Research Catalogue

"Esparto, embodied" is the second of a series of three installations representing the artistic component of my doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. In this exposition, I aim to unpack the research process leading to this event and its outcomes after I opened doors to it on October 18th, 2025, in Organo Hall of the Helsinki Music Center. The research project in which this series of installations is contextualized aims at understanding listening as a catalyst of remembrance in the context of a world in which things are susceptible to being quickly discarded, replaced, and, therefore, forgotten. The project has been developing through the documentation of my field trips – re-encountering certain places, objects, and voices in my homeland in rural Southeastern Spain –, the re-engagement with the documented material back in Finland, and its re-assemblage at the installations, so that this re-engagement can be further extended to an audience. The first installation, "Esparto, approached", discussed in an earlier exposition on Research Catalogue , represented a first attempt at verbalizing some of the ideas derived from working in the field and working with the materials from the field. On the other hand, the second installation, "Esparto, embodied", created many frictions emanating from a deeper questioning of those preliminary ideas. This exposition subsequently represents a space where those discomforts can cohabitate with an imaginal supposition of what the third and last installation, "Esparto, revisited", could help reveal. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3779770/3779771 Previous exposition

Insubordinate Costume: Inspiring Performance presents a comprehensive study of historical and contemporary examples of scenographic costume – the type of costume that creates an almost complete stage environment by itself, simultaneously acting as costume, set and performance. This book provides readers with an overview of the costumes, designers, context and theory that have contributed to the emerging field of ‘costume as performance’. Focusing on artists and their creative approach to space, form, materials and movement, the book looks at iconic figures such as Loie Fuller, Oskar Schlemmer and Leigh Bowery, amongst contemporary examples of practitioners that are blurring disciplinary boundaries between fashion, dance, performance and theatre. The book includes chapters by Dr Sofia Pantouvaki, who focuses on performance costume as a means of research; Christina Lindgren, who presents the findings of the four-year Costume Agency project at Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway; Charlotte Østergaard, who discusses the implications of 'Listening with costume' and Felix Choong, writing on 'Contemporary Runways, Contemporary Costumes'. The final part of the volume, 'The Practitioners’ Voice', examines current practice through interviews and contributions from key practitioners.

The Tarot Walk Part of Elinor Rowlands' practice based research in autistic stimming as artistic methodology

In recent years, it has become a real possibility for artists to engage with spatial sound technologies that allow for movement beyond the stereocentric paradigm. Thus, spatialization has mostly lent itself to avant-garde traditions, electronic music, and sound art. However, the rapid advancements of technologies have called for artists, songwriters, and musicians of all genres to contribute to this development not only by following and fitting into these new formats but also by shaping them through artistic engagements with them. When considering sound in space as a new component in the music creation toolbox, a new dimension is added that provides creative and performative potentials of situating songwriting and music creation within a spatial sound practice. Beyond the literal, what kinds of metaphorical or emotional resonance can emerge from the vibration between various bodies, such as composers, performers, and audiences, as well as bodies of sound, technologies, interfaces, instruments, scene, setting, speakers, aesthetics, and orientations? Voicing Spatial Songs was conducted by avant-pop duo SØSTR, which consists of sisters Louise Lind Foo and Sharin Foo.

This essay proposes the “Erased Museum” as both a critical framework and an institutional ethics: a museum that recognizes loss as its primary collection and disappearance as a mode of curation. Drawing from Absential Aesthetics, it argues that destruction—by fire, flood, war, neglect, theft, or obsolescence—does not terminate cultural meaning but reorganizes it into a second, invisible archive composed of voids, residues, and public conscience. Through case studies and touchstones including the Library of Alexandria, Brazil’s National Museum (2018), the Mosul Museum (2015), and architectural and curatorial practices that preserve wounds rather than conceal them (e.g., post-damage restorations and void-centered memorial architectures), the essay reframes conservation as a dialogue with entropy rather than a fantasy of permanence. It also traces contemporary artistic strategies that curate absence directly—fabricated archives, missing inventories, empty frames, restitution bureaucracies—showing how loss can become documentation rather than mere lament. The work concludes by extending the ethics of disappearance to the digital domain, where decay occurs without smoke, and by proposing “transparent loss protocols” as a future-facing curatorial responsibility.

This thesis, (Documented Artistic Research Project (Doctoral Thesis)), investigates the crisis of Regie (i.e. of the agency of directing) in a post-#MeToo landscape. It argues that the outset of this crisis lies in an expansionist gesture – rooted in the avant-gardist ambition to merge art and life – by which directors have conflated artistic mandate with managerial control; a gesture culminating in the toxic institutional cultures painfully exposed during the last decade. Starting from this point of no return, the thesis examines the question of how to acknowledge the fact of directorial power abuse without cutting our practices off from the potential – or even the necessity – of directorial agency as such. Its title “Reinventing Regietheater” thus carries the tension between a historical form of theater (generally known as “directors’ theater”) and a yet-to-be-found future expression. Conceived as artistic research, the discrete focus of the thesis is the rehearsal space and its confines. Within the micro-scale of the latter, the crisis of Regie reverberates first and foremost in the non-foreseeable instances of the actor-director interaction; namely in the increasing scrutiny applied to the tool of improvisation. In contrast to the prevailing strategy of eroding the rehearsal space’s symbolic boundaries (in the interest of directorial accountability), the thesis conceptualizes – practically as well as theoretically – a “Space of Rehearsals” as a heteronomous zone of safe but ecstatic play. This “Space of Rehearsals” is constructed through a rehearsal method informed by the psychoanalytic concept of transference as well as the interaction framework “Wheel of Consent”. To answer its main questions, the thesis presents a “written part” as well as a set of “online resources” containing the documentation and “re-stagings” of the practical experiments. Four “books of Regie” present methodological reflections, a critical genealogy of a theater of directing (based on the author’s symptomatic practice) as well as the central concepts. Three so-called “Pre-studies”, devised through practical work with professional actors/collaborators form the empirical basis of the thesis, sketching out different possibilities for the actor-director relation in a re-invented Regietheater. In the proposition resulting from the above, directorial agency does not necessarily sit with the director. Nevertheless, the disciplinary divide between actor and director is upheld; as well as the radical asymmetry in the distribution of authorial power, albeit in temporally limited and co-curated iterations. The main argument of the thesis is thus that the artistic potential of the historical form of Regietheater can be salvaged without taking a revanchist or revisionist stance: the idiosyncratic directorial agency known as Regie has its place in consent-based rehearsal settings.