Research Catalogue

ارض حريه كرامه وطنيه land, freedom، collective dignity a slogan that has been with me for a long time, since the revolutionary moment in Tunisia in 2010, when we raised it in the protests, wrote it on the walls, banners that we held high, we sang and shouted it, it recurred in our writings, in our conversations, in our dreams of the sovereignty and independence of our lands. today I see, we see, houses bombed, falling down, turned into dust, piles of stones, dirt. the land carries it all, embraces the decay and transforms it. Down there, other times lie, invisible, suspended from the narratives of control and structures of oppression that dominate the realm above. in the past semester, perhaps even years, I have turned my attention to the interstices in cities that have been created, or rather overrun, by the political programming of urban spaces. They have become areas that have no specific function, no specific production value, no active role in the web of trajectories, signals, instructions, restrictions, power relations... they are just there immanent I like to go there, to step aside from the flow of traffic, to stand in the in-between corners that people hardly look at. I am always wandering, wondering how I can inhabit them, reconvert them, activate their performative potential, claim other times and relations that neutralise or reverse the dominant narratives around me. I took the act of strolling as a ritual, a method. I looked and all I found was dirt, soil, biomass, decaying debris, stones inhabited by microscopic organisms, a complex stratum composed of various "others". everything felt connected and embedded in itself. robert smithson wrote in an article: "the city gives the illusion that the earth does not exist. but what I saw was a symbiosis of things we often see as separate, they grow, they evolve, they shift as a one, a network of self-organising systems. There's no master, no slave. I saw in the land a biosphere highly charged with inter-independent times, stories, histories, memories, dreams, identities, homes, belonging, roots... they are all there, traces of our past, inherited from our ancestors, and of our present, which we define ourselves. monday, half past nine, the air is slightly aggressive, my hands are cold, I am collecting soil in this area behind the railway. I haven't broken any laws I promise, I haven't jumped any barriers, I've just been following the side of the canal. I don't really choose where I stop, the ground calls me, I respond. I walked to the back of this area that has no title, I found a small door hidden behind the herbs. It opened onto a cemetery, beautiful and quiet. I remembered Michel Faucault and his concept of heterotopia, which also fascinated me during the first semester. he described them as spaces absolutely other, the city's sacred and immortal wind. I saw in the in-between spaces of the city what I call heterotopias, a land for altered human and non-human relations, friday, february is almost over. spring is shyly approaching, I could see and touch it as I bent down to collect some earth. today I had an encounter with a microscopic, translucent creature. I've observed so much autonomy and self-sufficiency through it. vivieros de castro, a brazilian anthropologist interested in the amazonian cosmologies and amerindian perspectivism (the way in which humans, animals, and spirits see both themselves and one another, an idea that suggests a redefinition of the classical categories of « nature », « culture », « super nature » based on the concept of perspective). said in one of his lectures: "the experience that each 'self' has of the 'other' can, however, be radically different from the experience that the 'other' has of its own appearance and practices." -- Lecture 1, p. 51 it seems to me that when we turn our gaze to our other, non-human selves, who perceive reality from a different perspective, within a very different temporality, we learn so much about how the world is of relative semblances, for example, what is solid earth to us is airy sky to the beings who inhabit the strata below us, and what is airy sky to us is solid earth to those who inhabit the strata above us. it is a world of relative semblances, where different kinds of beings see the same things differently. in the last few years, before coming to the Netherlands, i've been volunteering on organic farms, dynamising the soil, collecting and redistributing biomass, planting wild forests... this has taught me a lot about how what happens in the soil can influence what happens above it, in terms of self-organising structures, symbiosis and, above all, solidarity. these last few months have also taught me that solidarity comes with love, it's hard to relate to the feeling without having love as a drive.

Choryeong, Iris and Roos study about the infamous skinhead subgroup and their sense of style.

Arts-based-philosophy is an emerging research concept at the cutting edge of the arts, philosophy and the Sciences in which cross-disciplinary research collectives align their research practices to finally stage their investigations in field-performances, shared with the public. Our research explores the significance of the HEART in artistic research and performance philosophy from a cross-cultural perspective, partially based on the concepts of the HEART in the works of two artist-philosophers, in which philosophy already became arts-based-philosophy: Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Aurobindo’s poetic opus magnum Savitri. We generally assume that the works of artist-philosophers are not only engaged in “creating concepts” (Deleuze), but their concepts are also meant to be staged artistically to let them bodily matter in fact. The role of the HEART in respect to this process of “bodily mattering” is the core objective under investigation: Firstly, because we hold that atmospheres trigger the HEART of a lived-body to taste the flavor of things it is environmentally engaged with basically in an aesthetic manner (Nietzsche). In this respect the analysis of the classical notion for the aesthete in Indian philosophy and aesthetics, sahṛdaya––which literally means, “somebody, with a HEART”––becomes crucial. Secondly, because the HEART is said to be not just reducible to one’s manifest Nature, but has access to one’s virtual Nature as well. The creation hymn in the oldest of all Vedas (Rgveda) for instance informs us that a HEART is capable of crossing being (sat) & non-being (asat), which makes it fluctuate among these two realms and even allows its aspirations to let virtual possibilities matter. Such concepts show striking similarities with contemporary concepts in philosophy-physics, e.g. the concepts of “virtual particles” and “quantum vacuum fluctuations” (Barad).

The artistic research project I HAVE THE MOON was an experimental group activity or 'band retreat' for five composer-performers resulting in a public performance in the aDevantgarde Festival, 2019, in Munich. Research was conducted around a central research question stated verbally at the outset of the project: how can aesthetic innovations of contemporary classical music be made accessible to audiences without specialist education or background via communicative techniques of other music genres? After a substantial verbal discussion and sessions of musical jamming, each member created an artistic response to the research question, in the form of a composition or comprovisation, which the group then premiered in the aDevantgarde Festival. The results of the discussion, artistic works and final performance (by means of a video documentation) were then analysed by the project leader and presented in this article. The artistic research position is defined a priori through the research question, during the artistic process in the form of note-taking and multimedial documentation, and a posteriori through a (novel) 'Workflow-Tool-Application Analysis' (WTAA). Together, a method of 'lingocentric intellectual scaffolding' on the emobided knowledge inside the creative process is proposed. Insofar as this embodied knowledge can be seen as a 'field' to be researched, the methodology is built on collaborative autoethnography, 'auto-', since the project leader took part in the artistic process, guiding it from within.

This page is a diagrammatic visualisation of my doctoral thesis. Originally presented as a digital PDF and at just under 50,000 words, it was important that it comprised all the collages, photographs, diagrams and films (as hyperlinks) that made it practice-based artistic research. This space allows the work and ideas to be experienced less sequentially and more relationally, befitting a nonlinear research practice assemblage.

Elena Cirkovic is conducting a transdisciplinary research project at Aarhus University, the University of Lapland, the University of Helsinki, and the BioArt Society Finland on the complex interactions between Earth and outer space systems, as well as the limitations in communicating with the unknown and unpredictable. The associated artwork is aiming for simplicity, placemaking, and "non-disruptive" BioArt (to the extent possible).