Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies
(2021)
author(s): Anne Juren
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies is an ongoing transdisciplinary artistic research, which encompasses the spectrum of experiences and practices that I have developed as a choreographer, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner. By drawing on various fields of knowledge – anatomy, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theories, poetry and somatic practices – the research expands choreography towards disparate discourses, practices and treatments of the body. Based on Feldenkrais’ speculative use of language, imagination and touch, I have developed several body-orientated practices situated at the intersection of the therapeutic and the choreographic, the somatic and the poetic.
The research is articulated through three transversal movements. The first movement is the expansion and distortion of the Feldenkrais Method® from its initial somato-therapeutic goals into a poetic and speculative way of addressing the body. Secondly, I propose experiences of diffraction, "blind gaze" and dissociation as a strategy for troubling the dominant regime of vision. The third movement consists of the co-regulation of bodies and dynamic relationships between the individual and the collective.
Combining fantasy, the fantasme and phantasmagoria, I invented the word “fantasmical” to emphasize how the ability to imagine may create phantom limbs that are as concrete as pieces of bone. Studies of Fantasmical Anatomies are simultaneously a set of practices, methods and places where the corps fantasmé is tangible.
in the flesh
(2021)
author(s): Virpi Nieminen
published in: Research Catalogue
In this exposition I reflect on an artistic research project I conducted from fall 2020 through spring 2021, as a student of scenography in Aalto University.
The base for the artistic research project was the idea of corporality, touch, flesh, materiality and aesthetics as something excessive and peripheral in the context of the Aalto University campus. I explored bodily excesses by working with sculptural objects formed by bodycasting, a method that produces a surplus of bodyparts. I was also interested in the process of working with my hands, and working through touching and being with the sculptural objects and materials.
As the process evolved the questions came to circulate around the issues of knowledge and the unknown. What kind of knowledge can working with these objects and materials lead me toward? Can that knowledge be articulated into language? How to work with things that language doesn't reach?
The research project was executed aside the peripheries in parallax: BRAVE NEW PERIPHERIES -conference organised by the four-year “Floating Peripheries – mediating the sense of place” artistic research project.
Moving through Choreography – Curating Choreography as an Artistic Practice
(2021)
author(s): Marie Fahlin
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The purpose of the artistic research, Moving through Choreography – Curating Choreography as an Artistic Practice, has been to consider choreography and curating in their similarities and differences. Thus, at different phases of the working process, choreography and curating were treated as one and the same artistic practice; while, in other moments, as practices that are distinct from each other.
Curating has been implemented as a ‘taking care’ principle and a relational activity impacting the production, presentation and documentation of choreography. Choreography has undergone a process of self-reincarnations, or rather, of trans-carnations, whereby the entire body of work has been scrutinized and altered. Key figure/body/agent of these trans-carnations has been the horse, or rather, the assemblage of human and horse, women and horses, here called ‘Centauring.’
Curating and choreography have been integrated to a scrutiny of the art of riding, specifically, the choreography of dressage. In dressage, the research has identified the rigor needed by the research to both steer and unleash the working process.
The research has been pursued by purely artistic means, within a circumscribed field. Different perspectives and the making use of ramifications and loose ends, has proliferated into a plethora of intra-related works, objects and choreographies within which research result and artistic result coincide. The research har proceeded in consecutive phases. Each phase has developed its own specific artistic methodologies.
The overarching methodology has provided for a clear navigation of undetermined directions and dramaturgies. The concept of ‘One’ has produced and collected both core outcomes and residual manifestations. The exhibitions and the exhibitor have carried, pursued and embodied the works and otherwise choreographies, throughout the research process.
Rudimentariness: a concept for artistic research
(2017)
author(s): Anik Fournier
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exhibition explores 'A Way of Making', an ongoing collaborative project in ceramics by curator Frédérique Bergholtz and performance artist Maria Pask. I propose that their investigation of making through ceramics – and, hence, through the hands-on encounter with the materiality of clay – is an intriguing instance of artistic research. Artistic research often refers to a discursive or scientific investigation that informs an artistic practice, or to an ongoing investigation within an existing practice. What interests me in this case is how the research is carried out in a parallel-site of investigation, one that is largely embodied. It is an empirical exploration of a medium and, as complete amateurs to the medium, an investigation of the various possibilities of ‘making’ with it. This form of artistic research aims to tackle the basics of what a curator and an artist are already busy with in their respective artistic professions.
My own formative and professional trajectory has meandered through various institutions, including universities, museums, and art academies. I have therefore operated in the tenuous fault lines between different creative practices and forms of knowledge production. 'A Way of Making' is of interest to me precisely for how it calls for an analysis of the relation between different ways of creating and ways of knowing. In following the many facets of 'A Way of Making' over the past few years, I began to see parallels between the artists' investigation of the material of clay and questions that arise for me as a theoretician when working with an artistic practice or artwork. I became particularly interested in the attitude with which the makers approached their site of investigation. This attitude can be identified in many registers of their project, including the way in which performers and audiences are interpolated somatically by the ceramic pieces in various staged encounters.
For this exposition, I adopted the concept of 'rudimentariness', as defined by Mireille Rosello in the field of comparative literature, to help define this attitude and to see how it can also operate in a largely non-discursive register. The exposition begins with the makers’ hands-on research, exploring how rudimentariness in making calls forth empirical forms of knowing. In particular, the notion of sensate thinking, as defined by Alexander G. Baumgarten, and theories addressing the intimate relation between the sense of touch and movement and modes of thought are key.
The exposition then extends beyond Bergholtz and Pask's project to propose how the attitude of rudimentariness, underpinned by an understanding of sensate thinking and workings of touch, helps articulate what is at stake in the present for artistic research more generally and, specifically, within the growing importance placed on economies of learning in the (Dutch) education system.
In creating this exposition, I attempted to follow the lines, curves, and cracks of 'A Way of Making' to investigate the feedback loops between the discursive and the non-discursive. I propose the not-yet of knowledge as a productive site for the emergence of new perspectives and critical standpoints, as well as the transformative effects of such emergent perspectives on existing habits, modes of making, and, ultimately, what is already known.
"No Self Can Tell"
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Laasonen Belgrano, E. and Price, M.D.
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The research explores 'ornamenting' as a transferable method in inter-disciplinary studies, inter-faith dialogues and artistic/therapeutic practices. Adapting techniques of Renaissance musicology, the processes we have developed de-create and re-create vital connections. It is a communica-tions strategy for times of crisis. Starting with simple sonic relations we extend the method far be-yond its traditional musical setting. The practice utilises 'Nothingness' as a component of creativity, providing a novel response to figurations of nothingness as mere negation. Preliminary results sug-gest its potential as a counter force to nihilism and social dislocation.
The work divides into four areas. 1. Primary research on relationships between sound, meaning, and the sense(s) of self, exploring how sense is made of Otherness via processes akin to musical praxis: consonance, dissonance, 'pure voice' and ornamentation. 2. To apply this new perspective to a range of exile experiences – mourning, social disconnection, ex-communication and aggres-sive 'Othering'. 3. To investigate the cancelling of normal time-conditions in crisis situations such as trauma, dementia, and mystical experience, relating non-linear temporality to creative practice and healing. 4. To widely disseminate our results and methods as contributions to the methodology of artistic research via journal articles, live workshops and performances, and a book of original, praxical, testable, and teach-able interventions.
Play and Dance Improvisation: scores, games and challenges
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Hermans Carolien
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In the previous phases of my artistic research I built up a living archive of play activities that occurred close to my home. In the second phase, some of these play activities were re-enacted by dancers/performers in order to capture and get a deeper of understanding of the vitality affects, energy and intensities. In this phase I want to develop a play/dance improvisation workshop around the concept of participatory sense-making. I am therefore collecting games, scores, challenges that are developed by me or other.
Body-Object Intersections: Touch Model
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Barbis Ruder
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The touch model is a first attempt at describing the space between
the body and the object as a new form: their intersection.
The touch is the intersection, and it builds a shape with various
specifications.
Box project
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Martina Wolna
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Concept#1 is part of the group project assignment in order to search for a tangible and interactive prototype that address the problem of social isolation and passivity, by using the knowledge and practises from Health Promotion to strengthen social relations and activities.