Research Catalogue

What happens when musicians improvising on acoustic instruments sample and exchange their sound libraries? How can such a transgression of sonic territories contribute to an expanded understanding of one’s own sonic identity? And could this b/lending of identities point to a more ambiguous yet vibrant field of intra-play? Departing from these questions, this project intends to challenge our idea of sonic identity as a personal subject-oriented entity, and consequently investigate how a collaborative sharing of sampled sounds, can contribute to an expanded understanding of the sounds we play and are played by. Individual idiomatic approaches to one’s own instrument are thus interfered as we transgress habitual boundaries for action possibilities and musical imagination. The practice circulates from the duo of Torben Snekkestad and Søren Kjærgaard toward external collaborators, where the sharing process involves different approaches to audio sampling and mapping, embedding and embodying, listening and playing with each other’s sonic material to a point where authorship, origin, instrument and sonic identity is diffracted.

Every art documentation is an encounter with an artwork in displacement, both in time and space. Yet, the experience of being present in the moment a live art work unfolds is – inevitably – lost in documentation. Evocations – towards a poetics of documentation explores non-conventional documentation to evoke imagination, inspired by the fragmentary, concision and absence found in poetry. This exposition passes through early discussions relating documentation to evidence. It looks into contemporary artists who challenge conventional ways to document, and approaches the act of document as bridging. Insisting on the loss and void inherent in documentation, Fernanda Branco's artistic research: environment embodiment – towards poetic narratives explores the circulatory generative process some non-conventional documentation can have. In the two projects I remember and Traces, the documentation viewer is invited to imagine – rather than to see – what occurred. Photo Credit: Performance by Fernanda Branco Traces #3. Drawing documentation and photo by Hilde Grønne Flikke.

Död åt välfärdsstaten (Death to the Welfare State) was a theatre performance for actors, dancers, and musicians that dealt with a concern that the welfare system in Sweden was about to be dismantled. To explore this worry political speeches were superimposed with a narrative inspired by George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm to examine how perceptions of welfare in Sweden have changed from the early 1900s to the present. This artistic research exposition elaborates on the process of developing the theatre piece. It unpacks how the relation between discourse and narrative informed the text and music, and how it allowed for a dramaturgical structure that included all the various performative elements and artistic expressions. Furthermore, the exposition discusses how the performance was composed through a collaboration that was characterised by an open-ended dialogue between the artists and how this enabled distributed decision making, as well as artists performing in other ways than they are used to. The exposition explores the open format of Research Catalogue. Through text and video documentation it builds on the dramaturgical structure of the performance itself: an introduction, five parts and an epilogue. The ambition of the exposition has been to make yet another iteration of the performance.

Textorium: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space is a language-based artistic research project that explores collaborative score-based approaches to live, situated writing and reading practices, for attending to the experiential aspects of situated embodiment with/in public space. Between 30 May — 4 June 2022, five artist-writers (Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya and Lena Séraphin) met in Vaasa, Finland, to engage in a process of observational and collective score-based writing-reading with/in public space. With its conceptual anchor in Georges Perec’s short book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975/2010), this enquiry evolves a distinctive approach that foregrounds a corporeal, sensorial and bodily approach to language, where writing and reading are conceived as a collaborative undertaking rather than a solitary endeavour. Working with and through different language-based practices — including performative, poetic, and phenomenology-oriented approaches — the research explores the potentiality of emergent spaces (perhaps even of emergent temporalities, subjectivities and collectivities) produced through the interweaving of shared writing and reading practices, as the cyclical rhythms of writing/reading intermingle with the circulating movements, momentums and flows of public space. Through developing and testing various embodied, corporeal, sensorial, and collaborative approaches, this research enquiry advocates the transformative capacity of language-based artistic research for cultivating new “ecologies of attention” (Yves Citton, 2017). This shared enquiry explores the critical potentiality of our “linguistic bodies” (Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher, 2018) as sites of both resistance and affirmation.

Our exposition comes out of a conversation and explorative research process about the performative potential of archives, both publicly and personally, shaped by four different artistic mediums and practices in film, performance art, choreography and essay writing. The shared medium has been through the use of text and online communication. The research was developed through ongoing monthly meetings and notes that were taken since April 2019. From those meetings, we laid a structure where we each created our parts of what became the score for "Living and Lasting", which we first performed in Oslo and then in Berlin in 2022*. This score is the pivot point of our exposition. Our working process includes considerable elements of risk and surprise by alternating between collaborative meetings and individual work. The first time we perform a new piece none of us know exactly what or how the others will present. Along with the audience, we experience portions of the text, movements, and media put together for the first time, without knowing whether the whole thing will coalesce, diverge, or fall apart.  (*) In Oslo at the 2022 Nordic Summer University (NSU) and in Berlin at the symposium “Who tells y/our story?” ​​by the artistic research project MEMORYWORK (2021-2024).

This exposition is a harvest of ‘Massaging The Asylum System’, a year-long collaboration between refugee justice centre Trampoline House (DK) and neurodiverse collective Project Art Works (UK) by co-curator Carlota Mir. As a lumbung practice, harvest refers to artistic recordings of discussions and meetings. Together, we set out to explore how migrant and neurodivergent communities are affected by social systems of care and control, and we sought ways to massage the asylum system – yes, massage, like a real massage – so that it could become softer and more humane. Bringing together the vision and artistic tools from both organisations, our work became a temporary coalition of dissident bodies.  Organised in a series of concentric circles and islands, the map revisits the ecosystem of the project and its traces: informal encounters, public conversations, art installations, and two workshop series in Copenhagen and Kassel, reflecting a multitude of voices from artists, collective members, facilitators, activists, publics, and the lumbung community. The collaboration between Trampoline House and Project Art Works was initiated by Carlota Mir and Sara Alberani in the context of documenta fifteen and funded with common resources from the lumbung Collective Pot.  With support from the Danish Arts Foundation and the Italian Council. Publication design: Laura Migueláñez and Orestis Nikolaidis. Thanks to lumbung inter-lokal, Trampoline House and Project Art Works communities for their generosity and the knowledge shared, which has made this harvest possible.

Filmed conversation between Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen, co-editor of issue #10, and Andrew Hardwidge, Chrysa Parkinson and Frank Bock, authors of “Studio Conversations”. During this conversation, the editor interweaves the essence of "Studio Conversations" with the overarching theme of "Circulating Practices." Through this talk, you'll get an insight into "Studio Conversations," a research project focused on ways of asking contemporary dance artists about the practices, working and knowing happening in their dancing. "Studio Conversations” was originally intended to be published as an exposition in VIS. In recognition of the project's specific approach, we decided in dialogue with the authors to depart from the conventional exposition format. Instead, we've chosen to present Studio Conversations as a video conversation. This decision stems from our commitment to presenting artistic research in a way that best reflects the purpose of the project and the vision of its creators. The discussion was filmed on Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH) premises at Filmhuset on 29 September 2023.