Research Catalogue

In the Mirror of Care Work researches skills within Nordic interactive performance practices. Using the mirror as a metaphor for visualisation and connection, artist Inga Gerner Nielsen brings into conversation the work of nurses and interactive performers. By inviting in the perspectives of care workers and looking into the history of their profession, Inga engages in discussions about the politics, mythologies and poetics of her own field. What do we see when we look in the mirror, and when that mirror is a nurse? Do we, as performers – like the nurses were once said to – abide by the feeling of a calling? Does this involve a kind of spiritual care for our audience? And what of the nurses’ working conditions should we perhaps try to adopt as (care giving) performers? The project visited Stockholm (MDT) in September 2023 and Helsinki in January 2024 in a two-day symposium to meet and exchange with local artists about the aspect of care work in their artistic practice . The project is based in a long-term collaboration with the nursing school at UCN Hjørring & Thisted in the north of Denmark. Together with teacher of the History of Nursing, Helle Kronborg Krogsgaard, Inga gerner Nielsen is developing ways of integrating interative performance excersices and visual art into the teaching of 1.st, 4th and 7th semester nursing students.

Great Sweetness is a written companion of the artistic research project Night of Dark Angels, which investigates how erotic mysticism, queer vampire narratives, and somatic performance can function as modes of embodied knowledge. The text explores “great sweetness” as a recurring motif in hagiographic writings of mystics and in queer vampire literature, where ecstatic pleasure, abjection, and desire exceed normative frameworks of sexuality, subjectivity, and transcendence. Drawing on Lacanian jouissance and Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, the research approaches great sweetness as an excessive affective state—simultaneously pleasurable and disturbing—that destabilizes boundaries between self and other, sacred and profane, human and non-human. Methodologically, the text operates through a situated, phenomenological, and autoethnographic approach, treating writing not as representation but as a performative practice that accompanies and informs artistic experimentation. Great Sweetness functions as a conceptual and affective archive that feeds directly into the development of experimental somatic LARP (Live Action Role Play) scores within Night of Dark Angels. This LARP experiment translates textual research into collective, embodied situations, where figures of mystics and queer vampires are enacted as tools for exploring vulnerability, monstrosity, care, and resistance. Rather than aiming at theoretical closure, the text proposes great sweetness as a mode of embodied thinking—one that foregrounds process, relationality, and affect, and that opens artistic research toward antifascist, feminist, and queer forms of collective imagination and practice.

This research explores creation as a form of violence that operates through interruption, erasure, and bodily pressure rather than through visible conflict or aggression. Through a conference-performance, writing is treated as an unstable action: it begins, stops, fails, and is physically destroyed without revealing its content. The work focuses on moments where creation resists completion, and where decisions to stop, delete, or abandon become central gestures. By placing the performer behind the audience and withholding textual legibility, the research shifts attention from meaning to process, from narrative to tension. Creation is approached not as expression or inspiration, but as a concrete and irreversible experience that acts upon the body and its limits.

This exposition reflects on the phenomenon of the public transport stop as a metaphorical framework for the condition of migration and the figure of the waiting individual. By centering the act of waiting, this research examines how mutual understanding and cultural translation unfold within intercultural encounters. The bus stop serves as both a physical site and a symbolic threshold, a space of transition, suspension, and projection toward an uncertain future. Within this context, the project traces the transformative phases of subjectivity experienced during emigration, emphasizing the temporal dimension of waiting, expectation, and the tension inherent in moments of immobility. The final installation is situated directly within the public sphere, specifically at bus stops, where the object destabilizes the everyday rhythm of transit. By oscillating between staged intervention and authentic environment, the project foregrounds the paradoxical beauty of stillness, alongside the latent unease of anticipation.

This exposition introduces an experimental framework for acquiring the “inner power” improvisation associated with 19th‑century non-literate Karelian kantele players. While their precise thought processes remain unknowable, it is clear they did not focus on finger control. The method emphasizes internalizing traditional plucking patterns without sheet music, allowing subconscious decision‑making to guide improvisation. Stepwise learning of increasingly complex patterns enables musicians to combine and vary them freely, creating a continuous flow of tones in which the player becomes part of the sound field. Contemporary practice thus reconnects with what kantele players once described as “playing their inner power” (“soitan omaa mahtia”), a style later termed “Quiet Exaltation” by folk music researcher Armas Otto Väisänen.

Guided by the members of the project PÁR-A-GEM (Bruno Pereira, Fernando José Pereira and Mário Azevedo) as guest editors, this edition offers in-depth explorations of the intersections between media, temporality, and embodied artistic research.