Little Do They Know
(2022)
author(s): Olivia Rowland
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition functions as both a visual and poetic essay, and a manifesto for my methodology of ‘line’. My definition of ‘line’, defined here as:
‘The gestural and abstracting tandem force of drawing-and-writing as a narrative means to express selfhood.’
The exposition posits the methodology of ‘line’ as one alternate artistic means to artistically communicate feminine selfhood. The methodology of line works to resist the internalised assignment of feminine voice to a corporeal body.
Instead, ‘line’ communicates selfhood through poetic means and a sense of fragmented corporeality. Visually, the stark and abstracting nature of the drawn line, and the allegorical, metaphorical nature of writing present an abstracted self that playfully evades full understanding.
The titling phrase ‘Little Do They Know’ intones a kind of secret power on behalf of the speaker, and the presence of secret and intricate worlds to which the gaze of the spectator has limited access. It is on this premise which the exposition operates, articulating the presence (in all its anxiety, instability, rage, joy and frustration) of a playful and evasive selfhood that reclaims agency from the spectator’s gaze.
Territorial Art, Design & Architecture
(2022)
author(s): Sergio Montero Bravo
connected to: Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This collaborative and cross-sectoral project addresses places, environments and spaces beyond mere functional urban endeavors. The project explores possibilities that become visible when public space is viewed from perspectives beyond the urban norm. The aim is to restore lost rural relations and to search for ways to leave the anthropocentric narrative. In the past, densification of cities has been considered synonymous with sustainable development, creativity and innovation. However, a one-sided urban focus leads to disarmament of rural habitats, and dissociation from human interdependence with non-human nature. Today, adaptation to global warming is dependent on the survival of the rural. Therefore, this artistic research project is primarily informed by activities in rural environments together with species and ecologies other than human and urban. The goal is to investigate how art, design and architectural interventions can foster oppositional narratives to anthropocentricity. What I present in this exposition are my most recent collaborations and a journey of professional metamorphosis to reach this goal. The result is a series of ongoing projects and processes that demonstrate how I explore places of communality, togetherness and mutual beneficial interdependency between species.
The Risk of Breaking
(2019)
author(s): Joanna Sperryn-Jones
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
My sculptural installations 'risk' 2011 and 'Celebration' 2015 were developed after I broke several bones mountain biking and wasn’t able to work in my studio for a year. When I returned to making sculpture I found I could only relate to previous artwork by breaking it. I explore how and why my aesthetic preferences changed after experiencing injury, in particular the new element of risk. I reflect on contrasting experiences of mountain biking and being injured, the tension between the support and restriction of being in plaster and my alienation to my broken arm. Through this I question what motivates people to take risks, how our judgement of risk can change in different circumstances, and if the motivation for men and women taking risks is different. I reflect on the risk to the artwork and to the viewer and different forms of risk in artwork. Finally I recount how this informs the making of 'risk' 2011 and 'Celebration' 2015.
Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation - Toward Non-Local Collaborative Art Practices
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Lucien Packer Yessouroun, Carla Zaccagnini
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation: Toward non-local collaborative art practices' investigates the resonances of concepts from quantum theory in the realm of transdisciplinary practice-based artistic research. Throughout a series of protocols using diffractive methodologies, we intend to translate and embody concepts such as spacetime, entanglement, non-locality, uncertainty, indeterminacy, and superpositionality, and embed them as tools for our artistic practices. These concepts were chosen for their singularity in physics, but also for the ways in which they confront ontoepistemic pillars of ‘Modernity’, such as sequentiality, determinacy and separability.
The research is carried out by a transdisciplinary non-local core ensemble formed by Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Packer, and Carla Zaccagnini. The cities we inhabit – Copenhagen, Sao Paulo and Malmö – have been our laboratories. Departing from tools and methods learned from each-other's disciplines, we have been creating scores that guide our simultaneous actions while walking on the street –interacting with public spaces and their characteristics– or while lying asleep –in the most private of spheres.
On the one hand, in a practice we call ‘non-local walking’, scores conduct our collective experiencing of our cities, involving a diffractive methodology of reading and listening, and the entangled collecting of objects, words and other affections found in the urban terrain. On the other hand, the ‘entangling dream practice’ experiment is an attempt without aiming at success of meeting each other in our dreams. Both investigations are conceived as boundary-crossing transdisciplinary methodologies through which we create a relational, critical consciousness and sensing that stimulates unexpected outcomes, embracing failure.
These scored performances have resulted in cartographies, drawings, moving sculptures, audio works and writings. Across these various materializations, unexpected connections, constellations, and coincidences e/merge, unveiling yet unheard polyphonies that give resonance to the urban and mental spaces, as potentized terrains awaiting (re)circuitry, and, as fields of forces that await to be (re)experienced.
Between control and uncertainty
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Marta Wörner Sarabia
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"Between control and uncertainty" is a practice-led research that combines the kinetic study of the body as a structure and the implementation of media and expanded choreography tools to de-pattern the conventional relationship between body and space in performative environments.
Moreover, on a meta-level, the investigation reflects on the tension between control and uncertainty in the act of research itself.
With the firm belief that the body has inherent philosophical and epistemological knowledge which can be activated by experiencing and observing movement, I embraced the challenge to name and contextualize that knowledge.
This inquiry started from my fascination for the kinetics of the body and its ability to reorganize itself in comparison with other micro and macro structures that do not move that way, such a, for example, the microstructures of materials like metal, rocks or the macrostructures built by the geography of the city and the Port of Rotterdam.
The interdisciplinary research addresses the dichotomy structure-destructure and its application and affections to the body. In this sense, the research proposes a tool for de-patterning the habitual relationship between the body of the performer and the external space and offers to the audience a door for de-patterning their relationship with performative spaces.
The research has been framed under the inspirational umbrella of the idea of performing the Deleuzian concept of “becoming”, (deriving from the Latin verb “devenire” which means “coming down, falling in, arriving to”).
The physical inquiry is focused on the action of “falling in”, "devenire". The exploration led to an articulated and defined set of physical and interdisciplinary exercises that are the core of the dance practice ‘falling in’.
In concordance with the practice, the findings of this research can be seen as ways of controlling and ways of facilitating, allowing, provoking uncertainty within the choreographic practice-led research frame.
This research artistically materialized in the performance Falling in. Notes on body space and matter premiered in 2019.
Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Lucien Packer Yessouroun, Carla Zaccagnini
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This KUV project intends to investigate, through theory and practical experiments, the possible implications that concepts such as spacetime, entanglement, uncertainty, non-locality, and diffraction, proposed by quantum physics, have on artistic practice and narratives.
As a collaboration among artists from different fields and different Educational Institutions, the research will nourish from this encounter as well as from the interaction with students and the contributions of specialists.
PRIMALISM UPDATED
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Christopher Hollins
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Primalism would be a way of looking at any object or event to remove the established ideas we use to recognise what we see. The aim of the Primalist Artist would be to reveal that art objects can be used to generate recall of what remains of an inherent 'animal' sensation that is suppressed in our minds by the learned ideas we use to categorize and classify what we see To achieve this view, art objects would have to be made to direct our responses to an inherent way of sensing that stems from our old powers of instinct. This is a directly opposed view to the educated definition of art – that looks to the production of works of higher learning. Primalist Art would hold no intellectual meaning or content, and it would have to be defined by an ability to disrupt our learned view of the world. Primalism is the result of a direct biological response from our minds to how we conceive of objects and events when deprived of all learned ideas, and the Primalist view is that our higher thought processes have evolved to stop a natural way of sensing in our day-to-day powers of observation.