Research Catalogue

An overview of Elisabeth Belgrano's artistic / performance / research and teaching in higher arts education 2004-ongoing

This artistic research project investigates the endangered material culture, ecological knowledge, and social structures of Anatolia’s Yörük nomads, whose traditional lifeways are under threat from forced settlement policies, climate instability, and capitalist extraction. Through participant observation, filmmaking, and collaborative ethnography, we explore how Yörük tent-making, goat-hair weaving, herding, and seasonal migration (Göç) embody a metabolic balance misaligned with the extractive logic of the Capitalocene. Rather than treating Yörük practices as folklore, we engage with them as valid epistemic systems, centering co-creation, shared decision-making, and relational trust to resist extractive research paradigms. Initial fieldwork with tribes in Ahmetli, Kuyucak, Başaran, Yatağan, and the Taurus Mountains reveals a spectrum of adaptation and precarity: from the fragmentation of migration routes by privatization and industrial expansion to the resilience of pragmatic adaptations, such as solar-powered tents and digital connectivity. The Yörük’s decentralized, undogmatic knowledge systems, rooted in cyclical mobility, communal labor, and reciprocal relations with the land, offer counter-models to the homogenizing forces of modernity. Their tents, weaving techniques, and seasonal rhythms reflect an ecological intelligence now strained by ecological degradation and economic pressures. Initial findings, including video documentation of Göç traditions and tent-making, highlight the tensions between memory and practice, as elders’ testimonies and adaptive strategies (e.g., solar panels, boot-making revival) reveal both loss and resistance. Future research will deepen these engagements, joining the 2027 Göç to document how Yörük communities navigate a shrinking world, where ancestral pathways and meanings are increasingly fragile. The project aims to co-create a multimodal archive that preserves their knowledge while interrogating the possibilities of alternative lifestyles in the Capitalocene.

MAGIC ON GLASS ABSTRACT This research analyzes and formalizes an original technique that uses a transparent adhesive substrate applied to glass as a surface for powdery and liquid materials, in particular charcoal and watercolor. The adhesive membrane, generated by the uneven drying of the glue, transforms the glass into an artificial skin capable of retaining the material without absorbing it, creating an intermediate condition between smooth and rough, stable and unstable. Charcoal, on this surface, produces atmospheric images characterized by velvety grays, flaked edges, and variable density; watercolor generates hydrodynamic phenomena such as irregular expansions, chromatic fractures, and pigment accumulations. In both cases, the image is not the result of a fixed gesture, but the outcome of a process in which the material participates autonomously in the formation of the work. The technique stands out in the contemporary art scene as an original contribution, as it introduces a new way of using glass as an active surface and proposes a conception of the image as an apparition, a phenomenon, and an unstable equilibrium. The documentation of the works confirms the processual nature of the technique and its ability to record traces of atmospheric and hydrodynamic phenomena. The research also highlights the future potential of the technique, including multiple stratifications, installation applications, and interactions with hybrid materials. The fragility, unpredictability, and liminal nature of the membrane become constituent elements of a visual language that combines material experimentation, phenomenological sensitivity, and the poetics of the threshold.

This essay examines the challenges of generative AI in composing ‘new’ music. The focus is on the commercial generative AI applications (i.e. AI music generators) due to their prominence in the mainstream cultural and technological discourse. The essay adopts a philosophical rather than a technological approach, situating the use of generative AI in music within a broader societal, cultural, and environmental context. If AI and music (understood as normative practices) are majoritarian, molar, and arborescent entities, then the approach taken here is Deleuzian: minoritarian, molecular, and rhizomatic. By engaging with their fault lines, disassembling and reassembling their structures, and connecting them to the wider world, the essay presents an alternative way of thinking about AI and music – and AI in music – and proposes one such possible application.

Vanessa Theme Ament’s "The Foley Grail" was, for a long time, the only publication to discuss in detail the art of film sound effects (foley). In this issue, we review the third edition of the book while in dialogue with the author herself.

Norths: Navigating Instability By Ear exposes a diversity of transdisciplinary artistic research threads within Norths, a growing body of environmental sound art practice at an intersection of data and listening experience. By rendering intangible data representations physically perceptible, ‘northness’ - understood as location, place, idea, and fiction - becomes a site for material interrogation of ‘standards’ applied to measurement, perception, being, knowing, and acting. Critical phenomenological and ecological issues emerge from the noise encountered when sonifying (near) real-time seismic and geomagnetic data, as well as data from communication systems. In the present exposition conceptual corollaries from my experience making, reflecting on, and exhibiting these works are diffracted through language in a project to expose the material propositions of these works themselves. Cross-modulation (feedback) loops established within this exposition connect artistic practice to philosophical-linguistic expression, providing both an explication and an exploratory continuation of my ongoing research practice.