitarian lifestyles; and a performative metaphor for global refugees of all kinds. At the time, in autumn 2019, I had attended an environmental protest in Amsterdam that was generally peaceful. Investigatory research with artworks, some of it carried out in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where I was a philosophy student, from 2017 until late 2019, and remained until the beginning of autumn 2020. I did not have student insurance, as it was obligatory, because I was covered by the NHS through EHIC (European Community coverage), while the UK was still in the EU. I didn't have travel insurance either. Dutch travel insurance, under the reference number E111, was opened by unknowns on my behalf in the summer of 2020, to cover the expenses of routine women's healthcare and family planning tests, but was closed as fraudulent after I reported to the Dutch fraud authority that I didn't open it myself; neither I had any knowledge about who might have done that. The title "Enlightenment Panel" comes from Peter Sloterdijk's 'Critique of Cynical Reason', published in 1983, which critically discusses philosophical and popular cynicism. See exposition, also in connection with expositions under 'Art and Activism Exposed as Research Blog'.

50 A3 drawings black and coloured markers, including: 3 A3 collages on paper with newspaper cutouts and printed photos. 12 A4 drawings on paper with coloured markers, glued on A3 paper + 1 A3 with black ballpoint pen and markers, glued on A3 paper. 13 A3 drawings on paper with black marker, and red, pale blue, gold, pink and orange markers +1 A3 two-sided. 17 A3 drawings on paper with coloured markers. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover with red nail polish. 1 text drawing on sketchbook cover inside. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover back inside with black, orange and gold markers. 22 A4 drawings with ballpoint pen. 62 pocket sketchbook black marker and ballpoint pen drawings. Some of the above is preparatory work for 4 large prints and 13 paintings. The 12 A4 glued on A3 are preparatory work for a collage on panel. I made the art between 2023-2024, from the perspective of the observer. Most of the research material came out of crime and fraud reports. I started writing the blog afterwards, since the summer of 2024. I adopted the visual vocabulary of the graphic novel, which I partly studied and read a lot about, looking at different graphic artists' work, when I was attending classes at the University of Malmo, Sweden, in 2012, to familiarise myself with elements of game design. Much of this work is, amongst other, about children: how they love, amongst other. I wanted to emphasise that element, by intentionally applying stylistic elements from children's drawings, in a naive and loose architectural composition, using heavily the black marker and stick figures. Adopting this visual approach, I also wanted to evoke a comically sharp, but intimate twist, as commentary, in the British tradition of political satire, to the otherwise dark subject matter. Finally, this artistic style refers to the populist character of actors. The text is written like trip-hop songs: two of the pseudonyms I gave are the artistic names of musicians of colour from the British band "Massive Attack", formed in Bristol. Otherwise, it is loosely structured in a manner inspired by television series. I used heavily popular culture signifiers, names of fictional characters from film, television, music and painting, as reference to actual individuals. Parts of the analysis is inspired by Saul Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's example of mathematical calculation. I used plenty of popular and less popular literary and philosophical references, for the visual art and in the writing. Saul Aaron Kripke was the inventor of the possible worlds philosophical hypothesis, which was seminal for philosophers working in the area of contemporary analytic metaphysics, including the theory of counterparts and the theory of names. He died in 2022. Lauren Berlant was a cultural theorist and gender studies scholar. She died in 2021. The exposition displays loosely and in lay terms vocabulary as rhetorical devices from analytic metaphysics, as well as gender and romance studies; for instance, I use the word "unactualised" to refer to individuals, who are real and concrete, who exist independently of my mind, however they were not "actualised" in my so-called personal life and dating practices: for that, I would have to select them, in order for them to be "instantiated" in my dating. The exposition is underpinned by an underlying neo-Marxist interpretation that, in my view, is relevant not just to economists and political philosophers, but also to people working in different sectors of our modern economies of advanced capitalism, such as banking and cybersecurity. In the style of art, as painting, I was inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat's drawings and paintings, which are laden with input from popular media sources, like jazz music and television, recorded in an automatic and naive drawing manner, turned into abstracted paintings. For "M" ('Ramadan', 'Julien', "Mr X"), Filip ('Philip'), and Brandon ('Magna') (and Nick) - August, September, and October 2024 (March 1996). For "Daddy G" ('Isaac'), 'Eric' ("Her Man"), 'Prudence' ("'Sharon''s Beau", or "Her Man's alter-ego"), 'Moussa', 'Gaetan'; Black 'Humbert Humbert' and friend, 'Miloud'; Mohammed' ('Onzedouze'), 'Hermando', 'Nesseem' and 'Didi' - December 2024, January 2025, May, June, July, August, September, as well as November to December 2025; again January 2026, with 'Prudence' in Paris. Seven men of colour and seven white men, who were also targeted, directly and indirectly. Who are not politicians, except for a current one and a former one, but are doing something political, so they must take good care of what they do. All my drawings were stolen in Paris and Brussels, in 2025. See also exposition "The Loot", under 'Art and Activism Exposed as Research Blog'.

Contemporary art criticism often advances by way of interpretive extraction. Works are translated into meanings, themes, intentions, and arguments, which then circulate with remarkable efficiency through institutional language. This practice, for all its fluency, carries an unexamined cost: the quiet displacement of the viewer, the compression of encounter into explanation, and the steady accumulation of linguistic force where restraint might have sufficed. _Measuring Proximity_ proposes a post-interpretive diagnostic tool situated within the framework of Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC). It does not ask whether an interpretation is correct, persuasive, or useful. Instead, it attends to posture, how critical language positions itself in relation to the artwork, how closely it remains, how quickly it resolves, and how readily it aligns. The framework emerges from a refusal of rigid disciplinary boundaries. It proceeds from the conviction that once inquiry is pursued with sufficient depth, the familiar divisions between philosophy, criticism, rhetoric, ethics, and analysis begin to collapse, revealing a shared terrain of attention and care. In this sense, the diagnostic experiment does not belong to a single “subject,” nor does it attempt to formalize one. Five diagnostic indices, Rhetorical Density (RD), Interpretive Load Index (ILI), Viewer Displacement Ratio (VDR), Ethical Proximity Score (EPS), and Institutional Alignment Indicator (IAI), are introduced as reflective instruments for tracing the behavior of language rather than adjudicating its claims. The framework is intentionally non-prescriptive and exploratory, offered in the spirit of a serious experiment, one that treats measurement not as authority, but as curiosity. These measures do not seek to replace interpretation, nor to govern style or method. They operate as a mirror, rendering visible the pressures already at work within critical discourse. What emerges is not a system of judgment, but a way of noticing: a playful yet disciplined attempt to see where explanation begins to outweigh encounter, and where proximity quietly gives way to possession. Rhetorical density enters this framework by way of inheritance rather than invention. Its articulation as a formal, measurable feature of language was first developed by Mandar Marathe and introduced to the research community through presentations at venues such as QUALICO 2025 at Masaryk University and the Digital Humanities Conference at SOAS University of London. Later implementations, including the BALAGHA Score (2025–2026), extended its use toward the measurement of rhetorical richness in Arabic-language texts. Here, rhetorical density functions simply as a descriptive register of linguistic intensity. The remaining indices: Interpretive Load Index (ILI), Viewer Displacement Ratio (VDR), Ethical Proximity Score (EPS), and Institutional Alignment Indicator (IAI), all emerge from within Post-Interpretive Criticism itself and belong specifically to its diagnostic orientation. The framework is not intended to guide the production of criticism, nor does it imply an ideal direction or outcome; it functions only as a means of reflecting on critical language after it has already been written.

Name Painting is an activity that has the potential to bring people together to test their opinions and tastes in a phenomenological fashion. This research aim to reveal how such an activity can lead to results that can be expressed through poetry. The arts-based research aims to reflect some of the challenges of engaging with the public for participation in a cultural activity, that of Name Painting, but also aims to show some fruitful ways to display the results in the form of poetry. A.I. is also consulted to provide further contrast with the participant and artist-researcher's approaches to name painting. The thematic and content analysis of the study reveals some of the patterns associated with the results in a mixed methods approach.

The research is based on personal experiences of working as a director and creator in the field of participatory performance. It raises questions about how the specific conditions of the field, where authenticity, presence, and relationality often are prominent aesthetic values, can influence the role of the director and the interaction between director and performer. Furthermore, the project examines how an artistic practice situated in this field and shaped in relation to these values is challenged and conflicted by the shifting and sometimes conflicting management cultures that exist in contemporary performing arts. The project consists of seven documented artistic projects, a reflective lyrical essay, and a summary of methods, all of which examine weakness as a cultural taboo and a potential path to artistic, professional and personal liberation in different ways.