Research Catalogue

Performance philosophy is still something of a ‘wild frontier’ where fundamental questions can be re-posed concerning the nature of wisdom and love, life and truth. For if love and wisdom are not co-extensive with verbal communication, then philosophy may be legitimately pursued by performative means. In this session the participants aim is to enact and unfold a set of trajectories rather than describe or 'define' their work in words alone. Passion and grief are disruptive currencies. Passion and grief not only seem un-necessary for biological life, they frequently threaten it. Yet a life lived without them would seem impoverished. Whether one views these turbulent affects as parasites, invaders, or as the engines of higher culture, they inhabit philosophy as an ineradicable black-market haunts all states and empires. We aim to consider this under-zone on its own terms, weaving theory with demonstrations of transferable techniques for cross-disciplinary research.

This project explores the transformative relationship between the human body, its emotional landscape, and the environment through site-specific choreography. The concept centers around the theme of releasing ingrained patterns and embracing vulnerability, inspired by the metaphor of "letting go" to find healthier ways of navigating discomfort and tension. Set against the striking backdrop of De Zandwacht, an architectural sculpture symbolizing transience and resilience, the choreography invited dancers to engage somatically with their surroundings. Through breathwork, weight shifts, and embodied improvisation, they responded to the structure, the landscape, and each other, creating movement that reflected themes of connection, resistance, and transformation. The goal of the project was to investigate how dance can serve as a bridge between inner struggles and external environments, fostering deeper awareness for performers and audiences alike. The outcomes included a layered, evocative performance that highlighted the interplay between natural and man-made worlds, leaving audiences with lasting impressions of human fragility and strength.

This project combines artistic and anthropological research on spontaneous gardening in open public space, predominantly in Brno, CZ. The team, mostly comprising recent graduates and graduate students of the Faculty of Fine Arts of Brno University of Technology, chose gardens and plantings which were, in most cases, rather exceptional. Unlike most typical front gardens, the ones in this study are somehow peculiar, due to their location, their composition and planting schemes, their scale, or methods of those who garden there. The anthropologists on the team analyzed a Facebook group dedicated to street gardening and conducted several interviews, while the artistic team responded to particular places with which they interacted. Some results of this research have been presented to the public in the form of an application comprising an audioguide and an interactive map; this exposition in the Research catalogue documents some of these findings. The team Barbora Lungová is a visual artist and has taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology since 2007. Her field of practice is painting and art projects focusing on plants, gardening, and queerness. She is the coordinator of the Partisans with a Hoe project. Lucia Bergamaschi is a visual artist working across the media of photography, sound, and installation. She earned an MA in Fine Art at Università Iuav di Venezia and an MA in Law at Università di Bologna. She is currently finishing her MA studies at the FFA BUT. Nela Maruškevičová combines painting, installations, and glass in her artistic practice. She is a 2023 graduate of the FFA BUT. Kateřina Konvalinová is a visual artist interested in the overlapping spaces of art, communal life, farming, and ritual. She earned her MA in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and is currently a doctoral student at the FFA BUT. Iva Balcaříková is a graphic designer and a member of the team behind the curated audio walks created by Galerie Art in Brno. She is currently finishing her MA studies at the FFA BUT. Hana Drštičková is a visual artist and a social anthropologist interested in environmental and queer topics. She graduated with an MA in Fine Arts from the FFA BUT in 2022 and with a BA in social anthropology from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Masaryk University and is currently a doctoral student at the Gender Studies Department of Charles University in Prague. Anastasia Blokhina is a social anthropologist who graduated with an MA tfrom the Faculty of Social Sciences of Masaryk University in 2022. Polyna Davydenko is a photographer and a video artist who documents social and environmental issues in her work, most recently those connected with the war in Ukraine. Filip Dušek is a media artist who studied at the Department of Photography at the FFA BUT. The project was conducted under the Specific Research FaVU-S-23-8441 Program.

Across diverse mediums and form, the ‘human’ body, however transient, remains my main subject of events. What is seen, in the eyes of my mind, take place on surface, lens, material, and morph with one another, with the living moving body, disfiguring each other and reconfiguring themselves after consumption. Embodied and disembodied appearances, reflect on the visceral and urgent presence of the human, live, body. At the start, the notion of mirror: a constant ever-changing image that is formed and deformed as each breath brings life to the body. Different media such as drawing, photography, printmaking, painting, voice, word, sound and video, interrelate with as output a universe of heterogeneous appearances, each with a common denominator: movement of the body and movement of the soul, between the gestural expression of charcoal drawing, the analogue and digital/post-produced sounds, still and moving images, to the carefully crafted and re-elaborated copper plates delivering prints. At the moment these are called Side Effects, each one a bi-product of the previous step in the process of feedback loop. “anthropomorphs”; two dimensional images derived from the superimposition of drawing and moving body (drawing>photo>painting>print) “hesitations”; the more visceral exploration of embodied voice-movement integration, exploring frequencies and resonances of vocal output rooted within the organs of the body “ghosts”; are the anthropomorphs restituted a third dimension. Sculptures rendered independent to move again, suspended in space, relating to nothing but to their history and to one another. “multiplicity”; anonymous portraits overlapped and stop-motion animated, searching to grasp the ever-changing nature of (one)(multiple)self, faced with memory and its loss, ancient stranger twins, imagined encounters or the union of multiplicity as one.

Sound Body is a project created by Zornitsa Stoyanova(BUL/USA) and Peter Sciscioli (USA), with an international cast of artists. The project was created over 8 workshops and rehearsal days in Sofia, Bulgaria. This is a written description of the project done specifically for a Master's degree assignment.

Collaborative filmmaking and the quest for a collective narrative. Through exploring different kinds of collaborators strategies this project embarked on a quest. Is there a way to create a narrative fiktion film that has is a founded in a kind of collective, existential mythology of contemporary life.