Stitches and Sutures. Textile Metaphors and Graphic Topologies as Methodological Artistic Tools
(2023)
author(s): Barbara Graf
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Barbara Graf (Center Research Focus, PhD candidate PhD in Art) takes Jacques Lacan’s notions of the ‘upholstery button’ and the ‘suture’ as starting points to explore textile metaphors as methodological tools for her artistic practice, informed by her own bodily sensory experiences and experience of paresthesia as a person affected by MS. Graf’s contribution "Stitches and Sutures" searches for images of the invisible and explores how deeply subjective experiences can be made accessible and adequately expressed.
Rewritable Creatures. Correspondence between Daniel Aschwanden, Vera Sebert and Lucie Strecker on Mimesis and Hybridity in Choreography
(2023)
author(s): Lucie Strecker, Vera Sebert
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Lucie Strecker (Angewandte Performance Laboratory and Department of Art and Communication Practices) reveals the artistic working process preceding a production with the contribution "Rewritable Creatures", reflecting on mimesis and hybridity in choreography through an exchange of letters with the late performer Daniel Aschwanden (Angewandte Performance Laboratory and Department of Art and Communication Practices) and the author Vera Sebert. As the three letter-writers search, speculate and ask each other questions, the text becomes a written performance, revealing an immediate, polyphonic approach to the subject that allows readers to become part of the performance. In this way, processes of hybridisation become manifest in writing. The performance, however, cannot be completed; Aschwanden’s sudden death interrupts the text, turning the contribution, in a sense, into a memorial to an artist, friend, and colleague and the readers into witnesses.
Exercises in Existential Eccentricity. Conceptualising autoimmunity as a variation of the conditio humana
(2023)
author(s): Barbara Macek
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Barb Macek (PhD candidate and fellow (DOC) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the Institute of Fine Arts & Media Arts) takes as her starting point self-reflections and her own experiences with the autoimmune disease SLE. She approaches the phenomenon of autoimmunity in relation to fundamental human ambiguity, following the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner. Macek’s contribution, "Exercises in Existential Eccentricity", explores the bio-philosophical dimension of the disease rather than its bio-medical dimension, showing how autoimmunity raises existential-phenomenological questions regarding bodily ownership, the self, and the notion of the body as “one’s own”. From an assumed embodied diversity, she designs an artistic technique, EEE - Exercises in Existential Eccentricity, drawing on the technique of auto-interviewing, autoethnography and poetics to facilitate a dialogue between different inner voices.
[Re] Mapping of Being – Landscape/Cavescape/Humanscape
(2023)
author(s): Nina Tsy, Nataliia Korotkova (IIAKO)
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition opens up the memory space of a landscape that carries a collective knowledge of the events of the Second World War in Sørøya, an isolated region far in northern Norway. Inside its landscape voids, the island conceals places that once became a refuge for half of the region’s inhabitants. In this research project, artists ask themselves what collective memory is and how the landscape opens up an alternative public space in its own depths. How do the caves of the island of Sørøya carefully hide and preserve the memory of the events of the Second World War, and how do these events fade into the shadows of Norway’s inhabitants’ social memory?
This exposition shows one chapter of our ongoing research project Dunke-Dunk, where the landscape is becoming the cavescape and the cavescape is becoming the humanscape through the artists’ long field trips to the region, their bodily immersion in caves, and an endless evagation searching for what preserves the memory of the touch of the Second World War through the [re]reading of archives, all the while collecting stories from the inhabitants and the terrain from an architectural and artistic perspective.
Unfinished Business
(2023)
author(s): Hedvig Jalhed, Mattias Rylander
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
How can microsocial rituals connected to a specific site be used as interaction templates for artistic purposes? And how can we distort such rituals artistically in order to make them memorable events? As artists, we regard distortion as the process that gives character and distinction to things and situations, as well as something that confuses and enriches information and interpretation. Through examples emerging from the operatic production Chronos’ Bank of Memories (2019–2022), set in empty shop stores with interacting visitors, we have recalled and fleshed out issues of rituality with distorted proportions. Due to the covid-19 pandemic, its production was interrupted and later on revived, which affected the work. This exposition covers aspects of both our artistic practice in general and this particular opera’s tendency to encompass distorted rituals. Commentary texts, images, and audio/video clips are arranged into an introduction and then three thematic strands in order to offer a reasoned overview of our work process.
The Anonymous – A Documentary Memory and Transformation Project
(2023)
author(s): Bengt Bok
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
De anonyma (The Anonymous) is a research project on memory and transformation that is divided into three parts: a book, a audio work, and a film. Over the past twenty years, Bengt Bok has returned several times to a former Nazi concentration camp north of Berlin. The first time he visited the site, he was shocked by the former death camp’s immediate proximity to a surrounding village. A community. Not only today but when the camp was still in use by the Nazis. How could people carry on living so nearby? He subsequently transformed the memories of his personal encounters, experiences and observations both in the camp and in the village into a book, which he, in turn, transformed into a sound work and, finally, into a film. In this exposition, Bok explores what became specific to, and distinctive about, each of the three different expressions or works — in other words, which narrative components remained, which disappeared, and which were added.
