Volatile Life
(2025)
author(s): Ghazale Mohammadi Moqanaki
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
MA Artistic research,
Volatile Life is a thesis exploring the yearning for emancipation in an uncertain world, examined through puppet theatre. The thesis consists of four prologues that establish the context and motivations for the exploration. The prologues set clear objectives for the thesis, including storytelling as a means of disruption, theatre as a rehearsal for revolution, and reevaluating power dynamics in puppet theatre. Uncertainty serves as the driving force behind the investigation, with the play's structure embracing this uncertainty as a means of exploration.
Within the play, a powerful voice gradually emerges, engaging in a dialogue with a girl and transforming into moving shadows that morph between various objects. At the play's conclusion, the voice manifests as a physical head, engaging in a discourse about puppetry. This narrative concept draws inspiration from the Jinn mythology found in Islamic cultures. The Jinn initially manipulates humans through a voice in their heads, gradually gaining power and eventually revealing itself in physical forms when the humans surrender to its influence.
Taming Amorphalia
(2024)
author(s): Eszter Mag
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Taming Amorphalia is an experimental documentation of the intuitive processes behind/during the development of ProjectMorpheo – a Master’s Project at SKH. The research aims to further discover the fragile connections between dreams and the materials that surround us. Since ProjectMorpheo is a participatory event, Taming Amorphalia attempts to communicate the background of the research in a dialog-like, interactive way by using the form of a text based role play game.
The variational mode: three cases about documents, artworks and animation
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Riccardo Giacconi
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The artistic practice of Riccardo Giacconi deals with documents and, more specifically, with the use and the exploration of their narrative potential. This dissertation is about three different cycles of artworks Giacconi produced as part of the research project. The notion of animation inheres in each of the three case studies: – Case 1 focuses on my artworks about Simone Pianetti (1858-?), an Italian mass murderer who escaped and disappeared, and who then became a puppet character, animated as a stock character.– Case 2 focuses on Augusto Masetti (1888-1966), an Italian soldier who shot at his superior officer and declared not to remember having done it, as if in a state of ecstatic possession, as if animated by an external entity. Mainly using publications and workshops, Giacconi produced a series of artworks related to legal, medical and anarchist records on his case.– Case 3 follows the appearance of a puppet character in Colombia, el espiritado, and its supposed connections to the Masetti case. Giacconi describes a series of artistic works the author produced, starting from a puppet script about the self-destruction of a village, which can be read as a commentary on puppetry, anarchism and animation.