Sigilos de amor e de Chagas/Sigils of Love and Sores
(2025)
author(s): Carolina Albuquerque
published in: Research Catalogue
O presente ensaio visa fomentar uma discussão acerca da intersecção entre a arte, a espiritualidade e a imigração, temas que se revelam notórios nas expressões culturais contemporâneas sociais e pessoais. Mais concretamente, analisa-se a forma como a artista navega na sua identidade e experiência, abordando questões sociais e reflexões pessoais sobre a experiência do imigrante.
Os elementos contidos nesta obra incluem peças de alumínio gravadas com sigilos de amor e mãos de cerâmica com olhos nas palmas. Os olhos remetem para a Mão de Fátima, um símbolo de proteção, mas as mãos também evocam as chagas em pessoas de cor, sugerindo um vínculo com experiências históricas de dor e sofrimento. Ao evidenciar as cicatrizes de pessoas que realmente viveram essas feridas, esta obra incorpora uma dimensão de memória e resistência.
Este ensaio é um registo de histórias e memórias pessoais na produção artística, inserido na investigação do doutoramento em Artes Plásticas da Universidade do Porto.
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The present essay seeks to stimulate a discourse on the confluence of art, spirituality and immigration, themes that have become increasingly prevalent in contemporary cultural expressions, both social and personal. Specifically, it will analyse how the artist navigates her identity and experience, addressing social issues and personal reflections on the immigrant experience.
The elements of the installation include aluminium pieces engraved with love sigils and ceramic hands with eyes in their palms. The eyes refer to the hand of Fatima, a symbol of protection, but the hands also evoke the wounds on the hands of people of colour, suggesting a link with historical experiences of pain and suffering. By highlighting the scars of people who have actually experienced these wounds, this work incorporates a dimension of memory and resistance.
This essay is a register of personal stories and memories in artistic production, as part of the research for a PhD in Plastic Arts at the University of Porto.
Migration and Listening: Political Life in Motion
(2023)
author(s): Ximena Alarcón and Ed McKeon
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Boundaries, thresholds, and limits characterise both political geography and the politics of voice and listening. The effect of hearing yourself speak, as Derrida noted, is foundational for sovereignty, self-identity, and relations to others. In this conversation, we explore experiences of border crossings and passing across limits through migration and movement alongside corresponding encounters with Deep Listening. Alarcón reflects on her experience of migration from Colombia to the UK and how this also involves ‘speaking and travelling in-between different languages’. McKeon draws on experience of ‘losing’ his accent, the voice’s marker of political identity. For both of us, Deep Listening has become an essential resource to forgo the desires of returning ‘home’ or arrival with their visa privileges and passports of legitimised status. Migration and movement are instead embraced for their potential to constitute another practice of centring and of balance without fixed and immovable boundaries. We aim to articulate this politics of listening and voice not through conventions of debate and polemics, defending ideological territories, but through exchange in dialogue, in what passes in the movement between us.
Talking Transformations: Home on the Move
(2022)
author(s): Ricarda Vidal, Manuela Perteghella
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition comprises an online version of a travelling exhibition which was curated by Manuela Perteghella and Ricarda Vidal in 2018/19 as a direct outcome of our collaborative Arts-Council-funded project "Talking Transformations: Home on the Move".
The online exhibition charts the journeys of two poems about "home" around Europe and the transformations they underwent as they were translated through different languages and into film.
Initiated as a response to Brexit, the poetic journeys focused on the EU countries most important to migration into and out of the UK—for migration to the UK, Romania and Poland; for migration from the UK, France and Spain.
The online exhibition invites viewers to listen to the poets and translators recite their literary versions and to watch the artists' filmic interpretations. It also includes recordings of translations made by Ricarda and Manuela in response to the the multiple versions of the initial source poems. The exposition concludes with a section dedicated to reflections about the project by some of the people who took part in it.
Methods of relations
(2021)
author(s): Marina Grzinic
published in: Research Catalogue
This is the presentation of rethinking conceptually, politically, and ideologically the conditions of the re/production of life, art, and culture in the social and political space in the present moment of neoliberal global capitalism. It is also the basic condition of how society's social and political, machine, and technological layers function.
Body Hegemonies 2017: An Experimental Transfer
(2021)
author(s): Monica Clare van der Haagen-Wulff, Michael Lazar, Fabian Chyle
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Body Hegemonies is an artistic project aimed at exploring and making transparent some of the themes of epistemic violence and hegemonic orders resulting from the legacy of colonialism and slavery, as the hidden flip-side of modernity and enlightenment. Our aim was to examine the Eurocentric logic of dehumanization and processes of exclusion from the perspective of bodies and their embeddedness within these hegemonic structures. The goal was to use artistic methods as tools to research topics commonly examined within an academic framework. The project focused on aspects of bodies that have been/are being excluded or made invisible within contemporary and historical discourses. “Body Hegemonies” worked on the trans-disciplinary interface (entanglement) of theorists, performers and everyday practitioners (experts), in an attempt to make possible other forms of knowing and knowledge production. Specifically, we tried to performatively re-inscribe the historically erased body within the production of knowledge. To engage with and explore these questions, a one-week laboratory was held in which six artists/(social)scientists gathered in a secluded location near Cologne Germany to hold video conversations with international experts over three days on the topics mentioned above. Resulting from these conversations, the Cologne participants presented individual performative responses to the group, which in turn were worked into a “performative score” presented to the public on the last day of the laboratory. This was flanked by a mini-symposium with two international scholars on the topic of body-hegemonies to expand the discursive field within which to locate and understand the artistic explorations.
Between plant fossils and oral histories: tracing vegetal imaginaries from Donbas, Ukraine
(2021)
author(s): Darya Tsymbalyuk
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition brings together multiple contexts, narratives and modes of expression to tell multispecies (hi)stories about and from Donbas region, Ukraine, where a military conflict broke out in 2014. By engaging with fossils, paleobotany and testimonies of internally displaced persons, the exposition explores vegetal imaginaries of the region in a series of drawings and questions stories we tell about Donbas and displacement, and ways in which we tell them.
Stop and go: nodes of transformation and transition
(2017)
author(s): Michael Zinganel, Michael Hieslmair
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Stop and Go is a research project investigating physical and social transformation at nodes and hubs of transnational mobility and migration alongside major pan-European road corridors in a geographic triangle between Vienna, Tallinn, and the Bulgarian-Turkish border. It draws on intensive embedded field trips with a mobile lab (a Ford Transit van) using (deep) mapping, workshops, installations, and exhibitions both on tour and in a stationary work space in a Vienna logistics hub (a former railway station). Intermediate and final results have been represented in diagrammatic drawings, maps, and (animated) graphic novels.
Haunted by last season's video letters: amateur films performing spectrality
(2017)
author(s): Lisa Stuckey
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This is an assemblage using the film 'Four Siblings' as a basis to reflect on the notion of the artist as analyst in connection with amateurish practices. These are positioned as performative, as they co-create the family system. The video letters, shot on 8 mm and Super 8 films, were sent from my grandmother, who had emigrated to the United States after the Austrian State Treaty in 1955, to my great-grandmother, in Vienna, where the films were developed and watched. During that time three-quarters of all amateur film-makers were men. In the course of 'Four Siblings' the beautiful images are contrasted with issues of violence, rivalry, and ambivalence.
'Haunted by last season’s video letters: amateur films performing spectrality' is an attempt poetically to map non-linear memory. Spectrality, in its simultaneous presence and absence, is introduced to film media as soon as an archive is set up.
HOME
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Vera Boitcova
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
HOME is part of Vera Boitcova’s ongoing doctoral artistic research that explores the notions of home and belonging within queer migrant dramaturgies. Expanding this inquiry, Boitcova brought together four queer migrant artists currently based in Helsinki to reflect on themes of displacement, absence/presence, and the complex meanings of belonging.
The project consisted of four workshops designed by Boitcova to methodologically experiment with the languages of queer migrant dramaturgy. These workshops aimed to create a space for collaborative experimentation and exploration, where participants could test how personal practices and lived experiences might be translated into shared, performative forms. The sessions also facilitated the discussion of artistic methods and ideas related to home and belonging among fellow queer migrant artists in Finland. The participating artists were selected through an open call posted by Boitcova in March 2025, with selection criteria emphasizing the specific focus of the project (exclusively for queer migrant artists) as well as the artistic merit of the applicants.
The outcome of the workshop series was the creation of five individual, site-specific, performance-based works presented on Suomenlinna Island in and around HIAP Gallery in June 2025. Each piece responded not only to the physical and symbolic context of the island but also acted as a form of cultural translation, transforming personal and collective experiences of displacement, identity, and belonging into performative language. The second outcome was participation in a group exhibition at the same gallery titled Unfolding Island Ecologies, which featured video documentation from the creative processes behind each artist’s work.
This exposition presents materials created and collected during the workshops leading up to creation of the performances. It documents the ongoing effort to develop a performative language capable of expressing queer migrant narratives centered around the concept of home. It attempts to capture dramaturgical methodologies-in-progress and the process of translation of personal artistic practices into shared experiences. The exposition is structured into five sections: brainstorming exercises, workshop designs, artistic tasks, writing prompts, and reflective texts. Each section was designed to highlight different methodological aspects of the process and to offer multiple perspectives on this exploration.
Human Migration
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Inger Eilersen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The project’s ambition is to develop methods for text development and staging strategies to put the performing arts in dialogue with the scientific fields and contribute to current issues in society. The specific topic is HUMAN MIGRATION
Through an artistic study, migrants’ personal stories are juxtaposed with DNA research and relevant philosophical texts.
We will convert the results of these studies into stories with site-specific, visual stagings.
This exposition brings together multiple contexts, narratives and modes of expression to tell multispecies (hi)stories about and from Donbas region, Ukraine, where a military conflict broke out in 2014. By engaging with fossils, paleobotany and testimonies of internally displaced persons, the exposition explores vegetal imaginaries of the region in a series of drawings and questions stories we tell about Donbas and displacement, and ways in which we tell them.open exposition comments (0)
Stop and Go is a research project investigating physical and social transformation at nodes and hubs of transnational mobility and migration alongside major pan-European road corridors in a geographic triangle between Vienna, Tallinn, and the Bulgarian-Turkish border. It draws on intensive embedded field trips with a mobile lab (a Ford Transit van) using (deep) mapping, workshops, installations, and exhibitions both on tour and in a stationary work space in a Vienna logistics hub (a former railway station). Intermediate and final results have been represented in diagrammatic drawings, maps, and (animated) graphic novels.open exposition comments (1)
The project’s ambition is to develop methods for text development and staging strategies to put the performing arts in dialogue with the scientific fields and contribute to current issues in society. The specific topic is HUMAN MIGRATION Through an artistic study, migrants’ personal stories are juxtaposed with DNA research and relevant philosophical texts. We will convert the results of these studies into stories with site-specific, visual stagings.open exposition comments (0)