Research Catalogue

I like to approach my body of work as being one big opera. Every object, wearable object or costume serves the opera. Every spatial costume a backdrop, every sculpture a prop, every wearable object a costume, every costume a character. One day I will make an opera consisting of all my works. Welcome to my world, welcome to my opera

LOVE LETTERS is an ongoing multimodal artistic research project exploring strategies and politics of participation, love letters as a form of communication, performativity of text and writing, intimacy and (imagined) boundaries between the "private" and the "public", forms of fandom, discourses on liveness, and the materiality and performativity of the LED ticker as an artistic medium. PROJECT TIMELINE AND CONTRIBUTIONS 2024 // Lecture Performance "How to Facilitate Careful Listening and Non-Coercive Participation in Artistic Research? LED Tickers and Love Letter Writing as Research Tools", Forum Artistic Research // Symposium "Listen for Beginnings", Gustav Mahler Private University Klagenfurt (Proceedings article forthcoming in 2025) 2023-2024 // Participatory installation at the Kunstzelle // WUK Vienna and Vienna Art Week 2023 festival 2020-2022 // Experiments within the frame of the artistic research project "TACTICS for a COLLECTIVE BODY" at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, PI's: Renata Epifanio Lamenza and Stef Assandri 2021 // video contributions LOVE LETTER TO JENNY HOLZER and WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? in the Facebook Lockdown Calendar of WUK performing arts Vienna

In A place Like This sets out to investigate and expand the issues and critical discourses within Sandborg and Higgins' current collaborative research practice. The central focus for the research is concerned with how art, in this instance photographic and painted image making and text, can be used as an agent or catalyst of understanding and critical reflection. The research methodology is constructed through photography, painting, drawing and text. This utilises the form of an artist publication as a point of critically engaged dissemination: a place for the tension between conflicting ideas and investigation to be explored through discussion. The research question is focused on how the production of the image and the act of making images can communicate or describe moments of erasure or remembering in terms of historical and personal narratives with direct reference to moments of violence and place. This is seen not in terms of a nostalgic remembrance of the past; instead as one that is rife with complicated layers and dynamics where recognition is denied the ability to locate a physical representation. Embedded in this is an exploration of particular questions concerning the ethics of representation: the depiction of ourselves and other? In this sense it brings into question an examination of the act of remembering as a thing in itself, through the production of the image and text, contexts of knowledge and cultural discourses explored through the form of an artists publication.

Skolbrandsarkeologi (“School Fire Archaeology”) is an artistic excavation (2022–2026) of Slättgårdsskolan in Skärholmen, Stockholm, led by artist Patrick Kretschek. The art project uses contemporary archaeology, participatory art, and documentary methods to explore the aftermath of the June 1, 2020, school fire. It combines text, photography, film, and artifacts to narrate the event through testimonies from students, teachers, parents, and the public. Exhibited locally at culture house FOLK in Skärholmen, it offers a space for reflection on loss, memory, and reconstruction.

What is a narrative, when it moves through time and history, when it moves through bodies? The narrative is always in danger of dying, until it is picked up and given new movement into new contexts. Where does the new begin? Where does the old one go? Vocalist Live Maria Roggen and pianist Ingfrid Breie Nyhus have over several years investigated duo music that was once romantic music. Through time, body, forgetfulness, fallibility – and improvisation as a method – the music has merged with the whims, derailments and backtracks of the inner sound and the duo's body. Where does the narrative live in the next moment?

Darkness Matters displays historic lightscapes, specifically at night, from petroglyphs to James Webb Telescope images. The exposition constructs a sort of cabinet of curiosities and wants to take the visitor on a private journey to a virtual exhibition space to re-embrace the endeavors under and around the nocturnal vault, an underrepresented micro-story of our times. By researching archive material, image recordings and other available data Costanza Julia Bani creates speculative reconstructions of our nights and our relationship to the universe behind the sky we can see with our naked eye. Starting from fireflies in olive groves, alpine forests and the Milky Way, the exposition becomes a visual experience around darknesses and light pollution that has been transforming our nocturnal habitat since the introduction of artificial light.