Research Catalogue

Photography with sound and net art, drawing, found folk sculpture with digital drawing, readymades, 2012, 2020, 2021. Accompanied by archival material. The exposition exposes the question of what is artistic research. Usurping the mini-essayist format, which is traditionally associated with research in say the area of philosophy, the exposition formally operates on different levels. I selectively included visual art research material from my own artistic archive, as well as anonymous material that's readily available from the internet and in film archives. In this way, I wanted to emphasise the role of archiving and using archives in the artistic process, as an element of artistic research and artistic production that might involve remediation. Taking that we live in a largely theoretic culture, which means that we use external information systems for storage and retrieval of written, visual and other material, the implication is that art is part of this theoretical system. Moreover, I specifically problematise the notion of value in relation to the visual arts by using the popular media figures of the counterfeit and the impostor, with reference to the so-called "impostor syndrome", correlated with being a minority of some sort in one's field: "A different thought is that two people may be answerable to the very same standard of success or competence, yet be subject to different epistemic standards for reasonable belief in their respective success or competence. This would be an example of pragmatic encroachment." (Katherine Hawley, "What is Impostor Syndrome?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93, 2019). I use visual art and figurative examples as illustrations, adapting from methods, such as the example, used in analytic philosophy. I suggest that some artworks operate as philosophical provocations of the archive: "The artwork just exists", as Frank Stella argued. Artworks and archival artistic material are offered for aesthetic contemplation; they don't possess any "magical" qualities, they don't cause any phenomena or events in the world. In this view, I ordered this exposition as a design proposal for two independent, yet interconnected exhibitions: one for the final artistic exhibition show; and one as a general overview for the artist's studio, set up as a stand alone, if parallel, exhibition. The conception of two parallel expositions as mocks of two parallel exhibitions is inspired by Jean Baudrillard's concept of "hyperreality", which refers to the blurring between reality and simulated representations, when sometimes, influenced by media, film, television, advertising, people tend to accept images or perceptions not corresponding to actual reality. The exposition hints at artists and others, who use different modes of communication, as skillfully exploiting the Baudrillardian concept of "hyperreality", with its accompanied "simulacra" and "simulations", for making indirect references on a sociological level; as well as for putting forward a critical commentary on the artistic and conceptual level.

This thesis stems from the need to investigate an original painting technique developed by the author, which combines figurative painting and solidified atmospheric phenomena. The heart of the research is a simple and radical question: How can an ephemeral phenomenon be made permanent? The answer takes shape through the creation of sheets of solidified rain, transparent membranes that preserve the logic of the drop, the flow, the surface tension. These membranes are superimposed on figurative paintings, generating a multidimensional visual language. Transparency is not an aesthetic effect, but a temporal device: it freezes the work, suspends it, holds it in an eternal instant.

Esta web es producto digital del proyecto Narración gráfica, laboratorio de objetos, cartografía digital y mediaciones en experiencias con comunidades de artistas migrantes, registrado con Cód. 10160180521 proyecto institucionalizado sin financiamiento del Centro de Investigaciones y Desarrollo Científico - CIDC de la Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas. Hace parte del proceso metodológico de desarrollo de la tesis doctoral Narración Gráfica de Experiencias: Intercambios en Imágenes de migración. Con la realización del proyecto, se busca incentivar el uso de la narración gráfica como proceso horizontal que permite relatar y revisar la importancia que tienen las prácticas artísticas de las comunidades en la construcción de tejido social. La propuesta de mediación artística se visibiliza como una estrategia colaborativa que permite el diálogo y el intercambio. El trabajo se inscribe y contribuye a las apuestas del Grupo de investigación para la creación artística y de la Línea de investigación en: Estudios críticos de las corporeidades, las sensibilidades y las performatividades. Adscritos al doctorado en estudios artísticos de la Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas.

Cruising with Craft to the Ends of the Worlds: Practices of shattering, becoming scyborg and dancing with dragons as possible cartographies is an investigation of cruising with craft as a companion to explore how its languages and discourses contribute to processes of equity such as decolonization and can challenge ivory tower academic structures through its cracks and margins, the place of the undercommons. Thinking with craft becomes essential in scyborgism. As la paperson defines in A Third University is Possible a scyborg "is a queer turn of word that I offer to you to name the structural agency of persons who have picked colonial technologies and reassembled them to decolonizing purposes." la paperson uses the scyborg within the academic institution to use the resources given for decolonial purposes when reconfigured. There is interest in how this idea can be expanded to other institutions such as the archive and the museum as well as the academy and artistic practice-based research with craft as a companion. Craft becomes crucial for its direct connection to the colonial framing of human and non-human and forces the consideration of the individual as well as the collective simultaneously. Collaborating and kinship making with artists and institutions of a vast array of disciplines has the potential to reassemble or reconfigure the current cultural systems of queerness and body politics while shattering the boundaries academically imposed on craft as a field. Unpacking the witnessing of toxic intimacies and the embedded systems of oppression rooted into the geological strata of cultural institutions as unpacked by Kathryn Yousoff, there is an urgency to develop ways to disrupt and subvert these mechanisms. lambert deploys the shoal or sandbar in reference to the work of Tiffany Lethabo King’s work The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies to allow for constant shifting(s) and assemblage(s) to produce vibrations, meanings and embodied understandings. Through Natalie Loveless’s development of polydisciplinamory, a chimerical practice of making, collaborating, writing and curating creates systems for platform building and methodologies to talk with and not at, in regard to the othered body. These methods centralize joy and pleasure, making them crucial in developing alternative models of institutional existence. The thesis is comprised of a miscellany of compositions such as texts, images, objects and prior publications that have been assembled together to form this publication with Patrick Lacey and Jens Schildt. In this, there is no ending, no beginning, no index, only choices to be made and actions to be considered. The process of this assemblage marks a moment where work becomes material, context and tool for cruising once again. The person who encounters this becomes the research, acting in solidarity with Loveless’ resistance to the monography that explains and instead centers the value and importance of practice as the research itself.

Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023. BA Fine Arts This paper is my submission for the Graduate Research Paper, a requirement as part of the Bachelor in Fine Arts at the KABK. The paper examines the idea that an art practice based on making is an alchemical practice. I explore how, in the heyday of alchemy, artisans working away in workshops to produce artefacts through a bodily engagement with materials, were seen as alchemists. I describe more modern theories of making, taken from the Humanities, to show that they are really describing a continuation of this same way of working – the search for what Pamela Smith has termed an artisanal epistemology. I examine how alchemy might be incorporated into an art practice. It is evident there are two principal ways in which artists engage with alchemy, and I classify artists as being either Borrower, Adept or a hybrid of the two approaches. Finally, I present 3 bodies of work in which I have engaged with alchemy in my own practice.

It Is Indeed a Dance is a project exploring the emotional, psychological, and cultural shifts within contemporary romantic discourse. Using the metaphor of dance as a dynamic, often asymmetrical interplay between self and other, the project investigates love and post-love conditions marked by ambivalence, hyper-awareness, and emotional fatigue. Drawing on concepts such as limerence, attachment theory, fantasy bonding, and “situationships,” it examines how psychological language has entered everyday dating vocabulary—shaping not only how we talk about love, but how we experience it. Through autotheoretical writing, visual media and spatial compositions, the project seeks to map and mediate intimate dynamics in an era where connection feels both over-analyzed and elusive. It reflects on the contradictions of contemporary intimacy, where vulnerability is praised but rarely safe, and communication is vital yet often ineffective in post-romantic conditions.