Volatile Life
(2025)
Ghazale Mohammadi Moqanaki
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
MA Artistic research,
Volatile Life is a thesis exploring the yearning for emancipation in an uncertain world, examined through puppet theatre. The thesis consists of four prologues that establish the context and motivations for the exploration. The prologues set clear objectives for the thesis, including storytelling as a means of disruption, theatre as a rehearsal for revolution, and reevaluating power dynamics in puppet theatre. Uncertainty serves as the driving force behind the investigation, with the play's structure embracing this uncertainty as a means of exploration.
Within the play, a powerful voice gradually emerges, engaging in a dialogue with a girl and transforming into moving shadows that morph between various objects. At the play's conclusion, the voice manifests as a physical head, engaging in a discourse about puppetry. This narrative concept draws inspiration from the Jinn mythology found in Islamic cultures. The Jinn initially manipulates humans through a voice in their heads, gradually gaining power and eventually revealing itself in physical forms when the humans surrender to its influence.
Vessels of Home: A Search for Belonging
(2025)
Naomi Arabel Moonlion
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 - BA Photography
'Vessels of Home' is a 'Search for Belonging.' As more and more people feel disconnected from the world around them, finding belonging is no longer only a question of physical place, but of creating moments in an imaginative space. These moments of belonging are short-lived, they are hard to grasp and contain in our ever individualizing world. Yet, I believe they can be found and nurtured through conscious acts and rituals.
Rowan Moonlion proposes various ways to cultivate moments of belonging, through stories contained in the vessels of Fire, Earth, Water and Air (Le Guin 2020). Firstly, in Fire, regarding human interactions: rejecting patriarchal and capitalist notions of group thinking, by letting go of identity definitions based on difference. Secondly, in Earth, considering nature: returning to our connection to the land, to understand the unifying power of interbeing. Thirdly, in Water, looking within our bodies: searching for sensorial experiences of belonging by making our bodies our homes. Finally, in Air, gazing in our minds and memories, imagining new worlds, holding stories together with our ancestors.
Witchcraft and Earth honoring rituals are used as a framework to explain and exemplify the four proposed layers. 'Vessels of Home' combines academic research grounded in queer and feminist theory, conversations with witches and other lived experience stories, poetic reflections taken from Moonlion’s artistic practice, and practical tools like rituals, recipes and affirmations. Together the four layers of belonging and the four types of writing form a unifying whole. Moonlion urges you to connect to your own personal form of belonging, and hopes you will learn to understand the value of trying to live in harmony with all else on this Earth.
The elements return again and again in a cyclical manner. The circle of life is ever present.
To be a host in a hosting country: hospitality as empowerment in refugee camps
(2025)
Ilaria Palmieri
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
Master Interior Architecture (INSIDE)
Today, one percent of humanity is displaced and there are twice as many forcibly displaced people than in 2011 when the total was just under 40 million.
Many possible solutions are being given to the extent of providing shelters for migrants in precariousness. Many of these solutions seem to attempt to normalise precarity.
But so little attention has been given to the perception the migrants have of that precariousness.
Then how can my response to such phenomena go beyond merely providing shelter to understanding the relationship between displacement and belonging?
This research explores new processes towards knowing and claiming territory; it speculates on the domestic environment that may emerge through processes of listening, tracing and drawing together with those living on the front line of precariousness inside refugee camps.
To this extent this research will draw a new way of looking at hospitality as a tool for refugees to gain empowerment in the camps. How would that be for a refugee, to be a host in a hosting country?