at the end of the sentence, it rotted
(2024)
author(s): Cecilie Fang Jensen
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
at the end of the sentence, it rotted gathers written words and photos exploring how language is not purely about communication, but a medium of revealing hierarchy of bodies, as we assign and circulate signs to bodies - none of which are neutral.
Moving between auto-theoretical poetry and essays on 104 pages, I write with an I using language to explore language itself from within; appropriating how words are never innocent, when the languages we speak are the ones with political value.
This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything
(2020)
author(s): Stacey Sacks
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything is a documented artistic research project (Doctoral Thesis) in Performative and Mediated Practices, comprising a series of excavations and vivisections of W(w)hiteness through clowning, making and thinging. This work/play traverses the fields of critical whiteness studies, performance and clowning, visual and cultural anthropology and decolonial critique.
This eclectic mash-up of history, memory and trauma unfolds from my original question: as an actor, which bodies is it appropriate for me to inhabit? Via hyper-disciplinary experiments of the impulse and
what it means to be ‘on’ the moment, the research fabricates a series of clowters, performed entanglements of clown and character passing between various continents, temporalities and situated histories.
SQUIRM is the title given to both the final performance essay as well as to the reflective documentation emerging from this research. As experimentations with auto-ethnography and productive discomfort, the performing essays in SQUIRM document, animate and satirise explorations of W(w)hiteness, privilege and colonial logic. At the intersections of histories, they dig through remnants of collective memory, personal genealogy and shame, in the hope of reassembling new, sharper ways of giving and receiving attention.
From inside the body of this performer SQUIRM is about TONGUE-ING, about licking the future into softness by reinvigorating ancient clown practices to poke at whiteness in the current age. It’s about squirming and laughing through the discomfort of privilege in what feels like a crumbling time.
But mostly it’s about feeling great in a beard.
Recuerditos de Cuba
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Anabel Pérez Lubián
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
BA Fine Arts.
This thesis explores the intersections of tourism, memory and visual culture through a decolonial lens, using personal photographs and lived experience as the primary site of inquiry. Centered on the context of Cuba, the work interrogates the postcard as both a material object and a colonial modern artifact, tracing how the tourist, particularly the white, gaze commodifies La Habana's histories, spaces and bodies. The project unfolds through the author’s own diasporic return to Cuba, structured around a series of photographs taken at the age of eight. These images, constituent of a family archive, anchor the narrative and serve as points of entry into the layered relationships between personal memory and colonial visual regimes. Throughout the book, the research brings forth the archival materials that inform the knowledge the author stands upon. The materials that shape memory, and memory itself as knowledge. Drawing on the flat, affective style of Annie Ernaux’s écriture plate, the thesis adopts a third person narrative voice to perform close readings of these childhood images, allowing the memory of a child to guide the inquiry. Rather than reproduce the vistas of La Habana Vieja, which Rolando Vázquez critiques as visual regimes that sustain the colonial difference, the work turns inward, toward domestic interiors and overlooked everyday scenes as potential sites of resistance. Ultimately, the thesis proposes a situated decolonial aesthetic practice grounded in embodied memory, affective inheritance and visual testimony.
EXPANDING PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY THROUGH PRISON MUSIC MAKING
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Iiris Johanna Elisabet Tarnanen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This research examines how the experience of working with prisoners might expand a musician’s understandings of their professional responsibility. It is an autoethnographic (Ellis & Bochner, 2000), arts-based (Leavy, 2017), examination of a musician-facilitator’s experience in a prison art project in Finland with 4 male prisoners and a group of artists. It consists of a literature review on community music and music making in prisons, a reflexive thematic analysis of the content of diary entries, poetry, and compositions, and final conclusions.
The research strengthens earlier findings that community art projects may expand the art facilitator’s understandings of professional responsibility (Solbrekke & Sugrue, 2011; Sutela et al, 2022) and direct the artist-facilitator to be more involved with their diverse local others (Bartleet & Higgins, 2018). Even though it can be argued whether community art is necessarily enhancing participants’ lives (Baker, 2021; Aakala, 2018), I explore how working with prisoners pushed my professional responsibility in a direction that is valuable for society which needs art professionals who can work in diverse environments (Sutela et al, 2022). Overall, this research contributes to wider discussions on community music and its role, impacts, ethical complexities, possibilities, and challenges in the prison environment.
A homage to my beloved Yuriy Kuchiev – A tale on neurodiversity, repetition and novelty
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Francisco Beltrame Trento
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This text approaches the author’s summer encounter with MT Yuriy Kuchiev, an icebreaker tanker built in Helsinki shipyard and delivered in fall 2019. The researcher investigates how their entanglement with a "hyperobject”, and other non-human entities produced an event of “oddification” (Borja, 2019) in the quotidian life, by relating them with their non-neurotypical subjectivity. The article outlines the neurotypical norms that convention repetition and echolalia to the incapability of producing novelty. The analysed sources of data are pictures, fieldnotes and instant messaging transcripts.
at the end of the sentence, it rotted gathers written words and photos exploring how language is not purely about communication, but a medium of revealing hierarchy of bodies, as we assign and circulate signs to bodies - none of which are neutral. Moving between auto-theoretical poetry and essays on 104 pages, I write with an I using language to explore language itself from within; appropriating how words are never innocent, when the languages we speak are the ones with political value.open exposition comments (0)