Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images
(2024)
author(s): Kajsa Dahlberg
published in: Research Catalogue
Informed by queer life practices, theories, and affinities, this documented artistic research project (doctoral thesis) draws from new materialist and post-humanist discourse in order to reconsider what role visual media play in the historical need to separate the human and the environmental. It asks, how do we challenge prevailing perceptions of film and photography as inexorably linked to ideas of progress and modernisation, to linear temporality, spatial separation, and to land-based thought? Based on the acknowledgement that we need to rethink our position as humans within the multiple habitats that make up the world, I investigate the ways in which the apparatus of film, rather than being an extension of human perception, attests to the material interdependences and co-productions that hold a potential for converging human and nonhuman perspectives. "Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images" considers the cinematic space of the ocean alongside Jean Epstein’s film "Le Tempestaire" (1947); it follows early photographic chemical methods involving seaweed to both develop film and to examine the technical intra-activity of human and nonhuman regimes as part of photography itself. Within the scope of this research, I argue and demonstrate how film engages in a sensory and reciprocal involvement with the material world, one that addresses the ability to sense, not just with one’s eyes, but with the entire body.
"Tidal Zones" are real locations, the habitat of a multitude of organisms, and the home of seaweeds. It is a place that is neither land nor sea but constitutes a zone with its own specific relationships and living conditions. In its refusal to be either or, it forms a (non-binary) temporal figuration between presence and absence, solid and liquid, life and death, dictated by the motions of spiral and circular time. This space, "Between Life and Images", is the chemical rockpool (the darkroom) out of which photography and film grew.
The PhD submission consists of four film-works, "The Etna Epigraph" (2022), "Seaweed Film" (2023), "Coenaesthesis – It Is Not Even True That There Is Air Between Us" (2023) and "The Spiral Dramaturgy" (2019) along with the exhibition "The Tidal Zone" shown at Index - The Swedish Con-temporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, from 25 November 2022 to 12 February 2023 and at Havremagasinet, Länskonsthall Boden from 14 October 2023 to 11 February 2024. The films and documentation from the exhibitions are included in the submission, which also includes an “Opening Letter” and two texts called “Filming with the Ocean” and “Methodology of the Spiral”.
This dissertation has been carried out and supervised within the graduate programme in Visual Arts at the Royal Institute of Art. The dissertation is presented at Lund University in the framework of the cooperation agreement between the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, and the Royal Institute of Art regarding doctoral education in the subject Visual Arts.
In Good Company. Think We Must.
(2024)
author(s): Falk Hubner
connected to: Fontys Academy of the Arts (internal)
published in: Research Catalogue
This publication/exposition is the extended version of Falk Hübner's inaugural lecture as professor of Artistic Connective Practices at Fontys Academy of the Arts. The text offers an introduction to the work of the professorship, to the ideas and concepts underpinning it and to its projects and research lines. Rather than presenting finished research, the text seeks to open ideas, insights and imagination and offer a sense of where the journey is heading. With an explicit emphasis on collectively working and thinking together, the core of the publication introduces and elaborates on the concept of artistic connective practices through the notion of three "conceptual clouds": practices, the artistic, and connectivity.
Juan Manuel Gaitán y Arteaga, the influenced musician [final]
(2024)
author(s): Alba Conejo Mangas
published in: KC Research Portal
Name: Alba Conejo Mangas.
Main subject: Historical violin.
Research supervisor: Wouter Verschuren.
Title of the research: Juan Manuel Gaitán y Arteaga, the "influenced" musician.
Research question: Is it possible to distinguish the influence of pre-flamenco in the villancicos of Juan Manuel Gaitán y Arteaga?
Summary of results: During my research, I never imagined finding music from Lima or Guatemala composed by Juan Manuel Gaitán y Arteaga, a musician from Córdoba, Spain, in the XVIII century, who had never been in these places. This discovery presented an interesting challenge: to bring back to life scores that had been forgotten for over two hundred years and to explore the music played in Córdoba Cathedral during the middle of the XVIII century.
My interest on Juan Manuel Gaitán y Arteaga started when I listened to a beautiful villancico "Voy buscando mi cordero" by Gaitán y Arteaga, performed by La Orquesta Barroca de Sevilla with Enrico Onofri. Despite being sacred music composed for the church and for weekly mass, it was written in Spanish and carried a distinct Spanish folkloric flavour. Did Juan Manuel Gaitán y Arteaga have a connection with XVIII century Spanish folk music? This caught my attention and spurred me to delve deeper into his music, particularly his villancicos. I soon realized how little-known Juan Manuel's music is today
The line of research I pursued falls within the realm of musicological-historical research. The musicological techniques employed include those related to musical historiography, such as the chronological organization of historical-musical events, particularly in Córdoba. Additionally, it involves an understanding of musical compositions, forms, and styles, as well as musical aesthetics, encompassing the conception of music, its functions, and purposes.
The objectives are: to understand the musical personality of Gaitán y Arteaga in his villancicos and the relation between the folkloric and ecclesiastical world in Spain on XVIII C.
Biography: Born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, she finished her modern bachelor under the guidance of Gordan Nikolic in Rotterdam. It was then, that she started her interest in historical performance. After her graduation, she studied for her baroque bachelor's in Brussels under the guidance of Ryo Terakado, and in 2022 she started her master's degree at The Hague Conservatory with professor Ryo Terakado too.
Invisible Cities - the experience of negative space
(2024)
author(s): vittoria pavesi
published in: Research Catalogue
"What is today the city, for us? I believe I wrote something like a last love poem to cities, in a time when it’s becoming more and more difficult living them like cities. Maybe we’re coming to a moment of crisis of the urban life, and Invisible cities are a dream born by the heart of unliveable cities." - I. Calvino, Introduction to Città Invisibili, Mondadori 1983
Starting by a confrontation between two historical utopian projects (Arturo Soria’s ciudad lineal and Constant’s New Babylon) I try to investigate with a broad and heterogenous look the idea of adopting path as fundamental topic of the city: whether Soria or Constant, in different ways, suggest an architecture of roaming, a nomadic and virtual space, that is the same space of cosmopolis, an anticipation of globalized culture that’s identified in a flux-condition and not in a stasis-one. Ciudad lineal and New Babylon projects prophetically forestall many tendencies of contemporary urbanity, proposing an idea of cities that are at the same time hyperlocal and hyperplanetary, ahistorical and superficial, acentric and non-identitary, inhabited by people always in movement. Streets don’t conduct anymore just to some places, they are places themselves: the condition of movement, and the street trail that constitutes his support, represents the urban archetype that is the basis of all contemporary architectonical and social disposition. From the description and comparison of these two projects the Generic City emerges, alienate and privatized, where we’re living in nowadays.
Circus as Practices of Hope: A Philosophy of Circus
(2024)
author(s): Marie-Andrée Robitaille
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This exposition provides a spherical exposition of the research processes through a repository of images, texts, and diagrams, and contains the exegesis—a critical textual articulation of the doctoral artistic research project Circus as Practices of Hope: A philosophy of Circus.
Abstract
My doctoral artistic research project, Circus as Practices of Hope: A Philosophy of Circus, responds to the growing complexities emerging from the convergence of the fourth industrial revolution, the sixth mass extinction, and the eco-socio-political turmoil of our time. What does it mean to be human today? What does it mean to be a circus artist today? How is circus relevant in today’s context?
Core to this inquiry is the assertion that although circus arts hold the potential to foster significant knowledge, they simultaneously perpetuate outdated worldviews that restrict their transgressive potential. With this research, I investigate alternatives to regressive models of thoughts and modes of composition, aiming to identify and articulate circus´ inherent epistemic, ontological, and ethical specificities and their relevance for navigating and steering the current planetary paradigm shift.
I conducted my research through embodied practices as a circus artist, as a pedagogue, and from the perspective of a human on Earth. My inquiry occurred through Multiverse, an iterative series of compositional performative experiments and discursive activities. I engaged critical posthumanism and neo-materialist philosophies to challenge and evolve my relation to risk, mastery, and virtuosity.
The project conceptualizes circus arts as nomadic and fabulatory practices, culminating in a series of artistic, choreographic, and conceptual tools and methods that articulate circus arts within and beyond their disciplinary boundaries. The project advances a philosophy of circus that highlights circus-specific kinetic, aesthetic, and embodied relevancies in today’s context, situating circus arts as hopeful practices for the future.
To quote this work:
Robitaille, M-A. (2024), Circus as Practices of Hope: A Philosophy of Circus, Documented Artistic Research Project (doctoral thesis), Stockholm University of the
Arts.
Publication series X Position no. 33
ISSN 2002-603X ; 33
ISBN 978-91-88407-52-8 (print)
EISBN 978-91-88407-53-5 (e-publ)
Arte y Autismo
(2024)
author(s): Antonio Puertas-Banegas
published in: Research Catalogue
¿Existe un arte autista diferencial?
A través de esta pregunta de investigación nos adentramos en un trabajo de investigación polifacético que hace especial hincapié en la fenomenología. Como suelo decir, "conocimiento sentido y leído". Esta investigación es un autodenominado "laboratorio espectral" no finalista. Esto quiere decir que no buscamos un final (una obra), sino que del proceso se generan objetos y prácticas, preguntas y respuestas.