Rubberneckers
(2025)
author(s): Joana Dos Santos Almeida
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Fine Arts
This Thesis is comprised of a series of chapters, which combine personal observations and analysis of existing theory and literature regarding the concept of trauma within the artistic context.
Throughout the text, I explore the choices and intuitive origins of the artistic practice with reference to my own experiences and connect them to my interest in the
traumatic.
Using Griselda Pollock’s writings on Trauma and art as a foundation, I explore the theoretical sides of trauma and how it operates, specifically that of psychoanalytical, scientific and philosophical texts. I aim to weave connections between the act of observation inherent to the artistic practice and the same spectacle associated with violent subject matter. This becomes the basis for the development of what I call, the ‘traumatic method’, which involves my ongoing research into this relationship.
Questions of affect and embodiment become key components of this thesis in regards to the function of using trauma as a conceptual starting point during the artistic process. Specifically the importance of re-enactment and treating the traumatic as a medium within itself rather than simply
subject matter.
GRAPHIC NOVEL CLANDESTINE JOURNAL
(2022)
author(s): ANARTIST
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The article describes, with a self-ethnographic position, the limit and potentiality of an "art of subjectivity" carried out by an a-modal "stranger" thrown into a foreigner country with abstract rationalist features that obstacle the immanent becoming(s) and repress the excess of a practice of interventions that is necessary to shape an uncoded "ethico-aesthetic territory". In this context of extinction the writer of the article, who is also the protagonist of the described art practice, presents the necessity of a new clandestine media for his art research publishing. After a brief outline of a Deleuzian theory of the media, he reveals and presents his project that consists of a "graphic novel clandestine journal". This "graphic novel style form" suits well to his practice of disruptive interventions in public space and the character-avatar "Anartist", which is the mask performed by the writer in its critical urban interventions. The "author" writes that our hyper-capitalist reality is already a form of dystopian graphic novel. For this reason the portrait of his action as a "graphic novel" is a form of realism and an aesthetic strategy to deal with it.