recent activities
XRW (Implicature)
(2025)
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
50 A3 drawings black and coloured markers, including:
3 A3 collages on paper with newspaper cutouts and printed photos.
12 A4 drawings on paper with coloured markers, glued on A3 paper + 1 A3 with black ballpoint pen and markers, glued on A3 paper.
13 A3 drawings on paper with black marker, and red, pale blue, gold, pink and orange markers +1 A3 two-sided.
17 A3 drawings on paper with coloured markers.
1 drawing on sketchbook cover with red nail polish.
1 text drawing on sketchbook cover inside.
1 drawing on sketchbook cover back inside with black, orange and gold markers.
22 A4 drawings with ballpoint pen.
58 pocket sketchbook black marker and ballpoint pen drawings.
Some of the above is preparatory work for 4 large prints and 13 paintings. The 12 A4 glued on A3 are preparatory work for a collage on panel.
I made the art between 2023-2024, from the perspective of the observer. Most of the research material came out of crime and fraud reports. I started writing the blog afterwards, since the summer of 2024.
I adopted the visual vocabulary of the graphic novel, which I partly studied and read a lot about, looking at different graphic artists' work, when I was attending classes at the University of Malmo, Sweden, in 2012, to familiarise myself with elements of game design. Much of this work is, amongst other, about children. I wanted to emphasise that, by intentionally applying stylistic elements from children's drawings, in a naive and loose architectural composition, using heavily the black marker and stick figures. Adopting this visual approach, I also wanted to evoke a comically sharp twist, as satirical comment, in the British tradition of political satire, to the otherwise dark subject matter. Finally, the artistic style refers to the populist character of actors, mainly far right of the XRW, but also others.
The text is written like a trip-hop song. I use heavily popular culture signifiers, names of fictional characters from film, television, music and painting, as reference to actual individuals. Parts of the analysis is inspired by Saul Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's example of mathematical calculation. I used plenty of popular and less popular literary and philosophical references, for the visual art and in the writing.
Saul Aaron Kripke was the inventor of the possible worlds philosophical hypothesis, which was seminal for philosophers working in the area of contemporary analytic metaphysics, including the theory of counterparts and the theory of names. He died in 2022. Lauren Berlant was a cultural theorist and gender studies scholar. She died in 2021. The exposition is underpinned by an underlying Marxist interpretation that, in my view, is relevant not just to economists and political philosophers, but also to people working in different sectors of our modern economies of advanced capitalism, such as banking and cybersecurity.
In the style of art, I was inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat's drawings and paintings, which are laden with input from popular media sources, like jazz music and television, recorded in an automatic and naive drawing manner, turned into abstracted paintings.
For Nikos ('Rama', 'Mr X'), Filip ('Philip'), and Brandon - August, September, and October 2024. For "Daddy G" and 'Eric' ("Her Man") - December 2024, January 2025. Who are not politicians, but are doing something political, so they must take care.
See also exposition "The Loot", under 'Art and Activism Exposed as Research Blog'.
Guiding Inner Journeys: Choreographing Inner Conflict in a Diverse Group of Dancers
(2025)
Marjolijn Breuring
This research was conducted with a diverse group of dancers, varying in age, background, and dance experience, and was guided through somatic embodiment and artistic articulation. Through a somatic approach, the body was explored as both an archive of lived experience and an oracle for emergent knowledge, offering a strong gateway into authentic dance material.
The creative process unfolded through four phases: somatic exploration and improvisation, composition, structuring, and refinement. Throughout, leadership shifted fluidly between an open, facilitative mode, amplifying the dancers’ voices, and a more directive mode, articulating the artistic vision.
The methodology highlights how initial somatic explorations were gradually shaped into choreographic form, maintaining a dialogue between internal embodiment and external composition throughout the process.
Key insights include that this process proved particularly effective within a diverse group context, demonstrating that, regardless of formal dance training, each individual, when guided somatically, can access embodied memory and, through compositional shaping, transform authentic movement into coherent choreographic structure.
Both the research and the resulting performance, Equilibrium, do not seek to offer resolution, but rather to evoke recognition and the possibility of coexisting with tension.
New Ecology of the Book
(2025)
Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen
In our exploration of the spatiality of language and, specifically, the activation of the site where writing "makes" rather than takes place, we propose a multilayered experience of the book as an object, as well as a geometrical, topological, and especially performative space, which we understand as an "ecology of the book". Extending this practice beyond the book's margins, yet simultaneously embedding it within the material and technical affordances of the book’s medial articulations, we evoke a "new" ecology—one unfolding alongside the interaction-landscape and its actual and invented inhabitants, as well as the techniques of its production. Texts, drawings, figures, figurations, methods, and both human and non-human authors weave together the heterogeneous texture of the book’s "new" ecology.
In our monographs, "Fauna. Language Arts and the New Order of Imaginary Animals" (2018), "Flora. Language Arts in the Age of Information" (2020), and "Fiction Fiction. Language Arts and the Practice of Spatial Storytelling" (2023, De Gruyter/Edition Angewandte), we explore and map the territory of language arts. This approach manifests, on the one hand, through the transgression of traditional scientific methodologies and a shift in models—from thinking-of-the-other toward thinking-with-the-other, and on the other hand, through the agency of our eponymous characters, Fauna and Flora, who not only title our books but also act as conceptual operators—figures that navigate, perform, and activate the very spaces our texts explore. Applying Michel Serres' methodology of thinking by inventing personae, these characters move within and percolate through the margins of text (written, figural) and space (concrete, fictional), reconfiguring the notion of authorship and placing literary texts and digital drawings within the frame(less) collective of more-than-human and more-than-organic actants.
recent publications
Performing Musical Silence
(2025)
Guy Livingston
This dissertation considers performed silences in composed music and suggests that musicians often use markers to communicate the dimensions of silence. These markers may shape, summon, or impose silence. Markers are signals or cues that may be visible, audible, or multimodal. This research consists of an archive of examples from the author's pianistic practice, as well as three case studies drawn from works of Beethoven, Cage, and Antheil.
Full title: "Performing Musical Silence: Markers, Gestures, and Embodiments"
Blast die wohlgegriffnen Flöten: Understanding and comparing J.S. Bach’s use of recorder and traverso
(2025)
Dante Jongerius
As a recorder and traverso player, J.S. Bach’s works form a crucial part of my repertoire. They include some of the most technically advanced music written for the recorder, in which the instrument seems to be pushed to its limits. Meanwhile, the traverso is welcomed into the orchestra, and it has come to stay. In order to understand the many problems surrounding the recorder and traverso parts from Bach’s music, I need to know how Bach used each instrument specifically. And to be able to make the right artistic choices, I need to know why he chose the recorder for one composition, and the traverso for the other. In answering these questions, I have used my experience in playing both woodwinds to my advantage. My journey has led me through an analysis of terminology, tessitura, symbolism, clefs and pitch surrounding Bach’s flute parts. And for context, I have compared Bach’s use of the recorder and traverso with that of his contemporaries. With my research, I present an overview of the characteristic differences between the two instruments in Bach’s music, giving my own artistic view on some of the unsolved mysteries surrounding Bach and his use of flutes.
echoes of a journey through eco
(2025)
Bødvar Hole
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
BA Photography.
The research paper Echoes of a Journey Through Eco is a record of several-yet-one-and-the-same journey(s). I departed guided by the two questions:
What can I learn from the forest?
How can I learn from the forest?
The first part of the journey I started as a humble, aimless observer in Haagse Bos, where I would sit and let my surroundings dictate what I would write. The symbolic, yet totally non-existent line between culture and nature became subject of my research.
I did not even know the history of the forest, or anything about trees from a more universally agreed upon perspective (science). I had to alter my approach to the research. Slowly the humble observer discovered a part of him inquisitively searching for questions and answers. I was approaching the field of ecology.
Some months into my journey I carved the fateful words “bark bark” in the bark of a tree. I questioned myself as an artist making a mark on nature. I started writing a text to underpin a few things I think an artist should think about when their practice takes place in and with nature involved. Some very critical, almost cynical part of me took stead of the humble observer. It seems I needed to vent some things.
The final paper holds fragments from all parts of the journey, from the humble observer to the cynical critic. As a journey it has barely begun, and as a text it is full of superficial reflections, very subjective opinions, and shortcomings. But, as the seed this text sprung from was planted only 6 months ago, it should be expected that it is still only a sapling about yay tall (20-30cm were I a Scots pine). If there is one thing I learned from trees, it’s patience.