Research Catalogue

Anatomy of Loss: An exposition

Building-Sound Compositions in (half-)public places: Starting from Graz, six vacant buildings in different European cities were researched as aural architectures and understood and experienced as an integral part of building-sound compositions. Techniques and strategies ​​were developed how sound art can react systematically to site-specific architectual conditions or how these environmental acoustic characteristics can become part of a previously non-existent composition.

"Expanding horizons" is an Artistic research project carried out between 2021 (August) and 2024 (November) at NTNU, Trondheim. The objectives were to contribute to knowledge on how different kinds of departure points can be useful for musicians when approaching 20th-century Western classical music through improvisation, an understanding of how one can navigate and negotiate the musical language of this repertoire, and insights into how the tension between different performance values can be navigated in this process. The research questions were: When applying improvisation to works of 20th-century classical music, 1. What role does the choice and preparation of musical representations play? 2. How can we navigate and negotiate musical structures such as melody, harmony and form? 3. How can we navigate the tension between fidelity to the work and creative expression? Based on selected pieces from this repertoire and practical explorations together with participating musicians, various approaches to creating improvisational frameworks were then explored. These included a wide range of scores, including lead sheets and indeterminate notation, as well as ear-based methods. From the perspective of integrating improvisation into the performances, approaches such as repeating elements, working with layers, creating transitions, and introducing open sections were examined. A key point was to use melodic material as a way of building strong connections with the source material, rather than relying on harmonic representations of the music. In terms of balancing respect for the original work with creative freedom, a “healthy dose of disrespect” pervaded much of the explorations, allowing deviations from the originals when they were musically justified. Throughout the work processes, an idea of focal points emerged, as aspects to focus on when reworking a classical work into an improvisational version. These focal points included the score, historical and performative contexts, expressive qualities, and the improviser’s personal voice.

”Fata Morgana. An Essay Journey” explores the optical phenomenon of the Fata Morgana and its mythical namesake, Morgain Le Fay, as a figure of thought to explore transcultural and transgeographical relationships between landscape and identity. Conceived as an essay journey with artistic interventions, Fata Morgana argues for rethinking imagined geographies against the territorial bigotry prevalent in Europe and the world, against essentialist ideas of singular or linear origins. Instead, Körschkes uses Fata Morgana as a motif, myth and method for artistic research, employing its ephemerality and “diffuse occurrences” to relocate places into other places, narratives onto other narratives, and thus brings together different spatialities, temporalities and identities into brieftopian co-existence.

The long-neglected industrial wastelands of Romania present themselves as heterotopias in need of help. Post-Communist industrial ruins form a link to a multi-layered and difficult past, and their systemic erasure has contributed to a collective amnesia that perpetuates historical trauma and denies the local population access to the landscapes, natural and artificial, that tie them to a shared past and a collective cultural identity. This contribution aims to illustrate one methodology of bridging the gap between preservation through museumification and invasive architectural intervention. In this context, artistic and design-driven research practices can enable the emergence of ephemeral creative spaces that foster engagement with industrial heritage and reach beyond commodification and capitalist exploitation.

Agnès Varda was more a photographer and invested in photographic storytelling in her fictions and non-fictions, such as the murals in Faces Places (Visages Villages, 2017). Experimental photographic narration and her artwork-like uses of the internet therefore is not a coincidence. In her internet accounts, she posed with her fans, while her Instagram account looks like an experimental work, an exhibition, open to the public and unfinished. In her first photograph, she is holding a necklace with a cat figure in her hand.