Research Catalogue

WALKING AS PRACTICE WAP23 was a process-based residency during September-November 2023, where artists using walking as a method delved into each others’ knowledges and things they encountered together at BKN, the Northern Stockholm Archipelago in Sweden. Fieldworks, share sessions and seminars were created jointly to locate and entangle structures, narratives and themes for walking. The residency formed a transformative, dynamic space for art that engaged with life and nature towards critical and poetic explorations, influenced by the immediate surroundings: the forest, lakes, sea and people living in the rural area. Processing how walking is interlocked in our artistic practices, this exposition represents a gathering of texts, visuals and audio from the walking art residency. The selected artists contributed with interdisciplinary practices, primarily drawing, photography, video, performance and dance. They worked both individually, in spontaneous constellations and in group sessions. The dissemination of the program took place in share sessions upon arrival of new artists - including dinners, open studios, walks, workshops etc. In addition, as the program unfolded, each artist developed their own exposition.

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

Illustration as research from within the field is of relatively new practice. The illustrators discourse on representation (Yannicopoulou & Alaca 2018 ), theory (Doyle, Grove and Sherman 2018, Male 2019, Gannon and Fauchon 2021), and critical writing on illustration practice was hardly found before The Journal of Illustration was first issued in 2014, followed by artistic research through illustration (Black, 2014; Rysjedal, 2019; Spicer, 2019). This research project developed as response to a rise in hate crime towards refugees and the targeting of European Jews in recent decade. A pilot project (This Is a Human Being 2016-2019) treated how narratives of the Holocaust may avoid contributing to overwriting of history or cultural appropriation. Asking how illustration in an expanded approach may communicate profound human issues typically considered unrepresentable, this new project hopes to explore representation and the narratives of “us” and “the others” in the contemporary world through illustration as starting-point for cross-disciplinary projects. The participants from different disciplines, have interacted democratically on common humanist themes to explore the transformative role of illustration in contemporary communication. our projects should afford contemplation of illustration as an enhanced, decelerated way of looking; and drawing as a process for understanding - a way of engaging in understanding the other, as much as expressing one’s own needs (McCartney, 2016). This AR project consisted of three symposia and three work packages, and the artistic research unfolded in the symbiosis of these elements. Our investigation of illustration across media and materials continues as dissemination and exhibitions even after the conclusion of the work packages in 2024.

More Than Meets the Eye: Capturing Invisible Flows and Processes: For my doctorate, I created four films and one photo-text installation that engage with invisibility in various ways. My research for the film "2°", which seeks the impact of human interaction with changing geographies, took me to an altitude of 3,500 meters above sea level. In my investigations, I traveled as far north as the 51st parallel to produce the film "In the Ice, Everything Leaves a Trace", and the photo series "The Other Side of Ice", examining the economic exploitation of the Arctic. My research also led me to a place where the wind is harnessed for filming, inspiring the creation of the film "Memories of a Past Future", and to a location where filming is no longer possible, yielding images used in the production of "Unlearning Flow". The decisive events of our time are often not visible. My research revolves around making this invisibility negotiable. These occurrences possess a fascinating duality, simultaneously feeling both familiar and foreign. While we are intimately connected to them, they represent global processes that escape complete comprehension. They are complex chains of causality that have become inscrutable to individual perception. Invisible events cannot be addressed through individual images or shots. Instead, it's the montage techniques of demontage, soft montage, and the productive gap that I employ. It is these working methods that allow me to approach the invisible, partially capture it, and make it negotiable. These forms of montage are also mirrored in the written part of my dissertation. The written section of the doctorate brings together various text elements that influence each other and create cross-references within the individual works. The the written part contains conversations with other artist researchers contextualize my work within my field but also to build a forum to negotioate my work.

Horn players have the duty to play the Wagner tuba when the repertoire demands it, but do they really know how to do it and how to adapt to the change of instrument? Mastering the Wagner tuba and feeling confident on stage can be a difficult task. Not having one's own instrument, nor subjects or teachers dedicated to the teaching of this instrument complicates its knowledge and preparation. Therefore, this research aims to facilitate and educate in this process, providing the most relevant information both intellectually and practically and offering a complete overview of it. Following an inductive methodology based on written sources, an exhaustive technical analysis and the experience of professional horn players, it tries to answer questions such as why Richard Wagner created this instrument, what role it plays in the orchestra and what demands its performance requires. For all this, if you are a horn player and have to play the Wagner tuba or have already played it but have had no previous education, the results of this research will guide you in the process and will make you obtain a higher level of interpretation and knowledge.

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.