Research Catalogue

Een artistiek onderzoek naar het creative vermogen, visual arts en iets uit kunnen dragen met passie

In progress Dorsal Practices — Murky Back Thinking is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orientate to self, others, world. How does cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? The dorsal orientation foregrounds active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a backwards-leaning orientation support an open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

Een artistiek onderzoek naar contact, verbinding en gemeenschappelijke grond.

This publication presents the outcomes of the Connective Symposium, which took place at Fontys Academy of the Arts in Tilburg, in November 2022. The symposium was the first time that the professorship and research group Artistic Connective Practices, initiated in 2021, opened its work to the international field: We invited practitioners from all over the world to share their work and exchange about the concept of "artistic connectivity". "Artistic Connectivity Unfolding" is an attempt to share the experiences during the symposium with the broader artistic research audience, and to contribute to the body of artistic research work that is socially engaged. The exposition is potentially many things: In part, it is a piece of documentation of the symposium, in part reflections on and proceedings of it. It is also an explorative contribution to our emerging and unfolding discourse of artistic connectivity, — unfinished, fluid and moving — and thus a springboard for our future work on artistic connectivity.

The aim of this documented artistic research project is to investigate functions of directing within an expanded understanding of co-created performing arts. My main question concerns the following. What practices and principles of directing in co-created performing arts are revealed in the sample narratives, expositions and final productions of the thesis, and what do these say about transformations within different spatial and social contexts? The project process consists of four documented stagings and a final performance. It is this way I develop the concept “The Coteur” which stands for a directorial function combining a unique, biographical director function (The Auteur) with the openness of a co-created process formed around place, collaborators and contexts, where the development of an original work start without a script. Here I am interested in what I call ”staged absence” which I consider to be an artistic principle based on the removal of “the expected”. What happens, for example when the lead vocalist and the music are taken out of a popular song to leave behind a group of beat counting back-up singers, looking for their cue and a rhythm. Or when boxers are taken out of the ring and only the choreography of the referee remains. In my artistic research project I want to challenge the premises of co-creative performing art, and the director function, by also using forms for seminars and association meetings, to stage collective readings aloud, from manuscripts. This is combined with autobiographical and reflective writing, influenced by the principles for knowledge in practice, to uncover and develop artistic principles for a co-creative director function.

Informed by queer life practices, theories, and affinities, this documented artistic research project (doctoral thesis) draws from new materialist and post-humanist discourse in order to reconsider what role visual media play in the historical need to separate the human and the environmental. It asks, how do we challenge prevailing perceptions of film and photography as inexorably linked to ideas of progress and modernisation, to linear temporality, spatial separation, and to land-based thought? Based on the acknowledgement that we need to rethink our position as humans within the multiple habitats that make up the world, I investigate the ways in which the apparatus of film, rather than being an extension of human perception, attests to the material interdependences and co-productions that hold a potential for converging human and nonhuman perspectives. "Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images" considers the cinematic space of the ocean alongside Jean Epstein’s film "Le Tempestaire" (1947); it follows early photographic chemical methods involving seaweed to both develop film and to examine the technical intra-activity of human and nonhuman regimes as part of photography itself. Within the scope of this research, I argue and demonstrate how film engages in a sensory and reciprocal involvement with the material world, one that addresses the ability to sense, not just with one’s eyes, but with the entire body. "Tidal Zones" are real locations, the habitat of a multitude of organisms, and the home of seaweeds. It is a place that is neither land nor sea but constitutes a zone with its own specific relationships and living conditions. In its refusal to be either or, it forms a (non-binary) temporal figuration between presence and absence, solid and liquid, life and death, dictated by the motions of spiral and circular time. This space, "Between Life and Images", is the chemical rockpool (the darkroom) out of which photography and film grew. The PhD submission consists of four film-works, "The Etna Epigraph" (2022), "Seaweed Film" (2023), "Coenaesthesis – It Is Not Even True That There Is Air Between Us" (2023) and "The Spiral Dramaturgy" (2019) along with the exhibition "The Tidal Zone" shown at Index - The Swedish Con-temporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, from 25 November 2022 to 12 February 2023 and at Havremagasinet, Länskonsthall Boden from 14 October 2023 to 11 February 2024. The films and documentation from the exhibitions are included in the submission, which also includes an “Opening Letter” and two texts called “Filming with the Ocean” and “Methodology of the Spiral”. This dissertation has been carried out and supervised within the graduate programme in Visual Arts at the Royal Institute of Art. The dissertation is presented at Lund University in the framework of the cooperation agreement between the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, and the Royal Institute of Art regarding doctoral education in the subject Visual Arts.