Research Catalogue

Illustration as research from within the field is of relatively new practice. The illustrators discourse on representation (Yannicopoulou & Alaca 2018 ), theory (Doyle, Grove and Sherman 2018, Male 2019, Gannon and Fauchon 2021), and critical writing on illustration practice was hardly found before The Journal of Illustration was first issued in 2014, followed by artistic research through illustration (Black, 2014; Rysjedal, 2019; Spicer, 2019). This research project developed as response to a rise in hate crime towards refugees and the targeting of European Jews in recent decade. A pilot project (This Is a Human Being 2016-2019) treated how narratives of the Holocaust may avoid contributing to overwriting of history or cultural appropriation. Asking how illustration in an expanded approach may communicate profound human issues typically considered unrepresentable, this new project hopes to explore representation and the narratives of “us” and “the others” in the contemporary world through illustration as starting-point for cross-disciplinary projects. The participants from different disciplines, have interacted democratically on common humanist themes to explore the transformative role of illustration in contemporary communication. our projects should afford contemplation of illustration as an enhanced, decelerated way of looking; and drawing as a process for understanding - a way of engaging in understanding the other, as much as expressing one’s own needs (McCartney, 2016). This AR project consisted of three symposia and three work packages, and the artistic research unfolded in the symbiosis of these elements. Our investigation of illustration across media and materials continues as dissemination and exhibitions even after the conclusion of the work packages in 2024.

This exposition documents my explorations of pondering with pine trees. Tämä ekspositio dokumentoi yritykseni miettiä mäntyjen kanssa. Den här ekspositionen dokumenterar mina försök att fundera med furor.

Conceptual map of current Research Catalogue Functionality, including workflows. This map aims to represent the current state of RC in visual and diagrammatic form.

Becoming Animal has sought to explore the boundaries and parralels between the musical bodies of different creatures.

City of Panic is an urban intervention, which has been realized by The Anartist (Gian Luigi Biagini and John Dunn). It happened in 2019 in the central train-station square of Helsinki. The installation-performance is a "caged mini-golf", which catches and elicits many disruptive resonances. The intervention challenges, contests and makes visible the "iron cage of rationality" that organizes the capitalist urban space through an ordoliberal trans-institutional consensus that does not leave space for the expression of Difference. The intervention puts in "play-ce" a critical and mystic playground of Difference in Itself that breaks the cage of assimilation to a functional hierarchical identity. The article describes this complex experience of rupture and cata-comic rapture by a phenomenology of the process in becoming. A phenomenology and an ethnography of difference, with theory references "in flight", that cannot be completely grasped by a homogenous and unified signifier, narrative, representation. Even the style of the graphic tries to evoke this "virtual heterogeneity of intertwined planes and becomings" that are sutured and re-composed by creative writing.

This research paper focuses on three different gardens located far away from one another. The common nominator of these gardens is to bring the community together for sharing vegetables, herbs, and discussions. Two of them are united by a new innovation, combination of sand and water in lieu of traditional soil. These are the Sahrawi sandoponic garden in the refugee camps in southwestern Algeria and a Helsinki Sandoponic Garden in Helsinki Biennial 2023. The Helsinki Sandoponic Garden is a project by an artistic research group called PHOSfate formed by Pekka Niskanen and Mohamed Sleiman Labat in 2018. Our PHOSfate garden emphasizes the injustices the Sahrawi population and the Baltic Sea have faced. Becoming a refugee is the utmost injustice that can happen to an individual. Eutrophication is causing a trauma for the Baltic Sea and for the inhabitants living on its shores. Sahrawis are refugees because of phosphate mining, and phosphate fertilizers are the reason for the eutrophication in the Baltic Sea. Coping with the trauma and healing from it is an aspect shared by the community garden in Paris and the Helsinki PHOSfate Garden. The community garden of Jardin Truillot in Paris was created after the Bataclan terrorist attack 2015 to help those living near the theater to heal from trauma. When focusing on the importance of gardens, I will engage with some of the discourses around environmental justice and ecological justice. In my text, I will show that the recognition of injustice is the central activism in these three gardens and in my garden practices.