Musical Psycho Performance
(2024)
author(s): Gianmarco Moneti
published in: KC Research Portal
Although I love attending traditional classical music concerts, I have long felt that they missed certain aspects that would make them more relatable to the inner world of the audience. In this research exposition, I argue that this missing aspect is a social element and I guide the reader through a possible application of social themes to a classical music concert. On a formal level, I use the techniques of psychodrama – a form of group therapy – as a tool from which I borrow some fundamental concepts, along with the conception of characters, to understand how social themes can be addressed in a context in which multiple people connect to the same object. In this case, the object of common interest is the representation on stage. On a substantial level, I draw upon material I collected in my interviews with Clara Scarafia to study a social theme she has been directly involved with: suicide. The two levels are brought together in my pilot session, where I experiment through a sample of the complete performance I am designing and an audience questionnaire how psychodrama and the interview interact and influence one another. The goal is to show that the classical repertoire, with its complex emotional kaleidoscope and non-verbal language, can easily bear a social theme and enhance the collective reflection of relevant themes in our times.
Building upon Ruins – Interweaving Metaphors
(2023)
author(s): Joanna Magierecka
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Does the complexity of a work of art, composed of diverging narratives, present a possibility to connect to what we do not grasp? In this exposition I present interweaving as a compositional technique and dramaturgical strategy, through aspects of the creative process connected to and elements of three installations – part of a series called Ruins. The installations combine different aspects of storytelling, participatory strategies, media, and forms of expression. I believe that interweaving different and diverging fragments, allowing audience members to create their own performance dramaturgy and experience, can create an understanding of others and their experience. In that lies the possibility for a shared story – a collective story. Interweaving as a method is also present in the dramaturgy of the text itself – building up to an audio-visual representation of those elements and the written text. In this way, I hope the exposition lets the reader and me both investigate interweaving as a technique and experience it.
HALFLIFE
(2021)
author(s): shasti
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition posits art as a form of contagious divination, a glimpse into the multiplicity of possible futures, and an examination of artists' ability to detect momentum towards unavoidable outcomes.
In 2014, I was selected by curator Heather Pesanti to participate in the City of Toronto’s annual Nuit Blanche festival, an overnight public art event spanning twelve hours in multiple neighborhoods that draws over a million people from the surrounding regions.
Spurred by my concerns about the inescapable gravity of mobile electronic media and "viral culture," my work was to be a performance premised on contagion, pointing to the monumental role that electronic media had assumed in mediating our direct experience, and the civic and societal fallout I believed would ensue. Little did I suspect how bizarrely prescient the work would turn out to be.
On October 6th, 2014, one hundred glowing “carriers,” dressed in fluorescent hazmat suits, wearing fluorescent LED-wired helmets in the dodecahedral geometric shape of an adenovirus, dispersed throughout the City of Toronto, each "testing" and “infecting” at least one hundred festivalgoers by marking their faces and hands with “spots” “lesions” and “rashes” using surgical swabs dipped into a beaker of invisible UV-reactive ink. Each "test subject" was then gifted a small UV pen lamp with built-in reactive ink marker and instructed to "infect" and "test" ten others.
It is estimated that HALFLIFE attained an "R-naught" value of ten, and through this performance, affected approximately one hundred thousand people.
Images of the performance went viral on Instagram for seventy-two hours, during which Toronto General Hospital admitted their first and only suspected Ebola case.
IN - The creation of an immerive music performance
(2017)
author(s): Jonathan Bonny
published in: KC Research Portal
Name: Jonathan Bonny
Main Subject: Classical Percussion
Research Supervisors: Gerard Bouwhuis, Fedor Teunisse
Title of Research: IN – the creation of an immersive music performance
Research Question:
How can immersive performance concepts be used to create a better connection between a musician and his audience?
Summary of Results:
In my research, I reflected on several aspects of a concert and how I want to communicate with my audience. Throughout the research I realised that finding ways to immerse an audience is easier said than done. My belief in immersion as a tool to guide listeners towards a certain atmosphere, attitude or interpretation is nevertheless still as strong as before. More than ever, I am convinced that this is the way for me to perform. This is particularly the case for contemporary music where inexperienced listeners might appreciate some guidance. This paper aims to inform (performing) readers of the possible (positive and negative) consequences of creating an immersive performance. Creating an immersive performance is difficult. It takes a lot of time, something musicians often do not have. In addition to learning the music, the performer needs time to brainstorm about the kind of immersion that supports the musical idea and does not distract from it. The line between the two is very thin. Once the immersion concept is established it often takes a lot of preparation to execute it. To bring elaborate ideas to fruition musicians will need the help of technicians, engineers, other artists etc. This explains why immersive performances are often organised by ensembles that rely on a bigger production team and budget. The danger here lies in the fact that those teams are often too far removed from the actual content of the music. Realising this made me think about other ways to connect with an audience. I concluded that besides immersion, also attitude and mindset are very powerful tools to decrease the distance between a performer and the audience. Low-tech solutions like literally performing very close to or surrounded by them are very effective to emotionally connect with the audience. Because of the reflective character of the topic I chose to write my dissertation in the form of an essay. My goal is not to present 'the ultimate truth' but to inspire myself and other musicians to create a personal (contemporary) performing identity.
Biography:
Jonathan Bonny (°1992, Bruges) studied classical percussion at the School of Arts in Ghent, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. He is actively building towards a music culture that knows no distinction between genres and he is consistently looking for innovative ways to present contemporary arts to a bigger audience. He co-founded Headliner (adventurous music collective), Kunstenfestival PLAN B (contemporary arts festival) and IHEART (band).
sin ∞ fin - The Movie | A performance-based art film project by VestAndPage (Andrea Pagnes & Verena Stenke)
(2016)
author(s): Andrea Pagnes
published in: Research Catalogue
Inspired by Peter Sloterdijk’s investigation dissecting Micro- and Macro- spherology in his trilogy Spheres, and by Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, the moving image project sin ∞ fin – The Movie by VestAndPage is based on various stages of research to conjugate performance art with filmmaking. Its final result consists of an art film trilogy produced along the course of three years in the following artist-in-residence programs: CONFL!CTA Contemporary Art and Science Research (Punta Arenas, Chile, 2010); Sarai CSDS Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies (New Delhi, India, 2011); Cultural Program of the DNA Dirección Nacional del Antártico (Antarctica / Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2012), and based on performances conceived site-specific.
Schizoproduction: Artistic Research and Performance in the Context of Immanent Capitalism
(2015)
author(s): Tero Nauha
published in: Research Catalogue
In the written part of my doctoral dissertation I am presenting the artistic works and set them in a larger context, which I have entitled immanent capitalism. This is an artistic research, where the art works, their processes or workshops produce knowledge, which will not be fully translatable to a written form. The artworks are performances, live-art projects and works on video. In the presentation of the context I am presenting the transformation that has taken place starting from the industrialism and modernism, and which have recently been incorporated with new forms of labour and economy.
Selected Interviews (2009-2015)
(2015)
author(s): Andrea Pagnes
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition consists of 5 selected interviews given by VestAndPage on Performance art issues and their artistic activity:
1. For eBENT by Carlos Pina, 2009
2. For CIPAF by Karolina Lambrou, 2013
3. For IPA by Hatice Utkan, 2013
4. For VIVO/VOD by Jeremy Todd, 2014
5. For PERFORMANCE IS ALIVE by Quinn Dukes, 2015
My Body Asking Your Body Questions: VestAndPage (Verena Stenke & Andrea Pagnes) interviewed by Valeria Romagnini & Karlyn De Jong (Personal Structures |GAA Foundation)
(2015)
author(s): Andrea Pagnes
published in: Research Catalogue
Complete and revised version in origin of the interview with performance artist duo VestAndPage by Valeria Romagnini with additional questions by Karlyn De Jong, partly published in Personal Structures, vol. II, 2013. The artists analyze in depth issues such as the "here and now", the position of the Self, the value of freedom, relational paradigms and the importance of the audience.
MY PUBLIC STAGE
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Ioannis Karounis
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"My Public Stage" is not merely an artistic practice; it is a dynamic fusion of performance art and civic engagement that transcends conventional boundaries. At its core, this practice navigates the intricate relationship between the artist and the public sphere, offering an unconventional perspective on how art can reshape our understanding of the world.
The essential aspect of this artistic journey lies in the intentional placement of artistic interventions and performances within public spaces, where the encounter with viewers is not a predetermined spectacle but a meeting. This deliberate approach seeks to dissolve the traditional separation between the artist and the individual, fostering a unique connection that is spontaneous and genuine.
I view public space as not only a material but also a social environment that is produced, reshaped and restructured by the citizens through their experiences, their intentions for action and the relations they develop in it. My project draws on Lefebvre’s (2019) approach to urban public space not as a neutral container of social life, but as a fluid entity, both constructed and produced by social practices. Lefebvre’s approach confirms and expands my view that public space is not fixed, yet it requires a conscious effort to intervene in its production.
The philosophy driving "My Public Stage" aligns with the concept of civic engagement. By presenting long durational performances in the heart of everyday life, the artist consciously assumes the role of a creator, using performance art as a medium to unveil the interconnected elements that bridge art with life. This philosophy echoes the sentiment of Joseph Beuys, who believed that everyone is an artist, actively sculpting the intricate sculpture we call life.
In embracing the public sphere as its canvas, this practice transcends the conventional boundaries of art and daily reality. It becomes a catalyst for a different perspective on how individuals perceive and engage with their surroundings. The transformative power of performance art is harnessed to reveal the latent artistic potential within each person, emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between art and life.
Radically Tender Spaces
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Janne Schröder
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Young people practicing collective care as a performative strategy for the creation of alternative social imaginaries.
ReForm
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Ruchama Noorda
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This dissertation of Ruchama Noorda, together with the artworks documented in it, is the result of an investigation across multiple media over a seven-year period of the cultural, artistic and spiritual legacy of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lebensreform (Life Reform) movement.
In the course of this research Noorda situates this movement with its origins in Europe and its promotion of a back-to-nature lifestyle (health foods, sexual emancipation, rational dress/nudism, pantheism/syncretic New Age religions) in a long line of radical reform projects, that lead back to the Reformation and the Anabaptist rebellions in sixteenth-century Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. At the same time, Noorda links the passage to America of Lebensreform beliefs and practices to the rise of the hippy counter-culture in California and the global spread in the decades since the nineteen-sixties of today’s ecological, organic food and naturopathy / Wellness movements.
In both the dissertation and the series of artworks discussed within it, Noorda sets out to unravel and confront the complicated legacy of Theosophy and Anthroposophy, the holistic systems of belief that formed the spiritual backbone of the Lebensreform phenomenon. In the process Noorda probes the question of how it came to be, that an occult world view based on a synthesis of world religions could appeal equally to purist avant-garde proponents of abstraction such as Kandinsky and Mondriaan and to figurative painters and illustrators such as Fidus (Hugo Höppener) and Fritz Mackensen, whose work promoted an idealized ‘Aryan’ aesthetic in line with German National Socialist ideology. As such the present work forms part of the larger reappraisal currently under way among artists and scholars of the history of utopian counter-cultural thinking and alternative life-style experimentation in the West. Following in the footsteps of historians such as Peter Staudenmaier, Janet Biehl, and Susan A. Manning, Noorda argues that this reappraisal forces us to acknowledge the anti-rational esoteric roots of Modernism along with the progressive strands in Modernist thinking and practice, that tend to be foregrounded in most historical accounts. However the interest in this project as an artist is not conventionally historical or academic but rather personal and performative. And the way the arguments are made, for the most part through installations, drawings, sculptural objects, video works, artist statements and performances, bears little relation to the orderly modes of presentation and detached forms of analysis that mark traditional academic discourse. Instead, the project unfolded over time as a prolonged archaeological dig into two intersecting strata, the muddy history of the Lebensreform movement and the own formation as someone born into an anthroposophical/Reform Church household in Leiden. The tension between Progress (social engineering/the collaborative ideal) and ℞egression (back to nature/childhood/basics) dictates the rhythm of the dig.
The excavation metaphor gets literalized as Noorda moves closer to home, and in many of the artworks (Dutch) mud and compacted soil become the primary material: both the medium in which the inquiries are conducted and the consumable message/medicine dispensed at the door in pill-form to the departing exhibition visitor.
Van kunstwerk tot religieus ritueel : een onderzoek naar de integratie van performancekunst in de liturgie
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Stefan Belderbos
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This research of Stefan Belderbos focuses on a new field of artistic research in which a visual artist takes on the role of researcher. The main research question is whether performance art integrated in an ecumenical service, combined with artistic directions from the artist, can enhance the religious experience of those taking part in the church service. I set my research against theology and Ritual Studies by describing my ideal image of a liturgical service and by comparing this personal view with the viewpoints of several theologians. Furthermore I examined the theories of the psychology of religion to search for an description of the concept of religious experience.The artistic experiment I set up in order to answer my main research question comprised a set of church services with several integrated performances. In this research I counted, described and analysed a total number of seven religious experiences. From the description and analyses of the experiences it became clear that these were indeed brought about by the performance rituals in the church services.
Writing performance : on relations between texts and performances
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Lilo Nein
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In art history, performance is categorized as performance art and defined as live-act. However, performance is no longer conceived of by artists as live-act only. Rather, the art of producing performances, according to artists, also includes considerations of their documentation and mediatization. In these contexts a paratextual perspective would enable considering documentation practices as part of performance art, which would also mean to acknowledge that performance is a practice associated with other practices that go beyond the enactment or staging which precedes or follows it. It is my claim that the potential of performance in visual art lies exactly in this ability to divest itself of a stable medial identity. This is to say that performance does not only have the practical need, but also the general potential to connect itself with other media, such as texts and audiovisual records. I think that contemporary performances in visual art cannot be viewed as distinct from the intermedial and paratextual issues with which they are connected. They engage, intermingle and enter into reciprocal relationships with these issues. So, I propose to understand performances in and through their relations to texts.
Research by Lilo Nein
Las guerras púdicas
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Lorena Croceri
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In this exhibition I develop the concept of responsibility linked to performance art. Through the analysis of the performative installation Las guerras púdicas, I make an approach to the curated integration of fields: cultural practice of cooking, contemporary art, psychoanalysis, synoptic charts and language of war.
Writing as the Body
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Jonas Schnor
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In the beginning of March 2016 a delegation from the literary label KØTER travelled to the high school Nova Academy in the small Swedish town of Simrishamn. Their ambition was to conduct a didactic experiment concerning writing and sensuous presence.
The set and setting for this endeavour was the alternate dimension of Sisters Academy - a performative space for poetic and sensuous learning.
In order to conduct their experiment, Frederik Bjare and Jonas Schnor from KØTER followed the credo of Sisters Academy and manifested into poetic selves: The Vibrator and The Shepherd, respectively. In addition, these two beings were able to transform into the collective poetic self of The Mongrel. This multidimensional being carried a large stick on its shoulders, decorated with notebooks and ballpoint pens. For the first two days ofTthe Takeover it roamed the rooms and hallways of Sisters Academy and together with students and other staff members explored the state of lingual transcendence now known as poetic meditation.
The first part of the text introduces the reader to the performative dimension of Sisters Academy. The second and primary part tells the tale of The Mongrel's two day immersion into this strange and fantastic realm. At the same time, it reflects upon what these experiences can tell us about the relationship between life and aesthetic practice.
The tale is told from the perspective of The Shepherd, in close collaboration with The Vibrator (and, of course, these beings’ everyday counterparts, but it also, at times, soars into the perspective of The Mongrel. In this way the text reflects the actual experience of being at Sisters Academy, which oscillated between everyday self, poetic self and collective poetic self.
The students’ writings during the poetic meditations comprise the potent material from which the reflections draw their energy. Therefore, quotes from the notebooks play an important role in the narrative. When the notebook entries are from The Vibrator, The Shepherd or The Mongrel, and not the students, this is clearly indicated.
WILL TO POWER: Strategies for Bodily Subversion
(last edited: 2016)
author(s): arianna ferrari
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
My research focus on experimenting bodily strategies to subvert the hierarchical relationship between mind and body.
My aim is to activate a “short-circuit” between mind and body in order to achieve non intentional gestures performed by a completely autonomous body.
Starting form the fact that we identify ourselves with our mind, my main interest and broader goal is to dismantle this identification and consequently (trying to) remove the ”self" from the action and achieve a performance of the body as flesh.
Inspired by Peter Sloterdijk’s investigation dissecting Micro- and Macro- spherology in his trilogy Spheres, and by Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, the moving image project sin ∞ fin – The Movie by VestAndPage is based on various stages of research to conjugate performance art with filmmaking. Its final result consists of an art film trilogy produced along the course of three years in the following artist-in-residence programs: CONFL!CTA Contemporary Art and Science Research (Punta Arenas, Chile, 2010); Sarai CSDS Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies (New Delhi, India, 2011); Cultural Program of the DNA Dirección Nacional del Antártico (Antarctica / Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2012), and based on performances conceived site-specific.open exposition comments (0)
In the written part of my doctoral dissertation I am presenting the artistic works and set them in a larger context, which I have entitled immanent capitalism. This is an artistic research, where the art works, their processes or workshops produce knowledge, which will not be fully translatable to a written form. The artworks are performances, live-art projects and works on video. In the presentation of the context I am presenting the transformation that has taken place starting from the industrialism and modernism, and which have recently been incorporated with new forms of labour and economy.open exposition comments (0)
The exposition consists of 5 selected interviews given by VestAndPage on Performance art issues and their artistic activity: 1. For eBENT by Carlos Pina, 2009 2. For CIPAF by Karolina Lambrou, 2013 3. For IPA by Hatice Utkan, 2013 4. For VIVO/VOD by Jeremy Todd, 2014 5. For PERFORMANCE IS ALIVE by Quinn Dukes, 2015open exposition comments (0)
Complete and revised version in origin of the interview with performance artist duo VestAndPage by Valeria Romagnini with additional questions by Karlyn De Jong, partly published in Personal Structures, vol. II, 2013. The artists analyze in depth issues such as the "here and now", the position of the Self, the value of freedom, relational paradigms and the importance of the audience.open exposition comments (0)
In this exhibition I develop the concept of responsibility linked to performance art. Through the analysis of the performative installation Las guerras púdicas, I make an approach to the curated integration of fields: cultural practice of cooking, contemporary art, psychoanalysis, synoptic charts and language of war.open exposition comments (0)
My research focus on experimenting bodily strategies to subvert the hierarchical relationship between mind and body. My aim is to activate a “short-circuit” between mind and body in order to achieve non intentional gestures performed by a completely autonomous body. Starting form the fact that we identify ourselves with our mind, my main interest and broader goal is to dismantle this identification and consequently (trying to) remove the ”self" from the action and achieve a performance of the body as flesh.open exposition comments (0)