Grain: Mediator Between East and West
(2025)
author(s): Kateryna Tykhonenko
published in: Research Catalogue
"Grain: Mediator Between East and West" is an image-led, cross-temporal exploration of bread wheat as both a commodity and a metaphor. Drawing on its historical and practical ubiquity as a staple grain in agrarian (Eastern) Europe, wheat emerges as the focal medium through which cultural and geopolitical narratives are revealed. What narratives does bread wheat carry, and what is entangled within localised perspectives? To what extent does the cultural history of grain intersect with modern grain infrastructures, whereby wheat transforms from an elemental medium into a mediator between East and West? Through thinking with and about grain, this work interrogates the gaps, overlaps and resonances between East and West, the post-war Soviet 1940s and the present day, repositioning wheat as a cultural mediator.
This Master's project was conducted within the European Media Studies program at the University of Potsdam and University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, August 2025.
Dreams of Lands: Unlearning the Modern Heritage for a Resilient Tomorrow.
(2024)
author(s): Fanny Noel
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Fine Arts
Dreams of Lands weaves the author's personal heritage to the modern history of Europe in order to understand the current ecological crisis. Questioning the cultural European context in parallel to the native American cosmology, the author enhances the current dynamics of extraction and production that overshadow most of the urban dweller's life.
The research is followed by a gardening handbook for artists and the detailed process of the realisation of a garden in the Royal Academy of the Arts. Both are thought as concrete tools for changing the way we are being human in our world in crisis.