Research Catalogue

With Operative Fiction, we introduce a practice of spatial storytelling driven by the dynamics of prepositions rather than verb-centric narratives. Here, the textual body becomes embedded in the medial spatiality of a printed book, digital interface, or performance space. The physical or virtual site of the text thus becomes integral to the storytelling process. Spatial production methods merge into the texture of the text itself; simultaneously, the text reshapes the unfolding of space, place, and site. The material and procedural qualities of the text actively engage and activate the digital interface as a site of narrative unfolding, intertwining textual and spatial experiences. We begin our first exercise in Operative Fiction with Thomas Ballhausen’s What the Probes Report, transposing the text from the printed page (FLORA, 2020) into the digital interface of a Research Catalogue exposition. The non-human protagonist – emerging through and evolving within the text – disrupts subject-centred narration. It becomes entangled in the linguistic and scenic fabric of its own development, thus, through its procedural logic and function, becoming an active agent in its own staging. A line, speculatively re-enacting the machine's operations, simultaneously traces the topographic texture of the digital landscape. Using a drawing technique typically applied in performance design drafts, we explore the friction between staging and spacing by deploying minimally visible images and textual cues of direction. The operational plasticity of these technical images enables dramaturgical intensities to gather (staging), while also allowing the story to disperse through the digital architecture of the exposition into hyperlinked virtual spaces (spacing). Alongside a linear reading mode, which follows the story’s original chronology, we propose a contingent reading mode activated via time codes. These time codes function both as compositional elements within the drawing and as hypertextual links. They suggest the duration and shape of a staged terrain, occasionally layering multiple time zones within a single topographic entity. In this way, the timelines act as more-than-texts, generating a multiplicity of positions and proximities, and intertwining temporal aspects of space with the speculative grammar of the story.

Excerpt from my forthcoming research project How to be a medium? including the script of How (not) to be a puppet and its first act as audio play.

Jenny Sunesson (b. 1973) is a Swedish artist predominantly working with sound. Her practice ranges from field recording and live collages to conceptual sound art and video. Sunesson uses her own life as a stage for her dark, tragic and sometimes comical re-contextualised work where real and invented characters and derogated stereotypes, collaborate in the alternate story of hierarchies and normative power structures in society.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 MA Photography and Society This study examines what roles images can play in the disclosure of discipline within the Dutch political settlement known as the polder model. On November 24, 1982, the Accord of Wassenaar formalised the contemporary Dutch socio-economic and political character by adopting a method of corporatist consensus seeking and decision making between capital, the state, and labour called the ‘polder model’. The polder model has its origin in the creation of a key feature of the rationalised Dutch landscape, reclaimed sections of formerly submerged land known as ‘polders’. This study draws a connection between the signing of the Accord of Wassenaar and the historically rooted labour discipline of residents of the artificial landscape of the Netherlands. Incorporating archival material, visual experiments, case studies and descriptions of field visits, this study reflects on the role of the praxis of the image maker through artistic research, and emphasizes the disciplined character of the Dutch landscape. These concerns are examined through discussions of the artificiality of nature in the landscape, the grid, the signing of the Accord of Wassenaar, and invisible labour. Through visual interventions in the materiality of cartographic and national archival material, this study argues for a more broadly-encompassing praxis of the representation of power mechanisms in the artificial Dutch landscape. Through the juxtaposition of different visual interventions in the Dutch landscape, an alternative situational understanding of the position of the viewer in relation to the polder is proposed.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023-BA Photography This is the search for what is left of the myth of the Witte Wieven, in the landscapes of the Netherlands. Historically there are theories about who the witte wieven were, and still are. One of them is that they once were wise female herbalists and healers. It was said they had the gift for looking into the future. Another theory is that they stem from forest spirits and goddesses, something our neighbouring countries still believe. In the Netherlands the collective memory of the women is based on the image of scary ghosts, witches or mist figures. History tells us something different. I use the folktales as a guide and travel to the places mentioned. Strongly intertwined with the history of the Dutch landscapes, ancient nature and the east of the Netherlands, the witte wieven show the magical side of this ‘rational’ country. As the search continues, some themes keep recurring: the memory of the landscapes, the importance of female voices in storytelling and their structural silencing throughout history. Clues, maps and the original folktales guide me to fairy tale- like encounters and push me to reflect on fact, fiction and the space in between. Using the camera to document the remnants of this myth, another world is created where the borders of what is ‘real’ fade. A new narrative where they are being remembered in a way they still have their magic. To keep the witte wieven close, I started to collect materials from the places where the witte wieven live: pebbles, twigs and water. Trying to conserve and protect the memories they have in them. The spirits of the women are still there to be found in flowers, trees and rocks. It is important for us to remember, for the women and their story will not fade away over time.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 BA Interactive Media Design Absorbed by squares and straight lines, I am separated from my nature. By producing and consuming, we waste natural sources, till the point that the Earth can’t keep up any longer. What can we learn from the billion-year-old underground network of nature? Fungi might be mostly invisible but ever-present to feed, defend and break down all we ever are and will be. In the house as an ecosystem, I image a space for harmonious orchestrated chaos, connecting life and mediating resources embracing all streams by collaborating with fungi to understand that we are more than one.