Have you ever stopped, pay attention, and take action by listening to the voice of the city in today’s world? We live in a neoliberal era where the world is viewed as fixed, immutable, and separate from the self. Consequently, our ears have been blinded, and the sounds of everyday life have been disregarded. As John Levack Drever highlights, one of the key objectives of soundwalking is “is
about circum-navigating habituation, in a process of de-sensitization and  consequently resensitization in order to catch a glimpse of the ‘invisible, silent, and unspoken’ of the everyday.” The artistic research project Cityphonic Walks encourages individuals to become re-sensitized to the sonosphere and its politics through a score-based method of walking, intentional listening, and
soundmaking. It views the urban fabric not only as a sphere of sociological investigation but also as a context for action that provides opportunities for emancipatory change while aims to create a just, equitable acoustic community.

a co-created project by the PPS Students 2022/23:

Jesse, Meric, Uddipana, Conni, Irini, Janne, Catherine, David, Mushtari and Petra.

Irini Kalogeropoulou born in 1998 is a performance-based artist, musician and educator from Athens, Greece. She holds a bachelor's degree in Theatre Studies from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and a piano soloist diploma with distinction from Hellenic Conservatory. She designs community art projects, creates immersive experiences for children, adolescents and young
adults, as well as solo and video performances that explore sonic everyday life, public space as an intimate stage, trauma, absence and memory. Besides, Irini has worked as an assistant director in theatre, won prizes in music competitions and performed as a soloist with the Simfonietta Orchestra of Athens.

The drive for creating functional cities in the West through disembodied practices has detached public spaces from our bodies, instituting the stage of mutual disengagement as a retreat from everyday public spaces and  deteriorating the sense of belonging to the residential neighbourhood environment. As a result, residents either tend to avoid connecting with public spaces altogether or resemble an auto-pilot state manifested through their lack of sensory attention while on public spaces. Focusing on the two most dominant senses – visual and auditory – my research develops an interdisciplinary practice which I call ‘ChoreoSensing’ that attempts to establish a deeper sensory and embodied engagement of residents with socio-physical dimensions of their neighbourhood public spaces. The purpose of the practice is to empower residents to (re)awaken their sensory engagement with neighbourhood public spaces and subsequently, enhance their sense of belonging to the neighbourhood through a series of performative and grassroots initiatives.

Based in Toronto Mushtari Afroz is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and an emerging artistresearcher in public spaces. In her more than 20-year career as a professional dancer and choreographer, she has created and presented multiple original works across Canada and the US. While she continues to create choreographic work for the stage, her current artistic practice is developed outside of the stage and explores residents’ multi-sensory  engagement with public spaces within residential areas as a means to enhance their sense of belonging to their neighbourhoods. Incorporating sensory walking, choreographed movements, participatory practice and tactical urbanism her practice is concerned with the functions, role and purpose of public spaces within residential neighbourhoods that have been linked to the well-being and the quality of life of residents as well as to the development of a sense of community.

Nazlı Meriç Çukurova (1997) is a performance-based artist and visual designer from Istanbul, Turkey. She graduated from Istanbul Technical University Faculty of Architecture in the department of Industrial Design in 2021. During her studies, she followed various dance classes and workshops such as contemporary technique and movement improvisation, which inspired her to explore her environment through body and space practices. Presenting herself as a foreign identity and object, she tries to build relations and tensions within her surroundings. Currently pursuing Master Performing Public Space program at Fontys Fine and Performing Arts, she conducts her practice-led artistic research in public spaces, exploring co-creating with others in the socio-political context. In her project in Tilburg, she is using participatory methodologies and experimental video making to uncover the multiplicity of the city's identity.

The city is not simply a physical space but also a cultural and social space that is continually being constructed and reconstructed by its inhabitants. Unlike a fixed city image, mapping practice represents a temporary city that is open to change from an individual’ perspective. In that sense, I try to explore new ways
of seeing the city through the social imaginaries of people from different  cultures by co-creating with international student. As a tactical field, public space is an imaginary space that resists one dominant image of the city where participants produce meaning continually through observing and following their emotions in the urban environment. Aiming to understand how international students create meaning and how the city of Tilburg is constructed through multiple ways of mapping in three areas -Dwaalgebied, Winkelgebied, and Veemarktkwartier-, I focus on the performative aspects of mapping and challenge traditional mapping practices through psychogeographical and experimental video mapping.

My research is questioning the human supremacy over non-human agents, supported by posthumanist references through a musical co-creation with living non-humans and the sounds produced by different sources besides human made, namely the sound of the wind passing to the leaves of trees, rain sound and the cracking of branches breaking, among others. I take the roll of intermediate and bounding the bridge…

Inviting and sensibilizing people for listening to the music performed by the biophony and geophony as a strategy for developing communication with other living beings. A tactic for activating the public space not only from a human perspective but also taking into account their animal and vegetal thoughts. 

David is a curious and passionate musician and researcher specialized in saxophone. Currently studying the Master of Performing Public Space at Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Tilburg. He is graduated from the Master of Music also in Fontys, in the saxophone class of Ties Mellema in
2021. He has explored mostly the classical and contemporary repertoire of saxophone; however, he has explored other musical genres as Caribbean music, jazz, blues and rock, which let him to record some CDs with different ensembles. You can listen and see him on different ensembles and styles,
as a wind band orchestra, a duet with piano or improvised music and electronics or interdisciplinary performances among others.
He has received important awards such as: winner of the third place in the pan-American competition of saxophone realized by the school of music of the “Universidad Autónoma de México” (12/2008), winner of National Contest of performance “Ciudad de Bogotá”, category saxophone, realized by the Bogotá District Mayor and the Bogotá Philarmonic Orchestra (10/2012), Colombia. He was selected for participating in the final of the Chamber Music Contest Willem Twee Toonzal in Den Bosch 2021, Netherlands, with his ensemble Duet Ixcra.

Besides performer, he also has a passion for teaching music, and he has been working in several institutions in Colombia and Netherlands, sometimes as a private lesson, some other in a group lesson.

This project is exploring viewpoints - the "must-see" tourist destinations and the personal perspectives experienced by those who travel to them. Viewpoints are unique liminal spaces, frequented by travelers, that have a number of effects on our perceptions. From feeling like a giant, as if you could reach out and pick up buildings, to feeling like a tiny particle, and comprehending how very small you are in comparison with the world. At viewpoints, we are not looking down or looking up to anyone or anything in particular. We are looking out - at and for each other. They can become a truly democratizing space where different perspectives (viewpoints) can be shared and discussed. Phuket Thailand has many viewpoints but none are as iconic as the Big Buddha. This project, through chance encounters with magical realist methodologies of writing, touring, imagining and sharing stories, aims to develop and encourage more intimate tourist practices at the Big Buddha Viewpoint. Participants re-tour the viewpoint, "getting there" and "getting lost" in writing exercises, sharing magical realist stories and challenging themselves, in a playful and imaginative way, to do some critical thinking and share their own unique story and view/point.

Jesse Is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Chicagoland based in Phuket, Thailand. Their background is in playwriting, poetry, directing for theatre, musical performance, and arts education. Jesse is relentlessly curious and you might find them getting lost exploring in their own magical realist way. Their work ventures into how exaggeration, fantasy, absurdity, darkness, and humor can connect people and encourage confidence in others to perform publicly and engage with new encounters. Jesse believes that through creative practice and performative action, we can bring our imaginings, dreams, and alternate realities to life. "Let me tell you a story of a magical journey . . . and along the way, we can make another together.“

Monuments communicate thought, symbolism and hierarchies of a society. In a patriarchal structured society, these representations manifest and recreate patriarchal domination among other forms of domination, not only in public space, but also in society and in the incorporated mental structures of people. How can we transform patriarchal Monuments into feminist monumental practices using transmedia performance art methods?

This artistic research project uses performative explorations, experimental movie making and overpainting of performance photographs to detect and transform patriarchal structures. It explores alternative, feminist forms of commemoration and worshipping in public space – FEMonumental Practices as performative temporary experiments, in search of diverse intersectional queer feminist ways of thinking, imagining, connecting and representing. From the research emerged the FEMonumental Guide, a set of methods that can be used by other artists to transform monuments all over the world.

Conni Holzer is a transmedia performance artist, art therapist and artistic researcher from Austria. In her work, she addresses dominant social norms and structures, starting from individual experience, expanding from the psychological effects to the social origins, currently focusing on patriarchy. She uses art’s therapeutic and activist potential to explore contradictory paradoxical spaces within our minds, society and public spaces. Her method is to reveal layer by layer through applying various artistic media.

Born in 1988, Holzer studied Cultural and Social Anthropology and Art Therapy in Vienna and returned to Vorarlberg, the westernmost Austrian Province five years ago. Here she started exhibiting, performing and curating and is currently finishing the Master Performing Public Space.

Janne Schröder (1995) is a multidisciplinary artist in performing arts, based in Porto. Through her artistic research she is proposing a dialogue between esthetic and political, sociocultural discourses. She studied Cultural Studies and Aesthetic Practice in Hildesheim (Germany) and directed various
theatre plays, cultural festivals, installations, exhibitions and performances in Germany, Nicaragua, Italy and Portugal. Since 2020 she is part of PELE - Espaço de Contacto Social e Cultural in Porto, Portugal, developing different artistic creations in community contexts, researching the connection between participatory art and civic and political engagement. Currently she is taking part in the international Master Program "Performing Public Space" in Tilburg, the Netherlands, researching radical tenderness as a performative strategy to question our social interactions in public space and to create speculative imaginaries for a more tender social fabric.

In my research project, I’m developing the methodology “in.tender.actions“, that offers aesthetic and poetic approaches to practice radical tenderness in the public space. Radically, because I aim to fundamentally question how we interact with each other, with the unknown, with the space and ourselves and tenderness because being tender creates a specific state of being, that is open and available, for creating a paradigm of welcoming, affection and care. Through performance and participatory art, I’m researching performative practices of embodied connectivity and sensorial ethnography, that celebrate our vulnerability as a space to connect, in order to (re)invent ourselves as a society, as a communal body, we all have to take care of and to create speculative imaginaries of a more tender social fabric.

Catherine Magill is a Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) based dancer, currently enrolled in the MA Art in Public Spaces program at RMIT. Using spontaneous choreography, interweaving dance and spoken word she creates embodied translations of site, somatic data, and the emerging moment. Her content is political and poetic, speaking to issues from the personal to the global, covering topics such as feminism, ageing, the environment, and social justice. Catherine is currently engaged in a 10-week practice/cultural exchange trip in Europe, including 3 residencies in Sweden and the Fontys Bootcamp.

My practice makes visible the somatic, older, dancing body to challenge the social norms which restrict individuals’ physical response and expression as they move through public space. I dance in public space to stake a claim, to make space for, the acceptance of “free movement”. Interweaving mundane and idiosyncratic movement with the gestures and actions of passers-by, I  interrogate the unseen boundary which delineates acceptable, restricted movement and not so acceptable expressive movement in public space. It is this idea of boundary that forms the basis of my new project “Don’t Fence Me In”. The title comes from a popular 1940’s American song, which speaks
of freedom and being on the land. Dancing at different sites, with different kinds of fences, this project interrogates the different meanings and functions of fences, and the types of boundaries they create. Life is different on either side of the fence.

Born in India, The Netherlands-based artist Uddipana Das stands out as a versatile dance artist, teacher, and a choreographer with a diversified background rooted in classical Indian dance forms Sattriya and Kathak. Her unique movement vocabulary blends with extended training in contemporary dance and Indian martial art- Kalaripayattu. She imbues artistic expressions from mythological aesthetics, archaic narratives, improvisations and everyday movement. Her curiosity in embodied narratives and collaborative quests gives liberty to articulate onto proscenium stages and public spaces. Earlier, she has had the opportunity for a few commercial projects as an assistant choreographer in regional Indian movies and film advertisements in Mumbai, India.  

Uddipana Das has completed her Bachelor Degree in Arts from India and currently she is pursuing her Masters in Performing Public Space from Fontys University, Tilburg. 

 (www.dancerud.com)

Based on social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner,1979), this ongoing research project emphasizes the significance of fostering a sense of belonging as a fundamental human need and a catalyst for social cohesion within public spaces. Grounded on this understanding, the project is specifically tailored to investigate expatriates’ sense of belonging, using the act of walking to engage and explore their personal narratives within the neighborhood of Amstelveen, a municipality recognized as an expat hub in the Netherlands.

By conducting participatory research methods including a series of informal interviews, walking experiments, and collaborative movement workshop, the expat participants were encouraged to share their personal narratives and experiences of belongingness. The analysis emerged prominent movement patterns as scores, functioning as a toolkit for movement improvisation. This transformative process expands the possibilities of storytelling beyond the oral tradition to create an embodied mode of narrative. With this approach, the project aims to develop a site-specific performance piece encouraging a wider group of expats and foreigners to share their stories of belonging, fostering community and connection in their new neighborhood.

"This place to be like the clear blue sky without any boundaries, without any unpleasantness” - (expat participant)