Research Catalogue

‘Mijn Lijf Mijn Lief’ [My Body My Love] was an artistic research project happening in 2024 on Sparrenhof in collaboration with students from the mbo Theateropleiding Brabant. The main question emerged out of a dialogue with the participating youngsters: How can we perform alternative perspectives on how we see our physical appearance? The process involved a lot of free-writing exercises, that led to several monologues that functioned like miniature portraits. These spoke about a diversity of themes (as diverse as the group); about gender-trouble, online and offline perfectionism and sexism. Next to these texts, we developed music and song, scenes of improvisatory play and movement scenes in constant cocreation, that were ultimately composed together into a multi-thematic, multi-disciplinary theatre performance that questions body positivity.

During a three weeks residency at the Nachtzuster, I worked together with a visual artist (Bas Kaufman) and a dancer (Maria Moschou) around the question of how to create vertical resonance in art. The question was inspired by theory of Harmut Rosa on 'resonance' (2018) and on the theory of 'metamodernism' by Vermeulen & Van den Akker (2010). We performed each Friday - 3 times in total - re-assembling and re-composing the main material of our artistic ritual in dialogue with feedback from each performance-session. The performance was meant as an incantation to draw the audience into a dreamlike world of surreal images.

Tijdens een onderzoeks-residentie via ROOT Brabant, heb ik gewerkt rondom de vraag: Hoe kan ik de impact begrijpen en verbeelden van het geweld dat mijn opa heeft meegemaakt in de Indonesische Onafhankelijkheidsoorlog? Ik heb daartoe samengewerkt met de mime-speler Luka Krijbolder en de opera-zangeres Fran van Lysebettens. Bronnen waar we mee hebben gewerkt zijn: historische getuigenissen uit het boek 'Revolusi' van David van Reybrouck, de openingsscène van de film 'Saving Private Ryan' en teksten op basis van persoonlijke ervaring en gesprekken met de familie. De teksten zijn mede tot stand gekomen door een werkweek bij Pauline Mol in Frankrijk.

This page consists of the program of the Performative Symposium for Ecological Spectatorship, that took place on the 16th of October in Het Huis Utrecht. *** The symposium is organised by Gaia’s Machine: an upcoming artistic research collective exploring the intersection between art, technology and nature. Aims for the symposium are: - Exchange knowledge between arts and sciences leading to a cross-fertilization of ideas and practices related to ecological spectatorship - Reflect on our positioning as young artists & scientists at a time of ecological crisis - Open a space for a young generation to question our responsibility and to explore potential methods of moving forward The term ecological spectatorship draws awareness towards humanity’s entanglement within an ecological web. We approach ‘ecology’ from an ethical perspective, addressing the responsibility we have as a human species in relation to the earth (our oikos). Furthermore, we focus on ‘spectatorship’ – a branch within theatre studies that is concerned with the relation between makers and performers and the audience. We emphatically include the spectator in the performative space. Ecological spectatorship expresses a concern that in our view is not only relevant for theatre makers but also for politically engaged scientists. In the symposium we will not only take the placement of the spectator into account but we will allow the spectator to become actively engaged in making sense of ecological spectatorship. We are keen to create ample space for the audience to reflect on their experience and to open an exchange of knowledge between both objective and embodied knowledge, and between the collaborators as well as the audience. We will be researching the proposition of ecological spectatorship through the form of a performative symposium – a play on the traditional form of the symposium by making it both artistic and participatory.

The startingpoint of "Still Moving" has been: to map and perform an artistic process in which the aim is to create a scenographic poem. If poetry is about 'feeling in language' (Eliot), then scenographic poetry is about feeling in the materiality of a spatial-temporal composition. We have started to work with an actor, live video technology and 'Four Quartets' by T.S. Eliot. Throughout the process the main ingredients have shifted towards: the breath of the actor, a lot of soil and sensor-technology. The research question has been evolving from an interest in the concept of 'presence', towards an interest in rhythms of the body in relation to rhythms of the earth, towards an interest in the materiality of the ingredients. This page is meant to give insight into our process of creation.

This publication presents the outcomes of the Connective Symposium, which took place at Fontys Academy of the Arts in Tilburg, in November 2022. The symposium was the first time that the professorship and research group Artistic Connective Practices, initiated in 2021, opened its work to the international field: We invited practitioners from all over the world to share their work and exchange about the concept of "artistic connectivity". "Artistic Connectivity Unfolding" is an attempt to share the experiences during the symposium with the broader artistic research audience, and to contribute to the body of artistic research work that is socially engaged. The exposition is potentially many things: In part, it is a piece of documentation of the symposium, in part reflections on and proceedings of it. It is also an explorative contribution to our emerging and unfolding discourse of artistic connectivity, — unfinished, fluid and moving — and thus a springboard for our future work on artistic connectivity.