Research Catalogue

An overview of Elisabeth Belgrano's artistic / performance / research and teaching in higher arts education 2004-ongoing

Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023. MA Interior Architecture -INSIDE “Lingering in Spaces” explores how architecture and space can shape people’s perception of time and how to create spaces that encourage lingering, slowness, and presence. In a world driven by speed and productivity, contemporary spaces often fail to support deep, meaningful experiences of time. In my research paper, I realized how space and nowadays acceleration affect not only people's time perception but also their health. Through a combination of theoretical research, spatial analysis, and personal observations, I investigated how rhythm, movement, materiality, and sensory engagement can influence our subjective temporal awareness. I found not only the effects space has on people's time perception but also the elements that could reconnect us with the present moment. The project began as a personal fascination with how different spaces affect my experience of time. Observing how time stretches while gazing out of a train window, or compresses in confined urban settings, and how time disappears during flows of rhythmical activities like yoga, I became interested in how architecture could be designed to create a more conscious engagement with time and encourage people to slow down. While sharing my experiences of slowing down, I ask you- when was the last time you lingered?

Silence surrounds us, silence around us – on creativity in communication, which interacts with and addresses the theoretical and practical exploring of the artistic research for Green x (2022 –). Simultaneously, it might be possible to create an artistic method of intervention artistically, which aims at the theoretical level evolutionally. Is language the tool? If it is yes, what kind of tool is the language? Through the language, what can we produce and provide? Thereby, I address the topic of creativity in communication in reading silently, speech, and listening. On creativity in communication is a play to draw models. Thereby the leitmotif is "reading". Critical seeing in a model on reading subjectivity and objectivity at the online artistic representational level, Question for on creativity The research objective(s) is a future idea for physical space and its mobility within virtual space (potentiality) for a new type of idea for notation between tradition and modernity. In this aspect, towards international communication gaps between tradition and modernity, DADA solved the issue of communication and explored a new way of communication, that was not a philosophical metaphor, but rather that consisted of semiotics and semantics in the context of design, was creative. – New visual and auditory codes. Thereby I deal with “Tractatus logico-philosophicus”, that is a logic of nonsense by Wittgenstein in the theme of space, body and time. "Silence surrounds us, silence around us" is an artistic research series, after "N.N-Zwischenliegend", I have been started to explore in 2020, after the corona-pandemic.

Kunstens grenser. Prosjektet er både er performativt og diskursivt: Kunstliturgien er en undersøkelse av kirkerommets potensial som kunstarena og en utprøving av kunstens grenser og stedsforandrende kraft i kirkerommet som offentlig rom. Man kan si at kirken befinner seg i et estetisk vakuum. Dette eventuelle tomrom kan tenkes som et mulighetsrom. Kirkemusikerens performative potensial. Prosjektet er samtidig en undersøklese av kirkemusikerens performative potensial. Prosjektet innbefatter en ambisjon om å utvikle og utvide organistens rolle og utvikle en performativ estetikk for musikere, basert på egne erfaringer og kunstnerisk utvikling av rituelt musikkteater og liturgisk orgelspill. Utvikling av liturgisk musikk. Som del av det kunstneriske utviklingsarbeidet inngår samarbeid med et utvalg komponister- der vi i fellesskap vil utvikle musikalske material og konsepter, spesialskrevet for prosjektet og meg som utøver. Kunst og religion. Kirken var, en gang i tiden, stedet for kunst. Er det fortsatt slik? I lys av Reformasjonsjubileet i 2017, innehar prosjektet, på et overordnet plan, en refleksjon over spennet mellom samtidskunsten og kirkekunsten siden reformasjonen, i norsk kontekst. Parallelt er Kunstliturgien en undersøkelse og refleksjon over forholdet mellom tro og kunst, estetikk og religion. Prosjektet har også en spirituell og eksistensiell ambisjon: Kunstliturgien er en undersøkelse av kunstens transformerende dimensjon.

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The Boundaries of Art The project is both performative and discursive: The Art Liturgy is an exploration of the church space’s potential as an arena for art, and an examination of the boundaries of art and its transformative power within the church as a public space. One might say that the church exists in an aesthetic vacuum. This possible emptiness can be understood as a space of possibility. The Performative Potential of the Church Musician At the same time, the project investigates the performative potential of the church musician. It includes an ambition to develop and expand the role of the organist and to cultivate a performative aesthetic for musicians, based on personal experience and artistic development within ritual music theatre and liturgical organ performance. Development of Liturgical Music As part of the artistic development work, the project involves collaboration with selected composers — together we will develop musical materials and concepts, written specifically for the project and for me as a performer. Art and Religion The church was, once upon a time, the place for art. Is that still the case? In light of the Reformation Jubilee in 2017, the project carries, on an overarching level, a reflection on the tension between contemporary art and church art since the Reformation, in a Norwegian context. In parallel, The Art Liturgy serves as an inquiry and reflection on the relationship between faith and art, aesthetics and religion. The project also holds a spiritual and existential ambition: The Art Liturgy is an exploration of art’s transformative dimension.

Having departed from the idea of exploring the subject of “childhood politics” and memory (topics that both Anja Suša and Dejan Kaludjerović have been interested in and invested in through their own artistic practices in theatre and visual arts, as well as in this collaboration), they soon found themselves caught up in the discussion about artistic mandates and the potential artistic format as the output of the research project. The discussion became so intense that it entirely changed the focus of the collaboration—from the content of the project to collaborative protocols—and finally landed in what is best described by Claire Bishop as the “Grey Zone,” which can also be understood as a liminal space between contemporary artistic practices in the fields of performing and visual arts. Coming from the ideologies of the Black Box and the White Cube, which have been further reinforced by many years of institutional practice that still revolves around the idea of formal artistic education and artistic mandates, the artists soon realized that they wanted to embark on the journey of reinventing themselves in the artistic field of the “other,” despite the lack of formal training or any previous experience. They tried to explore the possibility of entering each other’s art fields based solely on artistic experience, and not on any particular art training.

How can embodied listening be performed, from my ears (body) to yours? How are we (dis)oriented? ‘Braced under the heating sun’ is centred around listening to and documenting my childhood home and its aural particularities through processes of embodied listening. The project is based on my recordings and experiences there between February and March 2020 (bookended by the waning Australian black summer bush fires and the burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic). The house is made from wood and so bends with the weather. The wooden structure amplifies the sounds of our habitation. The house is located on the edge of a small town and next to a sugarcane farm in North Queensland. Although in a tropical climate it has no flyscreens, and air-conditioning in only one room. The windows are open all of the time to let a breeze through. Most evenings you can find green tree frogs, geckos and insects amongst other animals in or around the house. In this way nature (a wild exterior) pushes against and blurs into the home (an organised interior). It is never silent there, the sounds are a mix of all forces; human/animal, natural/industrial. For me, it resonates as a site that is connected to the world despite its rural location. In this house the “rhythms and cycles of the living and the immediate needs of every living being are highlighted and played out. It is where intensities proliferate themselves, where forces are expressed for their own sake, where sensation lives and experiments, where the future is affectively and perceptually anticipated” (Elizabeth Grosz 2008). In this audio paper, I discuss this installation work and my continued research on embodied listening.