Flâneur Commissie : On the Digital Mobilisation of Frozen Bodies
(2025)
author(s): João Henrique Viegas
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
Master Photography & Society
This thesis is the result of research on two statues commissioned by collective bodies, of writers who, combined, wrote under more than 100 pseudonyms, after they died. Fernando Pessoa and Edward Elias, sculpted by António Lagoa Henriques and Theo van der Nahmer respectively.
These statues don’t serve the authors, so why were they built? How do they frame collective memory? How do we interact with them?
By connecting the story of these statues with theory on cultural identity, aura and counter-strategies for mobilisation this thesis explores possible interventions to negotiate these statues.
Extended Umwelt: a thesis on losing control and connecting to chaos
(2025)
author(s): Sarah Hoogman
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
BA Interactive Media Design
The complexity of nature is everywhere around us, from the microscopic, indeed invisible elements in the world, to the macroscopic, to the transhuman, to the supernatural. Sometimes it goes beyond our human perceptions, which for me, is a gateway to the realisation that there are so many more systems besides our intelligent human-controlled systems that are elusive to us. Imagine if we could perceive the world with a different perception. What if we could also sense the microscopic scale with our naked eye, or if we could receive light or sound outside our spectrum?
Suppose we become aware that everything around us is in constant motion of vibrations. Perhaps we would see that we as human beings are only one element of so many more elements in nature. In this way, could we let go of our control over the systems in Gaia and leave more room for nature’s chaos? The experience of receiving vibrations beyond our senses will help us to create a new perception of our human-centred perspective of the Anthropocene.
Dining with interdepenedency : a new dining scenario
(2025)
author(s): Ariana Amir Hosseini
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
MA Interior Architecture (INSIDE)
Ariana Amir Hosseini's graduation project questions the normatisation of the artificial environment dictated by the Vitruvian anthropometric scale alone, introduced by early modernist architecture manuals such as the "neufert - architect's data" (1939). This, in her view, is limited to promoting the efficiency of everyday activities while neglecting many other values that architecture and design can offer such as the connection between people.
By focusing on the ritual of food, Ariana disrupts such everyday and important actions as, preparing food, cooking it and eating it, by proposing surreal spaces and objects that encourage connections between people based on a normatisation of interdependent actions.
Community school
(2025)
author(s): Chen Liu
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
Master Interior Architecture (INSIDE)
Driven by the author's personal experience, this thesis investigates the changing sense of community among Chinese students abroad. Through ten interviews and relevant theoretical readings, I discover a transitional journey of this sense of community: sprouted in a condensed living condition in dormitory, practiced in the basic daily activities and extended in the misuse of public teaching spaces. This transitional journey is currently facing challenges during Chinese students’ overseas study. How will this community sense continue without its previous habitats?(condensed dormitories, etc) How will this community sense deal with new upcoming factors?(language barrier, etc) In dealing these challenges, I emphasize the need for a conceived situation that allows participants to act on the possible challenges.
Can I use words to build a house?
(2025)
author(s): Yanbing Wu
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
BA Fine Arts
I started from my father’s dream - his future house. From a dialogue with him, dives me into memories and shapes a poetic space through the idea of Bachelard’s 'The Poetics of Space'. The house becomes the imagery in which the memories stay that we can enter in and touch it, to interact with the house that belongs to us, or never belongs to us.
Through the ‘experience of imagination’, the house exists not only to provide a space for perception and memory to meet but also to bring ‘awareness’ to the ‘back of self’. When the imagination circulation begins to drift away, a space is needed to enclose it. By encounters with the theories, literature, films, artists and artworks mentioned in the text, it is like walking through a forking path where you learn that yourself can be a way of knowing others.
Exploring Utopian Worlds
(2025)
author(s): Helmi Nieminen
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
Master Interior Architecture (INSIDE)
This thesis is nonlinear, fluidly organized and freely associative because that’s how I think and work. I have learned to embrace this way of working and thinking through the writer and philosopher Helene Cixous. Helene Cixous argues that we need new languages and so she has proposed what she calls Écriture féminine (feminine writing). Feminine writing resists patriarchal and binary modes of thinking which usually require correct methods of organization and rationalist rules of logic. This logic relies on narrow cognitive experience and discredits emotional and intuitive experiences. According to Cixous feminine writing also resists linear reasoning. I have created my own way of constructing a thesis. I have established my own rules and logic and allowed myself to be intuitive. The order of this thesis might be a bit unconventional. There is no beginning, middle and end (conclusion).
