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.

Festival Art ALIVE 2024 Folha de sala, videos e QR code

A 2-part module by the MA Transdisciplinary Studies of ZHdK, Department Kulturanalysen und Vermittlung. Held by Anna Rubi & Eirini Sourgiadaki. Autumn 2023-Spring 2024 Colour perception varies, so do the semantics of colour terminology, for both sighted and blind individuals. The questions around colour perception from ophthalmology or neurobiology perspectives to cognitive and artistic ones, are infinite: Is there a universal human experience of the blue sky, the green grass and the brown soil? How is colour perceived in the brain, how is it translated into a communicable concept and how does it affect our perceived world, our mental and physical state? What is the role of colour in synesthesia? And most importantly, does colour have to do just with vision? In this module we work with the generation of blue colour on print, using the major light source available, the Sun. The Island of Amorgos is often referred to as “Le grand bleu” after the famous french film was shot at location. Its ancient name is “Melania”. “Melani”, the Greek word for ink, (“Melano” for dark blue, cyan) as it is said that in ancient times the place was covered with dark green flora. Our investigation begins exactly with this deep tint. We pay a visit to the famous monastery and the water oracle, walk the trails to observe the sensual -not only vision-based- shades of blue. In the spring term, we participate in local activities such as beach clean-up initiatives of the remote bays by local fishermen and their boats. We visit bee-hives and herb-distilleries, we work with the most basic bits and pieces of the island to capture its essence.

Informed by queer life practices, theories, and affinities, this documented artistic research project (doctoral thesis) draws from new materialist and post-humanist discourse in order to reconsider what role visual media play in the historical need to separate the human and the environmental. It asks, how do we challenge prevailing perceptions of film and photography as inexorably linked to ideas of progress and modernisation, to linear temporality, spatial separation, and to land-based thought? Based on the acknowledgement that we need to rethink our position as humans within the multiple habitats that make up the world, I investigate the ways in which the apparatus of film, rather than being an extension of human perception, attests to the material interdependences and co-productions that hold a potential for converging human and nonhuman perspectives. "Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images" considers the cinematic space of the ocean alongside Jean Epstein’s film "Le Tempestaire" (1947); it follows early photographic chemical methods involving seaweed to both develop film and to examine the technical intra-activity of human and nonhuman regimes as part of photography itself. Within the scope of this research, I argue and demonstrate how film engages in a sensory and reciprocal involvement with the material world, one that addresses the ability to sense, not just with one’s eyes, but with the entire body. "Tidal Zones" are real locations, the habitat of a multitude of organisms, and the home of seaweeds. It is a place that is neither land nor sea but constitutes a zone with its own specific relationships and living conditions. In its refusal to be either or, it forms a (non-binary) temporal figuration between presence and absence, solid and liquid, life and death, dictated by the motions of spiral and circular time. This space, "Between Life and Images", is the chemical rockpool (the darkroom) out of which photography and film grew. The PhD submission consists of four film-works, "The Etna Epigraph" (2022), "Seaweed Film" (2023), "Coenaesthesis – It Is Not Even True That There Is Air Between Us" (2023) and "The Spiral Dramaturgy" (2019) along with the exhibition "The Tidal Zone" shown at Index - The Swedish Con-temporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, from 25 November 2022 to 12 February 2023 and at Havremagasinet, Länskonsthall Boden from 14 October 2023 to 11 February 2024. The films and documentation from the exhibitions are included in the submission, which also includes an “Opening Letter” and two texts called “Filming with the Ocean” and “Methodology of the Spiral”. This dissertation has been carried out and supervised within the graduate programme in Visual Arts at the Royal Institute of Art. The dissertation is presented at Lund University in the framework of the cooperation agreement between the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, and the Royal Institute of Art regarding doctoral education in the subject Visual Arts.

The publication Envelope offers insights into ongoing PhD projects by candidates in the PhD programme PhD in Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in an innovative format. The major thrust of “Envelope” presents content supplied by doctoral researchers based on their individual artistic research and provides insights into ongoing work processes. These visual and textual traces reveal the state of the Art within its ongoing research processes. This open format seeks to reflect on experiences through exchange, as well as document relevant developments in the field of art and research. Participating projects: Sanja Andelkovic: Voice-Shifting as a Method: Eco-Gods in Future Orthodox Chants, Supervisor: Gerhild Steinbuch Margit Busch: A Garden for a Fish, Supervisor: Virgil Widrich Johanna Bruckner: Xenopoetic De/Compositions: The Affect-Body as Interface, Supervisor: Jakob Lena Knebl Andrew Champlin: Technique Concerns: Ballet Practice Against the Western Archive, Supervisors: Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond George Demir: Ancestral Junctures: On the Expansion of Ancestral Mythologies, Supervisor: Hans Schabus Rah Eleh: Xenofuturism: A Proposal for a Liminal Futurism, Supervisor: Bouchra Khalili Wolfgang Konrad: Before the Truth in Documentary, Supervisor: Luzius Bernhard Joseph Leung: Post-digital Angst – An Arts-Based Research on the Manifestations of Angst in the Digital Milieu, Supervisor: Gabriele Rothemann Cristiana de Marchi: Casting a Shadow. On Disappearance, Emptiness, and the Haunting Power of Absence, Supervisor: Judith Eisler Jo O’Brien: Confusion: As Resistance, as Relationship, and Towards the Relational, Supervisors: Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond Marthin Rozo Castaño: Art and Conservation in the Post-Conflict, Supervisor: Cristina Garcia Grinda + Efrén Diaz Moreno Konstanze Stoiber, Untitled, Supervisor: Brigitte Felderer Fabian Weiss: Ideal Self: How We Use Photography and Technology to Present and Optimise Ourselves, Supervisor: Margarete Jahrmann Ksenia Yurkova: Figures of Reticence as a(bio)political Strategy, a Forced Necessity, and the Impossibility of Artistic Expression, Supervisor: Jakob Lena Knebl Conny Zenk: RAD Performance – Driving Voices of Resistance, Supervisor: Ruth Schnell Feel free to zoom in on each poster for ensured readability.

PhD project: Before the Truth in Documentary, Supervisor: Luzius Bernhard Envelope is a publication of the PhD in Art programme at the University of Applied Arts Vienna