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

Psychoanalysis is always targeted in theory with armchair theorizing. A very distorted sense of the phenomena from the armchair introspection and speculation and almost-limited theorizing in behavioral psychologies and even in psychoanalysis invests itself in human experiential stances instead of objective observation. To construct a theory based upon these phenomena, however, there’s too much data. What psychoanalysts do is to demonstrate to the people, through self-experiments, how simple it is to misunderstand what is actually in their consciousness and in their first-person data. What’s remarkable about consciousness is that it is not continuous. There are countless voids in the information of consciousness, some of which work in the psychoanalytic experience of diagnosing symptoms in first- person data, the beliefs about the experiences to which individuals have exclusive access. Its discontinuity, the voids and the holes are limited to these beliefs. For the fact that language works discursively, humans may renounce their privileged access to these experiences and shift their focus from what they believe to what actually is the case. In the end, there will be a scientific narrative in which the conscious self will not be a character. A living body, a living brain, and everything else is all that exists. The first-person narrative would be extracted from that third-person account. The conscious self never exists in any other sense. Thinking that it would exist is the illusion.

“Havana Syndrome” has so far been shrouded in a controversial secret as a medical condition and reluctantly made available in the scientific discourses. In spite of the reluctance, global availability of technologies to conduct the violations reported by the US diplomats was never a hidden agenda for conspiracies. US and various NGO accounts illustrate the deployments of these high-tech tools in warfare and beyond, targeting both diplomats and civilians.

Integrity of science would surely be challenged by possibilities of bias, errors, mistakes or misinterpretations. Science is charged with methods evaluating the relevance and significance of these — even when the first-person singular, which doesn’t sound objective, is in their research question of any scientific claim. With or without relevance and significance, I mash-up here a narrative with the scientific notes from Atatürk’s Nutuk / Discourse (1927) with respect to NATO.