Research Catalogue

Operafrø / seed is a site-specific performance cycle with opera singers and improvisational performers in a ritual form, created for babies and parents together with seeds, plants and trees in a botanical garden. Through a playful and free improvisational musical approach to creating art for the little ones, we have, based on Vivaldi's Four Seasons, created a baby opera for the smallest seeds, both human and plant seeds. Babies have their own little big voice, which can be said to be a sprout for the adult big voice. In the span between the baby voice and the opera voice we can hear that a string is ringing! During the four seasons in Ringve Botanical Garden through 2023, and together with the audience of babies and parents, the artists have investigated seeds, sprouts, plants and trees through rituals, play and theater in sympoetic (Haraway) co-creation with nature, song, rhythms, babies, and parents.

I have collaborated with the composer David Matthews for over thirty years. This exposition focuses on the ideas and insights that result from our long-term work together on music for violin (and viola alone. Matthews's output in this arena is prolific, and 2/3rds of his solo works have been written for me.

Sculpted and painted wood, combined with treated rusty objects. Duct tape with boat paint models for metal sheet sculptures, 2020. Digital drawings, 2021, 2023. Dutch steel sailing boat part-restoration and renovation, Amsterdam (with Sean A. Hladkyj), 2019 until summer 2020. I exposed relief and improvised sculptures made with industrial paints, as well as found objects, to weather conditions, including heavy rain and wind, over a few months on a floating timber raft. Working with the changes the weather was causing to the ad hoc studio, I made changes until the painting was finished, photographed, then dumped. Someone collected the relief. I applied the colours from those available in a symbolic manner, abstracting the view of a ghetto in a large city. The objects stand for the landmarks. The pieces would comprise of the scenography for a theatre performance, informed by my conversations with a theatre lighting technician. The performance would also include a donation event of the art objects. See external link for the theatre play, based on the tradition of the philosophical dialogue and employing the idea of performing philosophy to make it accessible to a wider audience. Political asylum has been traditionally offered to people who flee from their countries of origin and citizenship, because of violations of their dignity, which is a human right, and other basic human rights, such as safety and liberty, due to their political beliefs and related activities, if any. Currently, seven human rights of mine, five basic, have been infringed in the United Kingdom, where I have been a citizen since 2011; the origin is my native Greece. Political asylum is only offered to people, who are non-citizens of the country where asylum is sought from. At the same time, political asylum has become harder to offer, due to the global nature of persecution of whoever is perceived as a dissident by authoritarians. Since 2020, Forza Nuova, the Italian affiliate of the Greek Golden Dawn, with contacts in the Middle East, specifically Hezbollah, has participated in the organised international criminal case, of which I have been the target, originating from my native Greece, "accelerating" in the Netherlands and the UK in 2020, Covid-19. This happened with the theft of my personal details, specifically my Greek driver's license number, by Italians, in Amsterdam, in the winter of 2020. My number was used on four fake Italian driver's licenses,in my name known as (aka), for criminal activity in the UK. My name known as (aka) was also used on four fake Italian passports for fictitious female Albanian citizens, succeeding two fake Albanian and a fake Kosovo passports for three of the four Greek teenage users, with different details than the fake Italian ones, which three of the four teenagers had: the youngest one, also had another fake Albanian, preceding the fake Kosovo, again with different details than the other fakes she had. A deceased Belgian filmmaker's, Chantal Akerman's, life and health insurance was falsified by the use of the two fake Albanian passports in 2018 and extended with the fake Kosovo, for the youngest, in 2019. Forza Nuova is suspected of being connected to two abductions: one domestic of an Italian citizen circa 2020 and one in Holland of a Spanish citizen circa 2022. Notably, Roberto Fiore, Forza Nuova's neo-fascist leader, inherited briefly Alessandra Mussolini's post in the EU parliament. All the more so, after mediation with the Albanian government, the Italian government settled in the autumn of 2024 one remaining fake Italian passport for a fictitious Albanian citizen, probably in connection with Golden Dawn, who had their own three MPs in the EU parliament. Rumours have it that Fiore was once upon a time an MI6 agent. It is confirmed that he has ties with the British National Party (BNP), the British XRW component. Italian Jews, including Greco-Italian Jews, were persecuted by the Catholics and almost exterminated in the late nineteenth century. My great grandfather, from my father's side, with the first name Gianni, went to my native Greece, from the North of Italy, around that time, He became Hellenicised and adopted the Greek Orthodox religion. We don't know his surname. The Jews is the archetypical diasporic population historically speaking. The Holocaust and the Slavery past are the black marks of modern historical times. Drawing on the philosophical notion of impossible objects, the works attempted an indirect postcolonial critique: a suggestion for alternative, autonomous and communitarian lifestyles; and a performative metaphor for global refugees of all kinds. At the time, in autumn 2019, I had attended an environmental protest in Amsterdam that was generally peaceful. Investigatory research with artworks, some of it carried out in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where I was a philosophy student, from 2017 until late 2019, and remained until the beginning of autumn 2020. I did not have student insurance, as it was obligatory, because I was covered by the NHS through EHIC (European Community coverage), while the UK was still in the EU. I didn't have travel insurance either. Dutch travel insurance, under the reference number E111, was opened by unknowns on my behalf in the summer of 2020, to cover the expenses of routine women's healthcare and family planning tests, but was closed as fraudulent after I reported to the Dutch fraud authority that I didn't open it myself; neither I had any knowledge about who might have done that. The exposition also showcases and juxtaposes a performative video, drawings and other visual art, by "Mohammed", aka 'Onzedouze', an investigator, who turned his hand to art, in order to record and communicate, in an improvised, codified , but still artistic manner, what was of interest to him with regards to a relevant investigation. The title "Enlightenment Panel" comes from Peter Sloterdijk's 'Critique of Cynical Reason', published in 1983, which critically discusses philosophical and popular cynicism. See exposition, also in connection with expositions under 'Art and Activism Exposed as Research Blog'.

In the year 2088, the artist Poem Johnson dies at the age of 102. His estate bequeaths his artworks and papers to the Kamau Brathwaite Center for Research in Black Studies. The archive contains eleven artistic outputs spanning Jacquard-woven textiles, video installations, performance works, and an artist book. This is the speculative framework of Marc Johnson's practice-based dissertation, which examines how artists from diasporic communities can shape archival custody and posthumous reception of their work before institutional stewardship begins. The future-oriented framing draws on Kamau Brathwaite's concept of tidalectics, a geopoetic model of history that combines Einsteinian non-linear time with Caribbean routes and roots. Brathwaite argues that diasporic histories cannot be traced to a single origin point. In the context of African diaspora, where displacement and forced migration fracture linear genealogies, identity and history move in tidal patterns across multiple shores and temporalities. This dissertation reimagines tidalectics through material practice, using the speculative structure to displace linear historiography, interrogate the politics of memory-making, and challenge the assumed stability and permanence of archival records. The artworks trace a research journey of artistic experiments conducted between 2021 and 2026. The Sea is History (2024) is a series of Jacquard-woven textiles that engage the colonial legacies of industrial textile production and cotton economies while rendering the ocean as living archive. The loom's punch-card system is itself an early form of data storage, and becomes a site for counter-archival practice that reclaims colonial infrastructure to materialize suppressed narratives. Sun/Sum (2024) is a performance work developed through public rehearsals that privileges process over product, establishing rehearsal-as-research methodology where Afrodiasporic movement vocabularies circulate through iterative process rather than fixed performance scores. Riot/Uprising (2023) is a three-channel video installation that foregrounds the materiality of decaying footage from the 1971 Attica prison uprising, directing attention across screens through sound remixing. Through speculative fabulation, the dissertation generates a post-custodial future: practical frameworks for how artists from diasporic and Indigenous communities can intervene in preservation systems before depositing materials into institutional care, shaping how their work will be encountered, interpreted, and activated by future researchers and communities.

Mot bakgrund av utomhuspedagogikens positiva effekt på kreativitet så har jag i den här studien undersökt bildundervisning i skogen. I studien använder jag arbetsmetoden A/R/tography och den post-kvalitativa metodologin för att främja ett rhizomatiskt förhållningssätt till undersökandet och lärandet. Studiens fokus är att förändra mål, kravfyllda tankar och ramar för att ge plats åt mer undersökande, experimenterande och fantasifullt förhållningssätt till bildlektionen. Syftet är också att skapa händelser som kan stärka idéprocesser och öka närvaron med omvärlden under bildlektionen genom ett inkluderande och holistiskt tillvägagångssätt. Jag har arbetat med detta genom ett teoretiskt perspektiv som belyser mänskliga och icke-mänskliga aktörers roll i lärandet. Centralt i undersökandet av konstnärliga metoder och material har Jane Bennets begrepp “Thing-power” varit plattformen för att öppna upp en stark närvaro med material och omvärlden. Frågeställningarna som bearbetats är: Hur skapar skogen ett “lärandets rum” som främjar sättet att undersöka material i en bildpedagogisk process? Och: Hur stimulerar perspektivet "Thing-power" en utveckling av bildpedagogiska arbetsmetoder? Frågorna har jag utforskat genom en konstnärlig process med olika händelser som jag i arbetet satt ihop till ett lektionsupplägg i skogen. Två utforskande händelser bearbetas och analyseras utifrån begreppen thing-power, konst-som-görande, ännu-icke-sedda, släta rum och lerbaserad språklighet. Studien har visat hur en större närvaro och uppmärksamhet till de icke mänskliga krafterna hjälper till i konstnärliga processer och att skogen är en plats som gör det enklare att undersöka och experimentera med material på nya sätt.

'Latency Records: The Delay, an Inhabitable Field' analyses a fictional mediated environment by studying the lapses of time involved in its diffusion. Approaching media as a source for new habits of perception over a landscape, it is concerned with the electronic tools used for the representation of nature; in particular those applied for near-real-time broadcast from sensory meteorological tools, webcams or satellites. Introduced with seven images from audiovisual references, punctuated by fourteen quotes from various sources and interwoven to three poems written exclusively for the essay, 'Latency Records: The Delay, an Inhabitable Field' is inspired by humans’ incomprehension of the artificial structures in which they blindly place their hopes for representing the unrepresentable: a living image of the exterior world. In doing so, it delves into humans’ attempts to portray themselves in order to comprehend who they are. Therefore, 'Latency Records: The Delay, an Inhabitable Field' interrogates the instantaneity of these naturalistic archives, ultimately shaping our cognitive engagement with our environment—which acts both as a mirror and a departure from it.