Sustainability in Performing Arts Production
(2024)
author(s): Johanna Garpe, Camilla Damkjaer, Markus Granqvist, Gunilla Pettersson Thafvelin, Anna Ljungqvist, Anders Larsson, Synne Behrndt, Mihra Lindblom, Anja Susa, Anders Aare, Anders Duus, Jon Refsdal Moe
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The purpose of this project is to explore how we can minimize the climate impact through the way we plan, produce, and support performing arts productions.
The overarching research question was: How can we continue to create relevant and innovative performing arts with a smaller climate impact?
The faculty in performing arts at Stockholm University of the Arts worked with Harry Martinson's Aniara from their various disciplines.
HOW LITTLE IS ENOUGH? Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters.
(2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition is an artistic PhD thesis and contains research outputs in three categories, Performance Archive, Research Publications and Method Development tied together by an essay.
I.Essay:
Testimony of a Pilgrim.
II.Performance Archive:
No Show - exposition.
Island - exposition.
Strings - exposition.
Pleased to Meet You - exposition.
III.Research Publications:
Porous and Embracing Dramaturgy for Transformative Encounters - video article.
A Quest for Existential Sustainability - video article.
Transformative Encounters - podcast series.
IV.Method Development:
ME-THOD.
How-little-is-enough-approach.
Abstract
At the core of this artistic doctoral thesis are four performance projects designed to counter the consumer-driven nature of contemporary performance-making while also addressing the need to develop sustainable methods of performance. Guided by the question: how to construct sustainable methods of performance for transformative encounters? the inquiry transcends the different layers of performance-making to explore the potential of performance as a catalyst for societal change.
As a part of the Agenda 2030 Graduate School, an interdisciplinary research initiative at Lund University, the project focuses on existential sustainability and investigates how performance can enhance participants' sense of meaning and motivation for adopting sustainable lifestyles and increasing sustainable awareness.
The thesis output is presented in three categories; a performance archive documenting, detailing and analysing the performances and their impact; research publications, disseminating findings and key concepts through different public formats; and method development accounting for the methodological approaches that have emerged through the process.
The four performance works of this artistic research are: No Show (2020), Island (2020), Strings (2022), and Pleased to Meet You (2022/2023).
The three publications of the project are: How Little is Enough? Embracing and Porous Dramaturgies for Transformative Encounters, a video article; How Little is Enough? A Quest for Existential Sustainability, a video article; and the podcast series Transformative Encounters.
Utilizing Me-thod, a pluralistic situated methodology grounded in the artist´s personal background and skillset, together with the how-little-is-enough approach, which minimizes production and focuses on essential needs, the project has collected insights into how performative encounters can initiate transformation in participants and foster connections to the world around them, thereby enhancing existential sustainability and nurturing care for the environment. Through repeated cycles of action-based artistic research, employing qualitative materials and autoethnographical approaches, rich data was generated. The findings emphasize the importance of personal engagement, embodiment, and authentic exchange as catalysts for transformation within performative encounters.
Through this investigation, the thesis aims to contribute to the development of sustainable approaches to performance-making that facilitate profound and meaningful human experiences in an era marked by unprecedented societal and environmental challenges.
ISBN:978-91-8104-107-1
No Show
(2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition contains six letters about the work No-Show that was performed in Reykjavík in 2020. The performance is a part of the artistic PhD research "How Little is Enough?" Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters in Malmö Theatre Academy at Lund University. The letters address different aspects of my artistic practice and research such as motivation, method, affect, ethics and the findings.
No Show is a series of five immersive participatory performances, solitary experiences performed in five private homes in different neighbourhoods of Reykjavík in June – August 2020.
Transformative Encounters Podcast
(2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
"Transformative Encounters" is a podcast series dedicated to the exploration and unpacking of the concept "performative encounters" within the realm of contemporary performance and how it can be understood. This series forms an integral part of the knowledge dissemination deriving from the artistic research project How Little is Enough? that is centered on sustainability and social change, conducted at the Malmö Theatre Academy by Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir under the umbrella of Agenda 2030 a transdisciplinary Graduate School within Lund University. In the podcast, Steinunn extends invitations to european artists and theorists, fostering performative encounters where they engage in in-depth discussions and multifaceted explorations of this concept from diverse perspectives.
The podcast series is edited and produced by Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir with the support of Inter Arts Centre at Lund University and Malmö Theatre Academy.
Music: Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir
Island
(2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition is a documentation and dissection of the performance Eyja/Island that was peformed in 2020. The performance is a part of the artistic PhD research "How Little is Enough?" Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters in Malmö Theatre Academy at Lund University.
It contains a video essay about the process of creating the work that describes both motivation and methods, a manuscript, photographs of the performance and a video interview with Gréta Kristín Ómarsdóttir a co-creator of the work.
Island
Eyja is a piece about what it means to belong; what ties a person to a community or a place and what kind of commitment it requires to be a part of something.
The challenges of the island reflect the global challenges of current times. In the performance guests are invited to critically investigate their own ideas on what it means to belong.
The guests are invited to mirror themselves in a staged journey through the life and values of the islanders. Through walks, observations, genuine exchange, symbolic gestures and structured dialogue, topics on quality of life on the ´island´ are contemplated.
Dreams of Lands: Unlearning the Modern Heritage for a Resilient Tomorrow.
(2024)
author(s): Fanny Noel
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Fine Arts
Dreams of Lands weaves the author's personal heritage to the modern history of Europe in order to understand the current ecological crisis. Questioning the cultural European context in parallel to the native American cosmology, the author enhances the current dynamics of extraction and production that overshadow most of the urban dweller's life.
The research is followed by a gardening handbook for artists and the detailed process of the realisation of a garden in the Royal Academy of the Arts. Both are thought as concrete tools for changing the way we are being human in our world in crisis.
The Ecology of Artistic Research
(2023)
author(s): Elizabeth Torres
published in: Research Catalogue
In the past decade, artistic research has emerged as a prominent means of generating new knowledge while addressing pressing issues such as sustainability and environmental concerns. However, due to its relative newness, the field lacks a clear mainstream understanding regarding its potential, meaning, structures, and limitations. The Ecology of Artistic Research is an interdisciplinary investigation that aims to explore the multifaceted dimensions of the field, with a particular focus on the significance of artistic research to researchers and practitioners themselves, and how they perceive, process, and embody knowledge through their practice. This project seeks to identify sustainable approaches to artistic research, demystify and clarify the language of artistic research for lay audiences, visualize the mechanisms of the field, and visibilize structures and networks that pay closer attention to the narratives of our world in transformation.
The investigation is conducted through a cycle of conversations and artistic responses, with a particular focus on the Nordic countries of Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Through engaging contemporary artistic practitioners, academic institutions and researchers in conversations, the project seeks to gain insight into their work, concerns, and personal experiences. The output of this research takes various interdisciplinary forms, including audiovisual interviews, articles, and a multimedia exposition.
Sol-Kissed Bokashi
(2023)
author(s): Shauheen Daneshfar
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This exposition delves into the realm of sustainable material reuse, re-thinking and recycling material in still photography. The artist explores repurposing techniques through personal experiences, approaching Bokashi, a composting chemical to replenish C-41 development for colour-negative film.
The exposition aims to reflect on alternative practices in photographic chemistry, recycling and repurposing materials. It is a sustainable artistic journey that aims to breathe new life into forgotten objects, expanding the discourse on environmental consciousness.
Making museum repositories greener
(2023)
author(s): Tanja Kimmel
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Tanja Kimmel (Institute of Conservation and PhD candidate Doctoral Programme in Philosophy) addresses the question of how art collections and conservation can become sustainable in her contribution "Making museum repositories greener". Sustainability poses a challenge for the art sector. While museums serve as role models for society and can thus contribute significantly to the discourse, they also have very high energy consumption and CO2 emissions due to their complex climatic technology. Kimmel mentions current initiatives and sustainability concepts of museums in Austria and abroad and discusses a case study featured in her dissertation that conducts a CO2 assessment of the central storage of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien in order to create the first profound data basis on climate-damaging emissions, which will then facilitate further action.
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (First Compilation)
(2017)
author(s): Meghan Moe Beitiks
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
'Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience' is a creative exploration of observation and entanglement as tools for negotiating pain. Research on ecology, restoration, and psychology creates a series of videos, images, and performances. How do personal networks of resilience overcome systems of pain, both in human perspectives, and in ecologies? The project explores commonalities in the context of divisive cultural politics.
Artist Meghan Moe Beitiks begins her research with personal interviews. She discusses processes of recovery with people with both personal and professional experiences of trauma and recovery, including an ecological restoration specialist, an animal behaviourist, several survivors of abusive relationships, and many others. Clips from the interviews become the basis for visual and material explorations, generating videos, installations, and images. Stigma and prejudice emerge as barriers to healing – acceptance, observation, and listening, as common tools to accelerate it.
This compilation takes components of Beitiks’s research and arranges them within their own system of exploration. Observers’ perceptions of the work are both assisted and disrupted by audio descriptions. Originally intended to make the works accessible to non-sighted audiences, the descriptions also serve as an exploration of observation and objectivity. A seemingly unrelated pine wallpaper appears to have been unfairly categorised as “masculine,” prompting further questions about categorisation and labelling, as well as depictions of nature. Beitiks’s presence and movement in the work is described as androgynous, their body taking on the narratives described in the interview clips. Boundaries between various disciplines and narratives disappear—we instead experience the labour of connecting disparate entities, despite the limits of our own perceptions.
A/R/Tography in Practice, 5 ect, spring 2024
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Guro Kristin Gjøsdal
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Guro Kristin Gjøsdal, A/R/Tography in Theory and Practice in Higher Education - Stockholm University of the Arts 2023/2024.
A/R/Tographic ripples in the water in the development of the theatre production Blindsone (Blind Spot).
How can my positions as an artist, researcher, and teacher continue to be activated and motivate in the theatre production Blindsone through spring 2024?
Gjøsdal as an A/R/Tograph: Research dramaturg and pedagogue responsible for Norwegian Nynorsk as a scenic language in The Cultural Schoolbag-production Blindsone.
Produced by The Centre for Norwegian Language and Literature, The County of Møre & Romsdal, and The National Centre for Norwegian Nynorsk in Education, at Volda University College, and the performing artists Mine Nilay Yalcin, Samir Mahad and Jahanger Ali. The target group is upper secondary school.
Portfolio in process spring 2024.
A/R/Tography is a hybrid research methodology that emphasizes the three positions Artist (A), Researcher (R) and Teacher (T), and how these can be combined.
The concepts hybrid methodology means that A/R/Tography is both a way of doing research throug/with one's own arts teaching practice, and a way of teaching through an artistic and explorative approach.
A/R/Tography in Theory, 2.5 etc, autumn 2023: 1) Interview and Exposition. 2) Analyse my A/R/Tographic process.
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Guro Kristin Gjøsdal
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Guro Kristin Gjøsdal, A/R/Tography in Theory and Practice in Higher Education - Stockholm University of the Arts 2023/2024.
The exposition ripples around an interview with Christine Yanco Helland (OsloMet), which is exploring and articulating how she carry out her entangled practice as artist/researcher/teacher. The presentation uses relevant literature to think with.
Christine Yangco Helland is an educated drama teacher, director, and dramaturg, with a master’s degree in fine arts with specialisation in theatre from the University of Agder, Norway. Helland has a burning commitment to diversity and inclusion. In addition to working with professional productions, Helland is motivated by involving children and young people, non-professional, and marginalised groups.
The exhibition and the interview uses rhizomatic thinking. And so does my own work and production within the methodology and thematics.
A/R/Tography is a hybrid research methodology that emphasizes the three positions Artist (A), Researcher (R) and Teacher (T), and how these can be combined.
The concepts hybrid methodology means that A/R/Tography is both a way of doing research throug/with one's own arts teaching practice, and a way of teaching through an artistic and explorative approach.
This task was completed in autumn 2023.
The Coming Catastrophe And Its Possible Decelerators // The Future Is Ancestral
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The project unarchive as an extension of the multi sensorial installation installed at ZNE! Exhibit at Uferhallen Berlin-Wedding. Opening 11.May / Artist Talk 16.6 / Finissage 16.July, 2023.
Urban Hub
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Erika Matsunami
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Artistic research Urban Hub is focused on materiality and its semiotics and the construct of syntax from cognitive linguistics. The research fields are architecture, visual arts and music.
Research methods are thereby interventional between different disciplines and work in progress.
In doing so, artistic research Urban Hub in cross-disciplinary and transdisciplinary between Architecture and Visual arts+Music aims for an innovative creative approach that emerges from the real space.
The research objective is on the topic of "well-being" as a common in design, which addresses Wittgenstein's theoretical exploring ontologically and epistemologically. The research is methodologically interdisciplinary in connection with the perspective of cognitive neuroscience (on the body) transdisciplinary.
The artistic research Urban Hub addresses environmental issues and human coexistence from the aspect of communication in the environment such as in urban space from the aspect of critical theory.
It is an exploration of Barriere-free (for the possibility of communication) spatial aesthetic in urban space "Urban choreography (gesture)" practically, which addresses artistic intervention in public space. Thereby, the artistic intervention in the context of this artistic research Urban Hub aims for the procedure of the natural way of integration.
Den emotionellt hållbara filmprocessen
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Emilie Löfgren
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Hur skapar och utvecklar jag metoder för en filmprocess som värnar mitt eget och mina medarbetares mentala och känslomässiga välbefinnande när vi gör film om svåra frågor? Hur tar jag hand om mina medverkande? Hur ser min film ut som är sprungen ur en sådan arbetsprocess? Hur har arbetet med terapeuten Cilla Holm, tidigare filmproducent, bidragit till en hållbar filmprocess? Filmbranschen präglas av högt tempo och utmattningssyndrom är inte ovanligt. För fyra år sedan blev jag utmattad och efter att ha sörjt mitt gamla jag och min nya stresskänslighet kom jag fram till att jag inte tänker acceptera att jag inte ska kunna arbeta med det jag älskar, film och skrivande. Jag tänkte att det måste finnas andra sätt att arbeta med film och fortfarande få må bra.
En exposition om skapandet av min dokumentärfilm Om sorg (2022) och metoden som jag kallar för den emotionellt hållbara filmprocessen.
English abstract:
How do I create healthy working methods that benefit my own and my team members mental and emotional wellbeing while making film about difficult subjects? What does a documentary sprung out of these methods look like? How has the collaboration with Cilla Holm, film therapist and former film producer, contributed to make the process emotionally sustainable? The film industry is fast paced and burnout is not uncommon. Four years ago it happened to me and I had a total identity crisis. After grieving my old self, my ability to multi-task and my newfound stress intolerance, I came to the conclusion that I will not accept that I have to leave the film industry. I wanted to keep working, I just had to find another way to do it.
An exposition about the creation of my documentary About Grief (2022) and the method that I call The emotionally sustainable film process.
How to make fashion sustainable?
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Laura Garnier
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
During the past few years I tried to change my way of consumption wether it is food or fashion. I believe in sustainability working together with fashion and textile. In fact they are the second most polluant industry after petrol. In our society, fast fashion, but also fast/overconsumption became normal and we only see the tip of the iceberg. Once we realize the amount of energy, work, products, etc... it takes to make one piece of fabric or even a t-shirt for example, it is obvious that it has to change. I develop some techniques myself to try and be more sustainable without having to cut out the pleasure of buying clothes and following trends.
Bioregion Vestland
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Alexandre Ralston Bau
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Bioregion Vestland is a design-driven development project under the auspices of Design Region Bergen. We want to develop a regional circular value chain that stimulates companies in Western Norway to green change through innovative production, services and products that, among other things, phase out fossil-based plastics. A "bioregion" is a geographically bounded area that takes into account human society and natural ecosystem; it is a call to act with renewed corporate social responsibility. The overall goal of the Bioregion Vestland project is to initiate several major projects that will make the business sector equipped for a sustainable future and create new green industry in Western Norway.
How can we make the best use of resources in Western Norway and use these to create circular value chains that are both sustainable and profitable - and which can also create solutions that replace our plastic consumption?