Vessels of Home: A Search for Belonging
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Naomi Arabel Moonlion
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 - BA Photography
'Vessels of Home' is a 'Search for Belonging.' As more and more people feel disconnected from the world around them, finding belonging is no longer only a question of physical place, but of creating moments in an imaginative space. These moments of belonging are short-lived, they are hard to grasp and contain in our ever individualizing world. Yet, I believe they can be found and nurtured through conscious acts and rituals.
Rowan Moonlion proposes various ways to cultivate moments of belonging, through stories contained in the vessels of Fire, Earth, Water and Air (Le Guin 2020). Firstly, in Fire, regarding human interactions: rejecting patriarchal and capitalist notions of group thinking, by letting go of identity definitions based on difference. Secondly, in Earth, considering nature: returning to our connection to the land, to understand the unifying power of interbeing. Thirdly, in Water, looking within our bodies: searching for sensorial experiences of belonging by making our bodies our homes. Finally, in Air, gazing in our minds and memories, imagining new worlds, holding stories together with our ancestors.
Witchcraft and Earth honoring rituals are used as a framework to explain and exemplify the four proposed layers. 'Vessels of Home' combines academic research grounded in queer and feminist theory, conversations with witches and other lived experience stories, poetic reflections taken from Moonlion’s artistic practice, and practical tools like rituals, recipes and affirmations. Together the four layers of belonging and the four types of writing form a unifying whole. Moonlion urges you to connect to your own personal form of belonging, and hopes you will learn to understand the value of trying to live in harmony with all else on this Earth.
The elements return again and again in a cyclical manner. The circle of life is ever present.
Why does she cry salty tears while he touches the sea
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Jenný Mikaelsdóttir
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Photography
Summary:
"Why does she cry salty tears while he touches the sea". Follows a search for understanding how being in cold water has a relationship with humans. More specifically if the sea is for people to be in or not - the upbringing stories from Iceland and a Nordic background is noticeable in how the author approaches the subject of the sea. From the perspective of being cautious towards it, yet fearful and therefore the quest is giving contrast on how the sea shapes people. On an emotional level yet spiritually as well. Questions regarding people’s place within the social context and, with others. The personal writings is intertwined with challenges people face and how it’s displayed in the art world. Research into how artist have dealt with overcoming bigger forces than themselves. The social element of a sea swimming community is discussed where recent acknowledgment in a modern society to be in cold water is ever present. This is done by interviewing people who have been tuned in with the sea, a former sailor and a sea swimmer.
The paper is divided into four chapters. Their titles serves the focus points. In Salt water, a look into the unknown, how artists deal with the sea as a natural force, admiration towards the sea with a connection to the emotional state. Community, is where the unknown offer a place to belong to, observing from a distance as well inside a sea swimming community. In Rituals, sea swim is investigated as a social act binding the community. Tales brings storytelling with focus on sailors and sea creatures.
The Invisible Women & the myth of the photographic truth
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Henriëtte Maria Giovanna Siemons
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023-BA Photography
This is the search for what is left of the myth of the Witte Wieven, in the landscapes of the Netherlands.
Historically there are theories about who the witte wieven were, and still are. One of them is that they once were wise female herbalists and healers. It was said they had the gift for looking into the future. Another theory is that they stem from forest spirits and goddesses, something our neighbouring countries still believe. In the Netherlands the collective memory of the women is based on the image of scary ghosts, witches or mist figures. History tells us something different.
I use the folktales as a guide and travel to the places mentioned. Strongly intertwined with the history of the Dutch landscapes, ancient nature and the east of the Netherlands, the witte wieven show the magical side of this ‘rational’ country. As the search continues, some themes keep recurring: the memory of the landscapes, the importance of female voices in storytelling and their structural silencing throughout history.
Clues, maps and the original folktales guide me to fairy tale- like encounters and push me to reflect on fact, fiction and the space in between. Using the camera to document the remnants of this myth, another world is created where the borders of what is ‘real’ fade. A new narrative where they are being remembered in a way they still have their magic. To keep the witte wieven close, I started to collect materials from the places where the witte wieven live: pebbles, twigs and water. Trying to conserve and protect the memories they have in them.
The spirits of the women are still there to be found in flowers, trees and rocks. It is important for us to remember, for the women and their story will not fade away over time.
Soil Stories, Touching with your Eyes and Seeing with you Hands
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Nalani Kailing Knauss
connected to: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
I excavate soil’s history using the lenses of photography, geology, etymology, and anthropology. As a visual storyteller, I engage with soil while digging deeper to address questions of human relationship to the natural world and the feeling of being held within the landscape. I use soil as a metaphor for my personal search for belonging.
Can a visceral, human relationship to the earth beneath our feet help us in our fundamental search for connection? As I unearth humanity’s history, delving into all things soil, starting from an exploration of myths and indigenous beliefs, I start to reflect on my own relationship with the California landscape that I call home. I explore what it means to belong and reconnect. Through the physicality of foraging and making with clay, in combination with photographing rocks as my subjects I reflect on belonging as a human connection to place within nature. I write about the split and alienation humanity has gone though of viewing nature as something separate. The disconnection of the right side of the brain with its childlike playfulness, feeling, wondering, and meandering in comparison with modern life’s prioritization of the left brain with its over efficiency and logic.
What would happen if we started to think about soil as a living body and even as a form of language? This substance that we deem inanimate and dirty, and which we mindlessly dump our waste onto, is the memory keeper of human history.
Beneath the layers of substrate, I am curious as to what terminology we use and why. How are the words we use meaningful, and how do they impact our belief systems and values? Can we unlearn the notion that dirt is dirty? What do words say about other words? How can we redefine our language and in so doing change our belief systems which then affect the way we portray, represent, or photograph the natural world?
Photographic language is also a vehicle for the communication of certain narratives, which in my work I use as documentation. Through photography, I engage in a sensual experience of earth in all its substantive expressions: skin, soil, dust, rock, water. Soil and photography share a similar language. When viewing photography or connecting with earth, the audience leaves with an impression, a trace, which then affects the viewer. As a visual storyteller, I strive to awaken a remembering of ancestral knowledge and remind people of their primal kinship with earth.
Questions arise such as how do we engage with touch? What do we even sense in the landscape of our own body? What does this form of re-earthing and re-wording look like? Within a society that is fueled by consumerism and the all-important “I” as ego, can we, when relating to the natural landscape remember what it means to be collectively human in a symbiotic relationship with soil? Can we create a deeper relationship with something as simple as the ground beneath our feet?
My research has been informed by many a author such as Ursula K. le Guin- The Carrier Basket Theory, Dark Ecology by Timothy Morton, Braiding Sweetgrass- Robin Wall Kimmerer
Staying with the Trouble - Donna Haraway, Spell of the Sensuous David Abrum, Tim Ingold and the discourse surrounding Stadium General here at KABK
Rethinking urban movement through the frame of radical psychiatry
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Dora Ramljak
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023; BA Photography
Research is the ground for exploring the world. My research paper serves as a guide in the sensorial and caring experience of the world around us as. Written in stages in which patients enter and experience the sensory room, the transition from history to the future opens space for discussion and implementation of observed practices in individual realities.
The beginning chapters introduce radical movements in psychiatry while outlining the historical formation of disability as a social issue. Discussion around illness and disability is observed trough political and philosophical frame. Historical examples provide insight into how the space of the institution itself can re-shape into a progressing form, how the discussion about institutionalised people is de-stigmatised once the closed system of a hospital or an asylum opens to its surrounding environment, and how this can affect the position of healthcare, psychiatry specifically, on the level of a state.
The chapters bring forward current knowledge around body memory and studies around sensory treatments in institutionalized settings. In this chapters, the body is not solely observed in the setting of a hospital or asylum, but brought in the context of perceiving the body as a social and cultural object.
Short poetic digressions are moments of personal reflection, automatic writing that reminds me of moments when I saw the necessity to provide alternative models of care.
The paper contains interviews and transcriptions of conversations I had with my commissioners. Through conversations with medical workers and artists, I reflected upon the current state of care provisions, ranging from institutional care to self-care. The dialogues show sensibility and understanding that a shift in healthcare towards the re-humanization of the ill is needed.
Written in-between moments of working with materials in the workshop settings, research has acted as
The Landscape That Should Not Exist
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Jonathan Hendrik Tang
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
MA Photography and Society
This study examines what roles images can play in the disclosure of discipline within the Dutch political settlement known as the polder model. On November 24, 1982, the Accord of Wassenaar formalised the contemporary Dutch socio-economic and political character by adopting a method of corporatist consensus seeking and decision making between capital, the state, and labour called the ‘polder model’. The polder model has its origin in the creation of a key feature of the rationalised Dutch landscape, reclaimed sections of formerly submerged land known as ‘polders’. This study draws a connection between the signing of the Accord of Wassenaar and the historically rooted labour discipline of residents of the artificial landscape of the Netherlands.
Incorporating archival material, visual experiments, case studies and descriptions of field visits, this study reflects on the role of the praxis of the image maker through artistic research, and emphasizes the disciplined character of the Dutch landscape. These concerns are examined through discussions of the artificiality of nature in the landscape, the grid, the signing of the Accord of Wassenaar, and invisible labour. Through visual interventions in the materiality of cartographic and national archival material, this study argues for a more broadly-encompassing praxis of the representation of power mechanisms in the artificial Dutch landscape. Through the juxtaposition of different visual interventions in the Dutch landscape, an alternative situational understanding of the position of the viewer in relation to the polder is proposed.