Research Catalogue

Initiated in 2020, Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orient to self, others, world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? A dorsal orientation foregrounds an active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

50 A3 drawings black and coloured markers, including: 3 A3 collages on paper with newspaper cutouts and printed photos. 12 A3 drawings on paper with coloured markers + 1 A3 with black ballpoint pen and markers. 13 A3 drawings on paper with black marker, and red, pale blue, gold, pink and orange markers +1 A3 wo-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. Some of the above is preparatory work for 4 large prints and 13 paintings. 22 A4 drawings with ballpoint pen. I did/made the art between 2023-2024, from the perspective of the observer. I started writing the blog afterwards, from 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. I mixed this with stylistic elements of the architectural sketch, using heavily the black marker and stick figures. Much of this work is, amongst other, about children. I wanted to emphasise that, by intentionally applying stylistic elements from children's drawings, in a naive and loose architectural composition. Using this visual approach, I wanted to evoke a comically sharp twist to the otherwise dark subject matter. "Pop and Politics" (Pop Og Politikk) Where does the boundary run between art and popular culture? Pop art embraces the iconography of mass culture. Themes are taken from advertising comics, cinema and TV. The slick, impersonal style is a deliberate provocation. In Norway, pop art is part of a broader left-wing protest movement. Everything from capitalism and imperialism to environmental and gender politics is subjected to critical scrutiny. The exclusive, unique artwork is replaced by mass-produced prints and posters, well suited to spreading a political message." From the National Museum, Oslo, Norway, 2024. For Nikos, Filip (Philip), and "Brandon" - August, September, and October 2024. For 'Tricky' - January 2025. The text is written like a hip-hop song. The art is influenced by Jean-Michel Basquiat, See exposition in connection with "The Origins of The Game", "Debris", and "The Loot".

RELAY is a three-year EU-funded research project supported by the ERASMUS+ programme „Cooperation Partnerships" that focuses on developing the artistic and educational fields of choreography, dance and music. The concept that gave our project its name – RELAY – is based on deep trust in the transiting and transmissive foundation of both artistic production and knowledge development. RELAY underscores a fluid and processual element in the intersection of art and education. Not only does the actual production and development of knowledge and artworks depend on collective – and therefore transmissive – efforts, but the future life of those productions depends on how they are shared. For example, a dance technique only lives through those who practice it. A piece of music is passed on (through ear, instrument technology, or score) between practitioners, producers, and listeners. Every hand-over gives the possibility for development, re-iterations, and productive misunderstandings. The exposition here gathers the findings, reflections and insights into the principles and methods of RELAY as well as obstacles, hiccups and (creative) failures as a work-in-progress. Authors and Contributors: Ana Papdima, Andreea Duta, Catalin Cretu, Evita Tsakalaki, Jan Burkhardt, Konstantinos Tsakirelis, Laura Lang De Negri, Maia Means, Max Wallmeier, Mihai Mihalcea, Nadine Kribbe, Rasmus Ölme, Sergej Maingardt, Stella Malliaraki, Vera Sander

My doctoral research explored musical interaction with disabled children and their families, focusing on how, when and under what conditions music becomes accessible and meaningful. The serie of pictures provides an insight into how accessibility is co-created by participants, activities, actions, objects and the environment. The whole PhD thesis can be accessed here: https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/34028/

This exposition reports and assesses the experience of the project ‘The Creative Potential of Evolving Constraints in Peer-to-Peer Reciprocal Coaching: A Three-way Investigation’ (hereafter 3WI), funded by the Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University. 3WI was designed to gauge the utility of evolving creativity constraints — that is, deliberately adopted restrictions (whether self-imposed or suggested by another) to choices in a given creative project — in the development of projects by the three participants: a dance artist and filmmaker, a songwriter, and an academic video-essayist. The format of 3WI was as follows. At monthly meetings from September to December 2021, each participant presented work in progress and exchanged feedback with the other two participants. Each meeting culminated in the setting of tasks and constraints designed to guide the development of individual projects over the subsequent month. After an introduction to the format and aims of 3WI, the exposition begins with a description of 3WI’s procedural and theoretical coordinates: the Critical Response Process, a formalised protocol for eliciting feedback on creative projects developed by choreographer Liz Lerman; The Five Obstructions (Lars Von Trier and Jørgen Leth, 2003), a film which models the provision of creativity constraints; and theory and scholarship concerning the utility of creativity constraints. The exposition continues with a description of the projects being developed by each participant (a dance performance and dance film; two songs; two sections of an academic videoessay), and an individual and illustrated account of the feedback meetings and development of those projects over the course of 3WI. These accounts are followed by a discussion reflecting on setting and receiving constraints, and an assessment of the experience of the project. We conclude with some contemplation of the ethics of constraint-setting and the lessons of the 3WI experience for other makers. Constraint-based procedures are commonly employed and recognised as generative in artistic and design contexts, and they are also used in experimental academic work. 3WI was an attempt to test the utility of constraint-setting as a form of formative peer-to-peer feedback in the development of real creative projects. This exposition will be of interest to artists and academics interested in deploying creativity constraints for the development of creative and creative-critical projects. It will be particularly relevant for those who work in collaborative and interdisciplinary contexts. Download Accessible PDF

Agential Guts was an artistic multispecies practice of care; a messy entanglement with goats, soils, microbial companions, and gardening activities. The concern over biodiversity loss and many ecological crises caused by traditional farming led me to learn about alternative soil care and goat-keeping and to invent new modes of relating and caring in a multispecies context. The fieldwork drew from rewilding practices that strive to create biodiverse conditions. Configuring the meanings of multispecies assemblage beyond instrumentalising governance of different species, I followed what I called microbial desires in our relational enactments envisioning microbial and mammalian companionship from the more-than-human standpoint. My kin-making was my object of study from an academic perspective but the companion animals and microbes, soils, and plants were collaborators from the artistic point of view. The premises of new materialist and post-anthropocentric relational ontologies were embodied in our practice, where the matter was perceived as intelligent and affective, and thus able to lead to sources of novel ethical thinking-doing and art. I drew from the arts of noticing and considering collaboration as contamination (Tsing 2015) with messy, microbially saturated milieu. Acknowledging how scientific knowledge is always shaping our affective encounters, I also tried to speculate with what we know about microbes leaking between different bodies. In producing a situated knowledge platform, Agential Guts contributed to both art-based research and social studies of microbes by introducing a speculative and embodied way to create knowledge together with nonhumans. Download Accessible PDF