Research Catalogue

In this exposition, I discuss the multimedia installation "Esparto, approached", to which I opened doors last May 10th, 2025, in Organo Hall, Helsinki Music Center. "Esparto, approached" is the first of a series of three installations representing the artistic component of my doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. The research project in which this installation is contextualized is currently titled "Listening through remembrance: An autoethnography of presence in the age of disposability". In this artistic research, the notions of listening, remembering, and presence-making are interwoven in an attempt to understand how we confer meaning and value on things despite our embeddedness in a world of disposable nature, where things are susceptible to being quickly discarded, replaced, and, therefore, forgotten. This exposition opens up a space of reflection in the aftermath of "Esparto, approached". The installation represented a collective recall of the field practice that led me to search for signs of durability in abandoned contexts of my homeland in rural Southeastern Spain. This exposition poses the following questions about it: What happened? (Description); What does "what happened" mean? (Analysis); And, how does "what happened" keep happening now? (Further becomings). The objective of creating an online exposition right after the event is to open a window to the reflective process of this investigation before its completion, thus making visible its traces. The process itself is therefore turned into an accessible outcome that manifests the continual nature of the project as a whole.

a lesson in the shadows of death entangled moment of frozen fragments embodying sacred movements through air, body, mind, mattering, voicing as if NOTHING

The Agenda Group is a research group based at KMD, connecting artistic practices "with an agenda". The group enables crossover methods rather than media specificity, allowing space for different participants. "An agenda" is here understood as an aspect of socially engaged art practices. This relates to people, narratives and history alike and is about our shared values and contribution to society as artists. The engagement relates to issues outside of the artistic context and investigates how these issues might be mediated and moderated with artistic means. The Agenda Group is open for all kinds of artistic practices, but the focus of the discussions will be on artistic practice "as crucial to both individual and societal change and development" (KMD Strategic Plan). The relationality between art and society is never as simple as it seems and these reflections involves the thinking of intensity in addition to formats, translation and displacement. In this sense the agenda of an artistic project is crucial to the understanding of its implications. The Agenda Group is a pragmatic platform to connect various members of staff at KMD (artistic-researchers, post-docs, PhD’s and maybe even MA-students). The main purpose is to meet regularly, presenting and discussing the artistic research of each of the group members. An internal critical agenda. Research group initiator: Professor Frans Jacobi

This artistic research project in Performing Arts SKH Stockholm University of Arts documents my transition from fine arts into a performative practice. I am focusing on developing a personal toolkit of methods that support this shift to a facilitator and a director/theatre-maker. The first part is my individual exploration that includes methods such as: creating character from image, writing with objects, and working with a real site in developing a semi-fictional space (exploring site-specificity through my observations and video documentation of Riga’s specific environment). The second part is a collaboration with two artists, Ģirts Dubults and Laine Luīze Freidenberga. We use a devised process concept,Sister Planets, to translate our embodied cultural experiences and identities into performative language. This method emphasises building shared poetics through methods of generating shared poems, visualisation, movement with objects, and integrating methods from the collaborators’ individual practices. Alongside methodological development, a strong interest in my identity as a maker emerged, deeply influencing my artistic inquiry. This stiltedness—as a young female artist from Latvia and Eastern Europe—shapes the themes of belonging and alienation in the Scandinavian cultural context and intersectionality in my work. I investigate how cultural, gendered, and geopolitical factors inform performance and dramaturgy. These personal reflections have evolved into shared thematic concerns within my collaborations, where individual histories and embodied memories merge into a collective exploration. Through this research, I seek new dramaturgical forms that channel socio-political narratives within primarily visual and poetic means of expression.

This artistic doctoral research approaches art, not as a variety of artworks or performances, but as a variety of collective bodies that are summoned. It addresses the subordinate and complicit way collective audience bodies form in relation to artistic performances. The commentary introduces the concept of an “audience body”, emerging when individual bodies gather to become an audience. Audience bodies are described through preconditions that are needed for one to appear, conditions that contribute to its subsistence and variables that determine the primary qualities and the degree of actuality of that audience body. More specifically, the commentary addresses the local genre of “esitystaide”, developed especially in the Helsinki-area during the last 30 years. Neologism “beforemance art” is introduced due to a lack of an English equivalent. Esitystaide/beforemance art is the artistic context of this study and is presented as a genre of art, in which the complicity of audience bodies is a fundamental material of artistic creation. The Finnish word “esitys”, being the medium of the genre of esitystaide, is defined as the sum of a performance and an audience body. The theoretical approach towards audience bodies is presented as impartial with regard to different genres of art, but the practice of research favours esitystaide/beforemance art. This leads to political conclusions that defend the exposed complicity of and the experimental relation to audience bodies which are characteristic for this specific genre. This theoretical argumentation has been developed through an iterative series of 30 drafts and two examined artistic parts, made by the author, as well as through a parapractice of audience membership. The drafts and examined parts are works of esitystaide/beforemance art, in which printed or digital texts are staged in different ways for audiences to read. The works and the thinking developed in them have been significantly affected by dialogues with audience members and their feedback. The commentary discloses how the process of thinking, resulting in the main arguments of the work, has evolved through this artistic research practice and how temporal, spatial, textual and material design of the events has been developed to address more adequately the phenomenon of an audience body. The parapractice of audience membership is introduced as a term describing the attendance of artworks made by others—a way of accumulating knowledge parallel to and yet different from practicing art. The arguments made in the commentary aim to provide conceptual tools for artists, scholars and pedagogues who attend the phenomenon of audience in their work. They can also serve as a basis for further research on the political significance of esitystaide/beforemance art and related art forms. Methodologically, the research offers an example of an iterative and dialogical artistic research practice and its presentation; the relationship between art and theory unfolds as both fruitful and troubled. Through the introduction of the parapractice of audience membership, it argues for using art, equally to the use of bibliographical materials, as reference material of artistic research. Through the use of a Finnish term and its local context as part of concept-creation in English, the work defends the importance of local thinking, which links artistic research to the land upon which it takes form.

This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, production, performance, and technology. This interview features Bryan Senti, American composer, violinist, and producer, whose work bridges classical tradition, Latin American heritage, and cinematic experimentation. His music, ranging from solo albums such as Manu to film scores and collaborative projects, combines impressionistic harmony, acoustic warmth, and electronic texture, shaping a distinct post-classical voice that is both intimate and expansive. In the conversation, Senti reflects on the integration of composition and production within the digital environment, the evolving relationship between notation and sound, and the ways in which tools like the DAW and immersive formats such as Dolby Atmos redefine musical form and spatial perception. He also discusses authorship in film music, the ethics of technology, and the need to preserve a human, performative presence in an increasingly algorithmic landscape. Senti’s reflections reveal a vision of music as a living craft, an art of listening, shaping, and reimagining sound, where composition becomes a dialogue between emotion, material, and space.