IMAGINING LIBERATION
(2024)
author(s): Dalia Al Kury
published in: University of Inland Norway
Imagining Liberation is an artistic research project with the aim of investigating methods in speculative nonfiction. This project begins with a question: What kind of cinematic images can arise from imagining a liberated Palestine? Dalia AlKury’s interest in staging simulated pasts in her earlier documentaries and then staging speculations of futures during her PhD research stems from a deep frustration with the lack of art imagining a world that she hopes is possible. Both practices—staging in documentary and speculative fiction—are rooted in posing the question “What if?,” to offer another possible world or narrative. Her work combines these approaches in the realization of her own method in speculative multitemporal nonfiction. Dalia AlKury approaches documentary filmmaking not as a way of documenting reality, but as a way of constructing an alternative one. Her final artistic results are informed by a long legacy of politically poetic Palestinian aesthetics and by grievances over the historical and present day witnessing of the violent ethnic cleansing of her people.
By committing to framing her vignettes in a fictional liberated Palestine, an emancipatory art making process starts to take shape. The process excavates an often-oppressed critical rage and pushes it up to the surface through different narrative tools. Imagining Liberation traces the filmmaker's confrontational journey while experimenting with staging, subverting, futuring, abstracting, and decolonizing to reach a type of catharsis in the face of a continuously fragmented diasporic existence.
By staging her own return to a liberated Palestine in different modes from writing to filming, Dalia AlKury runs into ethical dilemmas questioning her self-censorship, representation of “others” and the elusive role of cinematic catharsis. This book encompasses her critical reflection on the short films , narrative experiments and video diaries created throughout her research. The three main audio-visual works that will be shared and analyzed are Congratulations on Your Return, Levitations, and What if a Tree, What if a Crow?
SUPER(IM)POSITIONS: Subverting Melodramatic Representation Through Personal Unpredictability
(2024)
author(s): Emilio Santoyo
published in: Research Catalogue
This Artistic Research in and through cinema explores the possibilities of using outdated melodramatic elements of cinematic representation in a new way, dissolving the intersection between the personal and the fictional as a tool for creating a redemptive act of filmmaking. "Super (im) positions: Subverting melodramatic representation through personal unpredictability" delves into the transformative potential of these elements within cinematic representation. By dissolving the boundaries between the personal and the fictional, this work engages in a redemptive act of filmmaking that reimagines melodrama. The approach employs a contemporary, polyphonic, and playful film language to propose a new form of melodrama—one that acknowledges its inherent perversity to challenge and deconstruct its toxic narratives.
Rooted in the pervasive influence of telenovelas and melodrama, particularly within Mexican culture, this exploration questions and critiques the genre's impact on cultural and individual perceptions of love and relationships. The research was catalysed by a significant personal and professional rupture, leading to a critical examination of the genre's conventions.
By employing a contemporary, polyphonic, and playful film language, Santoyo reimagines melodrama as a genre capable of portraying complex, personal emotions and generating critical, boundary-pushing narratives. This self-reflective genre deviation, temporarily termed the "New Melodrama," seeks to subvert traditional melodramatic tropes by acknowledging and confronting their perverse nature. Through this approach, Santoyo aims to dismantle the toxic knowledge perpetuated by conventional melodrama, offering a sophisticated and nuanced critique from within the genre itself. His work presents a trojan horse strategy, using the familiar systems of melodramatic representation to question and ultimately transform them, proposing a relevant and self-aware cinematic experience.
Through innovative use of superimpositions and a deliberate deconstruction of melodramatic mise-en-scène, this study aims to create a critical and self-reflective genre deviation termed "New Melodrama." This method seeks to subvert traditional cinematic conventions by integrating multiple perspectives and temporalities, fostering a richer, more complex narrative experience. Ultimately, the research stands as a trojan horse within the film industry, using the very mechanics of melodrama to critique and reinvent it, offering a fresh, introspective take on a genre often dismissed as superficial.
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.
Staged Conversations Using dialogue as both method and form when staging documentary material for theater and film
(2024)
author(s): Marcus Lindeen
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
Between 2017 and 2024, I have conducted an artistic research PhD project at Stockholm University of the Arts resulting in a feature length documentary film (The Raft, 2018), a documentary based theater play (The Invisible Adventure, 2020) and a book with his work diaries documenting the process of creating the two works (Staged conversations, 2024). The research project focuses on using the conversation as both method and form for staging documentary material for theater and film.
The Raft reunites seven people who were all part of a social experiment crossing the Atlantic on a raft in 1973. The film mixes archive footage from the original journey with scenes shot in a studio, where participants share memories onboard a scenographic replica of the real raft.
In The Invisible Adventure three characters – a scientist, a video artist and a transplantation patient – meet for an intimate conversation on identity and transformation. The performers who interpret the characters through repeating dialogue from a sound script in hidden ear-pieces, sit together with the audience members in a circular scenography, where there is no separation between stage and audience seats.
Both the film and the play are using the staged conversation as a shape for the storytelling and share similarities in their visual expression with wooden scenographies set in a black box studio environment. In the film it is the real people from the raft journey who reunite 43 years later in the studio. In the play the script is based on three separate interviews with people who have never met, but who are interpreted by performers.
The research project will be finished and presented publicly in January 2024. The film and play will be presented together with the release of the book at Gothenburg International Film Festival in collaboration with Gothenburg City Theater.
Darkness as material - PhD project - 2023
(2023)
author(s): Mia Engberg
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The doctoral project Darkness as Material, examines darkness as material and its relationship to cinematic storytelling. The study addresses different kinds of darkness: darkness in the image, darkness in the cinema theatre, darkness in the spectator where films are received and the darkness in the filmmaker, where the world is reflected and ideas are born. The project is inspired by Marguerite Duras' idea to kill cinema, and it explores film's potential to approach the place she described as 'the dark room, where we are deaf and blind and passion is possible'.
voice under
(2023)
author(s): Ester Martin Bergsmark
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
If voice over is the superior voice that dictates truth, I examine voice under, the other truths that take place simultaneously. In my doctoral thesis voice under, I explore all the parallel voices beyond the dominating all-knowing voice over. The intention of the project and concept voice under is to open up a wider sensory register in both the creation and the experience of film. By looking closely at, challenging, and playing with different cinematic conventions, I explore how we can recreate seemingly dominant expressions and find spaces for resistance, although temporary.
This document outlines the different modes of publication of the doctoral thesis voice under. voice under consists of two branches: film and text. The Documented Artistic Research Project (Doctoral Thesis) voice under will be made public and archived on September 1, 2023, through the following three materials:
1. Welcome to voice under folder
2. Performative contemplative film screening
3. The book voice under, consisting of a collection of texts
The Visual Silence
(2020)
author(s): Mia Engberg
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The Visual Silence explores a cinematic aesthetic that approaches silence and darkness and challenges the voyeuristic tradition of cinema. It is a cinematic form that is situated in the gap between what is projected and what is perceived, between the impression of the ear and that of the eye. The Visual Silence examines the possibility of new perspectives through the deconstruction of the image and also through a critical examination of patriarchal, excluding and exhausting methods in the traditions of filmmaking. The research project resulted in the feature film Lucky One that premiered 2019.
If film is a language, can birds make movies? An essay and two heretical descriptive systems
(2017)
author(s): Tim Ridlen
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The work presented here uses the analogy of artists as talking birds and draws on research from cognitive ethology, linguistics, and film studies to ask, what kind of knowledge does art produce? Drawn diagrams and short structural videos illustrate but perhaps complicate or even obfuscate various parts of the text. The starting point is a 1966 film by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 'The Hawks and the Sparrows', alongside his essay published with the script, 'The Cinema of Poetry'. That text made a compelling argument about the nature of cinematic language, while his film imagined a world in which birds could speak. This essay – made up of text, drawn diagrams, and short video loops – takes the next logical step and asks, can birds make movies? The question is left unanswered, at least explicitly, and remains a figure or stand in for artistic forms of knowledge, research, and thought. This essay may not be of interest to those studying linguistics, cognitive ethology, or film history in earnest, but rather to those interested in visual forms of knowledge production and communication, humanistic explorations of the natural sciences, and the history of ideas.
This presentation is the first of a three-part series titled 'The Artist’s Field Library', an arrangement of essays and source materials that explore the mutually transformative relationship between art and the university. The second essay in the series deals with academic institutions as the site of artistic and political practices, as well as what stands to be won or lost, and the third deals with critical pedagogy.
One Motorbike, One Arm, Two Cameras
(2015)
author(s): Ainara Elgoibar
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The idea of creating a video work exploring the question of how an industrial robotic arm would see a handmade product is used as a pretext to generate a meeting point for different local agents in the framework of the production of an art project titled 'Rodar y Rodear' ('To Shoot and to Surround') (2013).
The heirs of a post-civil war motorbike manufacturer (MYMSA) and the Barcelona Fab-Lab found it interesting to take part in the production of this artistic project, which is a film event built on the idea of dislocation in the common uses of its leading actors: a motorbike restored as a museum piece and an industrial robotic arm programmed to produce the image of something that was fabricated with a pre-robotic sensitivity.
This exposition explores the connections that arise between production processes in commercial cinema and the automotive industry, and the capacity that artistic research has to create a singular and significant space for mutual exploration.
IMAGINING PALESTINIAN LIBERATION
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Dalia Al Kury
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Note: This is a modified version of the official PhD published outcome and reflections.
Imagining Liberation is an artistic research project with the aim of investigating methods in speculative nonfiction. This project begins with a question: What kind of cinematic images can arise from imagining a liberated Palestine? Dalia AlKury’s interest in staging simulated pasts in her earlier documentaries and then staging speculations of futures during her PhD research stems from a deep frustration with the lack of art imagining a world that she hopes is possible. Both practices—staging in documentary and speculative fiction—are rooted in posing the question “What if?,” to offer another possible world or narrative. Her work combines these approaches in the realization of her own method in speculative multitemporal nonfiction. Dalia AlKury approaches documentary filmmaking not as a way of documenting reality, but as a way of constructing an alternative one. Her final artistic results are informed by a long legacy of politically poetic Palestinian aesthetics and by grievances over the historical and present day witnessing of the violent ethnic cleansing of her people.
By committing to framing her vignettes in a fictional liberated Palestine, an emancipatory art making process starts to take shape. The process excavates an often-oppressed critical rage and pushes it up to the surface through different narrative tools. Imagining Liberation traces the filmmaker's confrontational journey while experimenting with staging, subverting, futuring, abstracting, and decolonizing to reach a type of catharsis in the face of a continuously fragmented diasporic existence.
By staging her own return to a liberated Palestine in different modes from writing to filming, Dalia AlKury runs into ethical dilemmas questioning her self-censorship, representation of “others” and the elusive role of cinematic catharsis. This book encompasses her critical reflection on the short films , narrative experiments and video diaries created throughout her research. The three main audio-visual works that will be shared and analyzed are Congratulations on Your Return, Levitations, and What if a Tree, What if a Crow?
Jorge Alvaro's academic and research space
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Jorge Alvaro Manzano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The essence of the video essay is to transfer the energy of the chosen audiovisual pieces to a new language. It aims to focus the viewer on a detail, a concept that articulates part of the narrative. In this series, different proposals converge to emphasize some relevant aspects of each selection.
The articles allow me to investigate and reflect on the topics I photograph or film, deepening and discussing my research with other authors
ARCHE-FOSSIL
(last edited: 2015)
author(s): Catarina Patrício
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Arche-fossil is a series of drawings presented in the exhibition «The Rest and the Gesture» a project which seeks to strengthen the contemporary reception of the World Heritage Site of Palaeolithic Art of the Côa Valley in Portugal.
Apparently separated, there exists a reunifying invisible line from stone to paper, from the engravings to the drawings, as if the engravings had freed themselves from the pre-cinematic stone and began moving, as if expanding its protocinematic essence.
The doctoral project Darkness as Material, examines darkness as material and its relationship to cinematic storytelling. The study addresses different kinds of darkness: darkness in the image, darkness in the cinema theatre, darkness in the spectator where films are received and the darkness in the filmmaker, where the world is reflected and ideas are born. The project is inspired by Marguerite Duras' idea to kill cinema, and it explores film's potential to approach the place she described as 'the dark room, where we are deaf and blind and passion is possible'.open exposition comments (0)
The Visual Silence explores a cinematic aesthetic that approaches silence and darkness and challenges the voyeuristic tradition of cinema. It is a cinematic form that is situated in the gap between what is projected and what is perceived, between the impression of the ear and that of the eye. The Visual Silence examines the possibility of new perspectives through the deconstruction of the image and also through a critical examination of patriarchal, excluding and exhausting methods in the traditions of filmmaking. The research project resulted in the feature film Lucky One that premiered 2019.open exposition comments (0)
The essence of the video essay is to transfer the energy of the chosen audiovisual pieces to a new language. It aims to focus the viewer on a detail, a concept that articulates part of the narrative. In this series, different proposals converge to emphasize some relevant aspects of each selection. The articles allow me to investigate and reflect on the topics I photograph or film, deepening and discussing my research with other authorsopen exposition comments (0)
Arche-fossil is a series of drawings presented in the exhibition «The Rest and the Gesture» a project which seeks to strengthen the contemporary reception of the World Heritage Site of Palaeolithic Art of the Côa Valley in Portugal. Apparently separated, there exists a reunifying invisible line from stone to paper, from the engravings to the drawings, as if the engravings had freed themselves from the pre-cinematic stone and began moving, as if expanding its protocinematic essence.open exposition comments (0)