The Poem Johnson PhD Papers
(2026)
author(s): Marc Johnson
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
In the year 2088, the artist Poem Johnson dies at the age of 102. His estate bequeaths his artworks and papers to the Kamau Brathwaite Center for Research in Black Studies. The archive contains eleven artistic outputs spanning Jacquard-woven textiles, video installations, performance works, and an artist book.
This is the speculative framework of Marc Johnson's practice-based dissertation, which examines how artists from diasporic communities can shape archival custody and posthumous reception of their work before institutional stewardship begins. The future-oriented framing draws on Kamau Brathwaite's concept of tidalectics, a geopoetic model of history that combines Einsteinian non-linear time with Caribbean routes and roots. Brathwaite argues that diasporic histories cannot be traced to a single origin point. In the context of African diaspora, where displacement and forced migration fracture linear genealogies, identity and history move in tidal patterns across multiple shores and temporalities. This dissertation reimagines tidalectics through material practice, using the speculative structure to displace linear historiography, interrogate the politics of memory-making, and challenge the assumed stability and permanence of archival records.
The artworks trace a research journey of artistic experiments conducted between 2021 and 2026. The Sea is History (2024) is a series of Jacquard-woven textiles that engage the colonial legacies of industrial textile production and cotton economies while rendering the ocean as living archive. The loom's punch-card system is itself an early form of data storage, and becomes a site for counter-archival practice that reclaims colonial infrastructure to materialize suppressed narratives. Sun/Sum (2024) is a performance work developed through public rehearsals that privileges process over product, establishing rehearsal-as-research methodology where Afrodiasporic movement vocabularies circulate through iterative process rather than fixed performance scores. Riot/Uprising (2023) is a three-channel video installation that foregrounds the materiality of decaying footage from the 1971 Attica prison uprising, directing attention across screens through sound remixing.
Through speculative fabulation, the dissertation generates a post-custodial future: practical frameworks for how artists from diasporic and Indigenous communities can intervene in preservation systems before depositing materials into institutional care, shaping how their work will be encountered, interpreted, and activated by future researchers and communities.
ARKADIA
(2025)
author(s): Anne Skaansar
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
Med utgangspunkt i kunstneriske framstillinger av Arkadiamotivet, og med pastoralen som optikk, vil dette prosjektet utforske «utopiske» forestillinger om fortiden, gjennom arbeid i ulike kunstneriske uttrykksformer, i tekstil, skulptur og tekst.
A Terceira Mão/ The Third Hand
(2025)
author(s): Carolina Albuquerque
published in: Research Catalogue
Este ensaio tem como objetivo apresentar uma reflexão, em forma de registro de memórias sobre as experiências relacionadas à obra "Terceira Mão", tanto em seu aspecto simbólico quanto em sua materialidade. Esta investigação artística insere-se no contexto do doutoramento em Artes Plásticas na Universidade do Porto.
A primeira mão segura a matéria, o tocável
A segunda mão segura o espírito, o sensível
A terceira mão segura a todos nós, é o que todos temos em comum.
Segura eu, você e o outro, em uma rede de tafetá, ligados à terceira mão e a todos.
Os olhos ligam a percepção do material com o sensível espiritual.
Percepção simbólica visual.
Olhar para o interior.
Ver além do visível.
Toque etéreo.
Gesto de benção.
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This essay aims to reflect, in the form of a memoir, on the experiences related to the work Third Hand, both in its symbolic aspect and materiality. This artistic research is part of the context of my doctorate in Plastic Arts at the University of Porto.
The first hand holds matter, the tangible
The second hand holds the spirit, the sensitive
The third hand holds us all, it's what we have in common.
It holds me, you, and the other in a taffeta net, connected to the third hand and everyone.
The eyes connect the perception of the material with the sensitive spiritual.
Visual symbolic perception.
Looking inwards.
Seeing beyond the visible.
Ethereal touch.
A gesture of blessing.
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.
Textile Awareness
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): HANNA felting
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
To create positive Textile Awareness I will be researching the relationship and interaction of consumers with clothing and textiles.
With the intention to encourage people to recycle clothing and shop less.
Inspire people to think critically about their purchases and create awareness about the consequences of clothing choices for the environment.
I want to make a joint impact so that clothing and textiles are no longer treated as waste products. More than half of old textiles in the Netherlands are not recycled but thrown out with the garbage. And thus into the incinerator.
Global warming is perhaps the greatest challenge of our time. What can the consumer change in his behavior towards clothing and textiles? That is the question that concerns me.
Med utgangspunkt i kunstneriske framstillinger av Arkadiamotivet, og med pastoralen som optikk, vil dette prosjektet utforske «utopiske» forestillinger om fortiden, gjennom arbeid i ulike kunstneriske uttrykksformer, i tekstil, skulptur og tekst.open exposition comments (0)
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.open exposition comments (0)
To create positive Textile Awareness I will be researching the relationship and interaction of consumers with clothing and textiles. With the intention to encourage people to recycle clothing and shop less. Inspire people to think critically about their purchases and create awareness about the consequences of clothing choices for the environment. I want to make a joint impact so that clothing and textiles are no longer treated as waste products. More than half of old textiles in the Netherlands are not recycled but thrown out with the garbage. And thus into the incinerator. Global warming is perhaps the greatest challenge of our time. What can the consumer change in his behavior towards clothing and textiles? That is the question that concerns me.open exposition comments (0)