Research Catalogue

Initiated in 2020, Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orient to self, others, world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? A dorsal orientation foregrounds an active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

This exposition or archive is a work in progress, under construction, for gathering material of encounters with junipers.

Only Here to Adore is an artistic research of the interaction between garden owners and plants. It unfolds in three parts. The first part takes place at Landlyst Plantecenter just outside Hjørring in the North of Denmark where Gerner Nielsen interviews garden owners about what they have purchased at the garden center and their hopes and dreams for their summer garden. These interviews form the foundation for developing scores and a choreography for a performance that Gerner Nielsen and another performer will show at Vendsyssel Kunstmuseum in Denmark. The performance is also filmed by Louise Ørsted Jensen and turned into a video work. Curated by Skal Contemporary

This article looks from a psychoanalytic-cultural approach to the ideologies and economy-politics in the truths and narratives around these places and events concerning ethnic, religious and national identities, and offers two opinions into a psycho-cultural narrative of parks, monumental places and genocides in Turkey. The complex is the collision of the secular and the sacred, for which the article presents a detailed interpretation of the material/wordly and the religious/otherworldly.

In the humanities and cultural sciences, the humor for fictionalizing a “truth” is described as “mocking”. Though it is more encountered in human sciences, this mode of structuration of events, happenings is also a significant concept in the STEM sciences. Mocking what is the kernel of truth of the Real, and what could be or what should be done about what is presented as the origin or the truth.

There has been an overwhelming mediatization of corruption, pandemics, wars and conflicts for decades going on through the 2000s. When the “Israel-Hamas War” had just begun in the fall of 2023, for instance, the mainstream media was covering it with wordy psycho-politics. Instead, what I suggest in this article is a detour to a centennial relevance for the psychopolitics of Israeli, Turkey, the USA and current global realities. A relevance that was missing in the psychopolitical realities of countries founded in the interwar and post-war world. Comparing two countries of these stages, Israel to Turkey, I think they are similar in regards to the constitution of national identity politics. It is Sigmund Freud’s relevance shrouded in the shadows for a century, which is not merely a relevance of his own. His work is as powerful a founder of psychoanalysis as the foundations of countries like Turkey and Israel.