recent activities
As teleperformances do Perforum Desterro enquanto pesquisa artística
(2025)
Yara Guasque
Desenvolvimento de investigação artística em teleperformance entre os anos de 1999 e 2001, quando não existia uma taxinomia adequada.
As teleperformances do Perforum Desterro partiram da pesquisa da linguagem intermídia da telecomunicação síncrona. As teleperformances foram a prática artística e, paralelamente, subsidiaram o levantamento teórico sobre telepresença realizado como parte de meu doutoramento no Programa de Pós-graduação de Comunicação e Semiótica da PUCSP (COS).
O Perforum nasceu em São Paulo das ideias de Artur Matuck acerca dos “Colaboratórios de Mídia e Performance” a serem criados em diferentes cidades. No segundo semestre de 1998 cursei a disciplina Escrituras Eletrônicas, ministrada por Artur Matuck na pós-graduação da Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo, ECA/USP. Entre minhas idas a São Paulo, passei a fazer parte do grupo de pesquisa da disciplina, antes mesmo de ingressar oficialmente como doutoranda em um Programa de Pós Graduação. Parte dos integrantes atuaram no início do projeto Perforum. Paula Perissinoto e Ricardo Barreto, fundadores no ano de 2000 do Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica, FILE, Tereza Labarrère, Otávio Donasci, o artista criador das videocriaturas, Edson Luiz de Oliveira, Cesar Barros, Suzana Moraes. Outros, como Daniel Seda, aderiram ao grupo mais tarde. O Perforum no ano de 1999 se bifurcou em Perforum Desterro, coordenado por Yara Guasque pela Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina, UDESC, e Perforum São Paulo coordenado por Artur Matuck pela USP. Os dois grupos desenvolviam colaborativamente scripts como proposição de interação e performance a distância.
Creating Cultures of Care
(2025)
Nina Goedegebure, Tim Outshoorn, Gjilke Wytske Keuning, Debbie Straver
Nine research groups from HKU, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Fontys, and Utrecht University of Applied Sciences are joining forces with UvH and UMCU to bring a new perspective on healthcare through the arts, supported by the SIA-SPRONG grant. Using a transdisciplinary approach, this research group and its partners are developing new methods, practices, and scenarios within healthcare and well-being contexts—not for, but with each other.
(Un)Realised Projects
(2025)
Betty Nigianni
"Unlike unrealized architectural projects, which are frequently exhibited and circulated, unrealized artworks tend to remain unnoticed or little known. But perhaps there is another form of artistic agency in the partial expression, the incomplete idea, the projection of a mere intention? Agency of Unrealized Projects (AUP) seeks to document and display these works, in this way charting the terrain of a contingent future."
From AUP-eflux Archive
In painting, the artist can also be a model for the artwork. In performance art, artist and model come together for the performance. The exposition explores the role of figuration in contemporary art.
Some of the material was selected for my participation, with my artistic pseudonym, Betty Nigianni, in conceptual artist's Janine Antoni workshop, "Loving Care", Performance Matters: Performing Idea, Toynbee Studios, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2010
With essay about Marina Abramovic's work, published at eflux/Art and Education papers, 2012; originally presented as a conference paper at the Yale Centre for British Art, 2010, slides including the artist's writings.
Fragments of the research for the installation project, developed in the studio and through my participation in urban research workshops, have been archived at AUP-eflux Archive.
recent publications
“Songs of despair and freedom”. Interview with Sashko Protyah.
(2025)
Vadim Keylin
Sashko Protyah is a film director and activist from Mariupol, Ukraine. He's a co-founder of Freefilmers, a collective of artists and filmmakers. In his films, he works with topics of memory, otherness, and alienation. Now Sashko is based in Zaporizhzhia and volunteers for IDPs and the Ukrainian army.
This interview was taken in February 2024 over email.
A Butterfly Akin to a Bird: Imagining New Jazz in Leningrad
(2025)
Sam Riley
Drawing from samizdat literature, contemporaneous interviews, and musical recordings, this paper investigates the reception and creation of “new jazz” in late socialist Leningrad. Figures of interest are critic Efim Barban and pianist Sergei Kurekhin. In my analysis, I read an understanding of “freedom” in this instance as more than simply a freedom from state socialism and position these works in a larger discourse regarding “the emancipation” of European jazz from African-American hegemony. This analysis reveals that new jazz was an amorphous concept in its circulating from Barban to Kurekhin and back again, its meaning shifting between the aesthetically universal and culturally particular. This enlivens understandings of avantgarde jazz in the late Soviet imagination – most often framed as a part of the “imagined West” (following Yurchak 2006) – by illustrating that new jazz carried a more complicated imagination variously projected as a universal, a European, and a Soviet/Russian musical form (rather than an American importation).
Sounding the dissolution from a Cosmic Space
(2025)
Giada Dalla Bonta
Whereas the sonic experimentations at the dawn of the October Revolution have been extensively documented, little research has been conducted on practices at the intersection of sound and art during the USSR dissolution. This article explores the political significance of sonic practices –alongside their cultural, artistic, and sensory dimensions– in late Soviet Russia's unofficial art scene, examining the case study of the New Artists group in Leningrad and their shift from mocking avant-garde legacies to a more organically interdisciplinary approach, presumably initiating rave culture in the region. This shift, along with the re-appropriation of cosmism, is framed as a sonic fiction made of music, dance, art, queer inclusivity that aimed at transcending the Iron Curtain and extending conceptually to the Universe. In particular, the paper aims to highlight the decisive influence, often overshadowed by the figure of Novikov, of musicians Valeriy Alakhov and Igor’ Verichev (New Composers) in such evolution by informing the group's poetic strategies and compositions in accordance with their sonic thinking and imagery. The understanding of “togetherness” as constitutive element of late Soviet underground culture and of the hypernormalized official ideology’s de-territorialization (Yurchak 2006) also demonstrates, through J.-L. Nancy’s theory of communal bodies, the role of participatory and corporeal sonic experiences in creating sonic fictions from “interplanetary sounds” able to penetrate socio-cultural dynamics. The artists’ “ubiquitous” (vsyochestvo) principle of absolute synthesis of the arts is thus extended to the realm of sonic materiality, multisensoriality and sonic agency, articulating afresh its appellation of “new avantgarde” of the empire’s dissolution. This article delves into the New Artists' initial evolution before their transition into the more reactionary "New Academy" formation, as some artistic strategies, successfully subversive under Gorbachev, faltered in the post-Soviet landscape and strengthened reactionary forces now intertwined with the ruling power. A forthcoming publication in the Journal of Sonic Studies (Dalla Bontà: 2024) will delve into this subsequent phase during the 1990s, offering insights into the intricate dynamics driving this seemingly contradictory development in the group and in certain figures in the Russian underground scene.