Research Catalogue

In this exposition, I discuss the multimedia installation "Esparto, approached", to which I opened doors last May 10th, 2025, in Organo Hall, Helsinki Music Center. "Esparto, approached" is the first of a series of three installations representing the artistic component of my doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. The research project in which this installation is contextualized is currently titled "Listening through remembrance: An autoethnography of presence in the age of disposability". In this artistic research, the notions of listening, remembering, and presence-making are interwoven in an attempt to understand how we confer meaning and value on things despite our embeddedness in a world of disposable nature, where things are susceptible to being quickly discarded, replaced, and, therefore, forgotten. This exposition opens up a space of reflection in the aftermath of "Esparto, approached". The installation represented a collective recall of the field practice that led me to search for signs of durability in abandoned contexts of my homeland in rural Southeastern Spain. This exposition poses the following questions about it: What happened? (Description); What does "what happened" mean? (Analysis); And, how does "what happened" keep happening now? (Further becomings). The objective of creating an online exposition right after the event is to open a window to the reflective process of this investigation before its completion, thus making visible its traces. The process itself is therefore turned into an accessible outcome that manifests the continual nature of the project as a whole.

50 A3 drawings black and coloured markers, including: 3 A3 collages on paper with newspaper cutouts and printed photos. 12 A4 drawings on paper with coloured markers, glued on A3 paper + 1 A3 with black ballpoint pen and markers, glued on A3 paper. 13 A3 drawings on paper with black marker, and red, pale blue, gold, pink and orange markers +1 A3 two-sided. 17 A3 drawings on paper with coloured markers. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover with red nail polish. 1 text drawing on sketchbook cover inside. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover back inside with black, orange and gold markers. 22 A4 drawings with ballpoint pen. 62 pocket sketchbook black marker and ballpoint pen drawings. Some of the above is preparatory work for 4 large prints and 13 paintings. The 12 A4 glued on A3 are preparatory work for a collage on panel. I made the art between 2023-2024, from the perspective of the observer. Most of the research material came out of crime and fraud reports. I started writing the blog afterwards, since the summer of 2024. I adopted the visual vocabulary of the graphic novel, which I partly studied and read a lot about, looking at different graphic artists' work, when I was attending classes at the University of Malmo, Sweden, in 2012, to familiarise myself with elements of game design. Much of this work is, amongst other, about children: how they love, amongst other. I wanted to emphasise that element, by intentionally applying stylistic elements from children's drawings, in a naive and loose architectural composition, using heavily the black marker and stick figures. Adopting this visual approach, I also wanted to evoke a comically sharp, but intimate twist, as commentary, in the British tradition of political satire, to the otherwise dark subject matter. Finally, this artistic style refers to the populist character of actors. The text is written like trip-hop songs: two of the pseudonyms I gave are the artistic names of musicians of colour from the British band "Massive Attack", formed in Bristol. I use heavily popular culture signifiers, names of fictional characters from film, television, music and painting, as reference to actual individuals. Parts of the analysis is inspired by Saul Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's example of mathematical calculation. I used plenty of popular and less popular literary and philosophical references, for the visual art and in the writing. Saul Aaron Kripke was the inventor of the possible worlds philosophical hypothesis, which was seminal for philosophers working in the area of contemporary analytic metaphysics, including the theory of counterparts and the theory of names. He died in 2022. Lauren Berlant was a cultural theorist and gender studies scholar. She died in 2021. The exposition is underpinned by an underlying Marxist interpretation that, in my view, is relevant not just to economists and political philosophers, but also to people working in different sectors of our modern economies of advanced capitalism, such as banking and cybersecurity. In the style of art, as painting, I was inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat's drawings and paintings, which are laden with input from popular media sources, like jazz music and television, recorded in an automatic and naive drawing manner, turned into abstracted paintings. For Nikos ('Ramadan', 'Julien', "Mr X"), Filip ('Philip'), and Brandon ('Magna') - August, September, and October 2024. For "Daddy G" ('Isaac'), 'Eric' ("Her Man"), 'Prudence' ("'Rachel''s Beau", or "Her Man's alter-ego"), 'Moussa', 'Gaetan', 'Mohammed' ('Onzedouze'), 'Hermando', and 'Nessim' - December 2024, January 2025, May, June, August and September 2025. Four men of colour and seven white men - or, more accurately, four and six, or six and four. Who were also targeted, directly and indirectly. Who are not politicians, except for a current one and a former one, but are doing something political, so they must take good care of what they do. See also exposition "The Loot", under 'Art and Activism Exposed as Research Blog'.

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.

The impossibility of perfect translation is a widely acknowledged trope, yet translation remains a powerful act of meaning-making. This research-creation project investigates not what is lost, but what is gained through translation, by presenting and reflecting on our artistic re-interpretation of Dichterliebe, Robert Schumann’s nineteenth-century song cycle on texts by Heinrich Heine. Drawing on theories of translation by Walter Benjamin, Umberto Eco, and Hans Vermeer, we approach art song translation beyond its conventional linguistic scope, exploring it as a mode of modernization and gendered recontextualization. Our project, The Poet’s Love(r), features a new, singable English translation, alongside newly composed spoken poetry that gives voice to the song cycle’s historically silent female protagonist. In our methodological approach, we consider translation as a generative act within a broader artistic assemblage, incorporating artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images derived from the translated texts. These visuals, created with minimal textual prompts, offer a ‘post-human’ reflection on our hybrid nineteenth-century/twenty-first-century intervention, illuminating both the creative potential and the inherent biases of AI-generated art. Through an iterative process of artistic experimentation, pedagogical engagement with students at the mdw — University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna — and comparative analysis of contemporary Dichterliebe adaptations, we examine the strengths, limitations, and ethical considerations of translation as artistic research. Ultimately, we argue that translation — understood both linguistically and as creative transformation — can enhance access to art song’s multiple communicative layers (music, text, subtext), expanding its interpretative possibilities. By embracing a translational methodology, we advocate for a shift away from rigid notions of fidelity to historical works and toward a more dynamic, pluralistic engagement with musical tradition, informed by feminist, posthumanist, and experimental artistic perspectives. By situating The Poet’s Love(r) within a broader assemblage of interpretations — drawing on Paulo de Assis’s concept of musical works as decentralized, evolving entities — the project challenges traditional notions of fidelity and authorship in art song. It argues for translation as a vital creative practice that expands accessibility, deepens emotional resonance, and enriches the afterlife of canonical works. Download Accessible PDF

In a hyper-individualised, market-driven neoliberal world where everyone is considered responsible for their own success and happiness, the notion of a common or collectively lived future seems either naive or — given the Eastern and Central European experiences of failed state socialism — totalitarian. To this, the natural and social sciences offer a counter-hypothesis: We already are interconnected in terms of biological matter, ecosystemic relations, climate systems, shared societal infrastructure, and even global financial markets. Socialised as individuals, though, we lack the tools to refer, relate, and act towards this reality. Monika, besides being an organically formed name for the artistic collective of me and my two artist colleagues (Matyáš Grimmich and Karolína Schön), is a lens and shared body through which I offer entry to this framework. This exposition follows an ongoing performative research project on models of relating — becoming ‘we’ on the planetary, social, and political scale. The research centres on concepts of the expanded self and politics of unity, focusing on testing existing models or developing new methods of becoming more-than-just-self. Its participatory installations, video works, workshops, and research performances were tested and presented in residency and gallery spaces. These outcomes are organised around three strategies — object and its use; situation and its record; story and its act of telling. Methodically, the exposition (and henceforth the whole research) uses poetic and prosaic language to address people as individual selves and poetically suggest what if we perform the multividual, rather than uphold the individual. This approach hopes to build affective relation towards the reality of a shared planet (Latour 2018), where all entities are connected and interdependent, with agency emerging from in-between, not from a particular ‘one’. Download Accessible PDF

The artistic works discussed in this article – two audio pieces and three experimental films – showcase a tangible connection with the tools, machines, and processes used in their making. The sonic works include Mes bronches by Henri Chopin and “Opus Putesco” by Jacob Kirkegaard. The films feature Noisy Licking, Dribbling & Spitting by Vicky Smith, Transit(ive) by Sarah Bliss, and a Darkness Swallowed by Betzy Bromberg, including a soundtrack by Pam Aronoff. The five case studies depict the technologically mediated human body as the source and basis of sound. This article aims to examine the complex relationship between materiality and hapticity. The theoretical approach will explore how performativity is embedded in the production of embodied sounds (and images) and why a dynamic view of materiality is essential. It will then discuss haptic vision and haptic listening, shifting the focus to the act of reception. As I will argue, engaging with the material through embodied forms of art production and reception has significant ethical and political implications.