recent activities
Empowering Collective Performing Arts: A Facilitator's Toolkit for Overcoming Language Barriers
(2025)
Alice Presencer
'Empowering Collective Performing Arts: A Facilitatorβs Toolkit for Overcoming Language Barriers' is a practice-led research project that explores the ways to encourage group connection through non-textual, embodied communication within diverse communities.
Drawing on work experience with immigrant children, refugees, and deaf/hearing collaboratorsβas well as recent research residencies with ASSITEJ Norway, The Flying Seagulls and Red Nose Emergency Smilesβthe project contains a growing body of facilitation strategies as an open-source toolkit.
Rooted in my personal experience of linguistic displacement and background in voice and dance, this project proposes a shift away from text-centric facilitation models toward approaches that prioritise emotional intuition and situational awareness. The project is underpinned by critical frameworks around embodied knowledge, power, and positionality, aiming to challenge colonial and exclusionary norms around communication.
Ultimately, it seeks to empower facilitators and communities alike to trust in the expressive potential of the body and encourage inclusive, trust-based spaces for collective performing arts experiences.
SWEAT - YoNoSudoBrillo
(2025)
Diana Ferro
SWEAT - YoNoSudoBrillo
Two weeks workshop held in Benidorm, Spain, in August 2024. In the context of EASA, European Architecture Students Assembly 2024 event. Tutored by Diana Ferro and Angelo Ciccaglione.
πΌπβπ πΆππ πΆπ·πππ πππ·ππΆπΈπΎππ ππππΆππΆππΎππ. πΏππ'π πππ·πΆππ ππ ππ½πΎπ πΏππππππ ππ» ππππππππ ππππππ½ππ.
In a sauna, people meet strangers and exchange stories while absorbing heat being naked and sweaty. In this workshop we brought the sauna to a step further: we absorbed heat, stories, gestures, words, objects, skills, dreams and sweat them out to other people, re-enacting what we have learned. Also naked, why not.
We learnt how to live, how to breathe, how to make a kebab, how to embody old wisdom, how to tie shoes the proper way. All you need is a fan, a towel and a body. A kebab stick, a drink, some snackies. Participants developed a deeper perspective on what it means to operate within a complex identity such as the city and gained skills to open their own kebab shop.
Traces and Paths Towards Singularly-Plural Companionships
(2025)
Fulya UΓ§anok
This exposition emerged from my participation in the second interval of the Simultaneous Arrivals (Simularr) Artistic Research Projectβa research project inviting international artist-researchers to explore relational, situated, and process-based inquiries in dialogue with core researchers. Core researchers: Nayari Castillo, Hanns Holger Rutz, Franziska Hederer, and Daniele Pozzi. For the second interval, the visual artist and researcher Elena Radaelli and I were invited as visiting artist-researchers. (More information on Simultaneous Arrivals: https://simularr.net/about/)
The exposition presents my process during the residency, i.e. my Traces and Paths Towards a Singularly-Plural Companionships.
The eight-week residency (3 March-30 April 2024) took place across three sites: Graz (Austria); Lecce, San Cesario (Italy); and Klagenfurt (Austria). The exposition traces this journey through various mediums, including texts, graphics, video and audio material experiments, field encounters, and theoretical companions. My processes, are informed and shaped by my companion collaboratorsβhuman (research-creation companions), more-than-human, textual, and materialβwho co-inform and co-create the unfolding of the research.
recent publications
The Trauma of Looking : Readings and Counter-readings of the representation of femicides in the Greek mainstream media
(2025)
Dafni Melidou
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
Master Photography & Society
The "Trauma of Looking: Readings and Counter-readings of the representation of femicides in theGreek mainstream media" is a work that aims to decode the narrative strategies used by the Greekmainstream media to report sensitive topics related to gender inequalities and gender-basedviolence. In this work I explore the tropes and the effects of media cannibalism, a term which I havecoined and it will be explained further in the text, through the lens of intimate femicides - aphenomenon which has recently entered the wider public discourse in Greece. There is a need frommainstream media to commercialize such crimes and exploit personal dramas. They are treatingreal-life stories as a spectacle, as another true-crime series ready to be consumed by the audience.This globalized "life-as-spectacle" approach, which goes beyond Greece, transmutes our collectivemoral principles into a new culture where violence is always legitimized and thus is made acceptablein society.
The Skateable Realm - Revealing New Affordances Within The Public Realm Through Skateboarding
(2025)
NjΓ₯l Aleksander Vigdal Granhus
Research Paper of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
MA Interior Architecture (Inside)
Public space is defined as β an area or place that is open and accessible to all people,
regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age, or socio-economic level. These are public gathering
spaces such as plazas, squares and parksβ.
Public spaces that bring together a great diversity of people are therefore
designed as βzero frictionβ spaces, but when in use, people will experience friction.
This research paper focuses on how one constructs territories within the public realm and how this
can both foster participation for those who can identify themselves with the activities
within the territory and others who do not -to depart from a space. This creates fear
tendencies against the unknown and in order to maintain a certain behavioral control,
objects are being modified, removed and designed to prevent certain behaviors and
user groups from territorializing certain spaces from happening.
One territorial action is found in the action of skateboarding. Skateboarders do not only foresee
opportunities for action through the use of affordances within the public realm, but also
territorialize the space through extractions, additions, and public interactions for their action to
be possible. Skateboarding might be considered an action that excludes certain user groups from using the public space if territorialized by the skating community. Yet, on the contrary, skateboarders see opportunities for action within the public realm through affordances that might not be obvious to
the naked eye and therefore creates another level of interaction and encounters which may alter
the behavioral corollary within the space.
If skateboarders see the user value of public space through affordances and claim elements
within the space through action, does their territorialization of the space actually negatively
impact the space? Or do they introduce a new user value of the space that furthers behavioral actions and introduces new encounters?
Therefore, this research paper reflects on how a skateboarder's perspective of the public realm criticizes how we use space and reveal new design potentials for a multifunctional public space.
The Networked Audience : Algorithms, affordances, and why digital photographs are only a small part of digital photography
(2025)
Will Boase
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
Master Photography & Society
As photographers we make, sell and consume digital images, and the digital space and its audiences are growing exponentially. But every conversation on circulating photography centres on the object, about books or exhibitions. It seemed like there are images, and there is photography. Why are the two diverging? Radio evolved into podcasts. TV turned into TikTok. This thesis, then, sets out to ask what it is that photography says it does, or thinks it does, and what it actually does in the age of the smartphone. Critics love to tell their readers that photography is dead, but for some reason you can find all those same critics cheerfully posting their lunch on Instagram. This thesis is an invitation and a challenge to photography, to admit that things have changed and to embrace this as an opportunity rather than a threat.