Research Catalogue

This exposition gathers a series of visual and linguistic investigations in which signs, form, and the space between them construct expressions that invite multiple interpretations. Here, propositions are understood as attempts, movements, and modes of thought. Between sign and form, a space emerges where meaning can be brought into play – where rhythm, structure, wonder and quietness may interact as an expanded practice of seeing, reading, and listening.

Exam Context as collaborator December 2025 - Makor

This project combines artistic and anthropological research on spontaneous gardening in open public space, predominantly in Brno, CZ. The team, mostly comprising recent graduates and graduate students of the Faculty of Fine Arts of Brno University of Technology, chose gardens and plantings which were, in most cases, rather exceptional. Unlike most typical front gardens, the ones in this study are somehow peculiar, due to their location, their composition and planting schemes, their scale, or methods of those who garden there. The anthropologists on the team analyzed a Facebook group dedicated to street gardening and conducted several interviews, while the artistic team responded to particular places with which they interacted. Some results of this research have been presented to the public in the form of an application comprising an audioguide and an interactive map; this exposition in the Research catalogue documents some of these findings. The team Barbora Lungová is a visual artist and has taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology since 2007. Her field of practice is painting and art projects focusing on plants, gardening, and queerness. She is the coordinator of the Partisans with a Hoe project. Lucia Bergamaschi is a visual artist working across the media of photography, sound, and installation. She earned an MA in Fine Art at Università Iuav di Venezia and an MA in Law at Università di Bologna. She is currently finishing her MA studies at the FFA BUT. Nela Maruškevičová combines painting, installations, and glass in her artistic practice. She is a 2023 graduate of the FFA BUT. Kateřina Konvalinová is a visual artist interested in the overlapping spaces of art, communal life, farming, and ritual. She earned her MA in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and is currently a doctoral student at the FFA BUT. Iva Balcaříková is a graphic designer and a member of the team behind the curated audio walks created by Galerie Art in Brno. She is currently finishing her MA studies at the FFA BUT. Hana Drštičková is a visual artist and a social anthropologist interested in environmental and queer topics. She graduated with an MA in Fine Arts from the FFA BUT in 2022 and with a BA in social anthropology from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Masaryk University and is currently a doctoral student at the Gender Studies Department of Charles University in Prague. Anastasia Blokhina is a social anthropologist who graduated with an MA tfrom the Faculty of Social Sciences of Masaryk University in 2022. Polyna Davydenko is a photographer and a video artist who documents social and environmental issues in her work, most recently those connected with the war in Ukraine. Filip Dušek is a media artist who studied at the Department of Photography at the FFA BUT. The project was conducted under the Specific Research FaVU-S-23-8441 Program.

This publication presents the outcomes of the Connective Symposium, which took place at Fontys Academy of the Arts in Tilburg, in November 2022. The symposium was the first time that the professorship and research group Artistic Connective Practices, initiated in 2021, opened its work to the international field: We invited practitioners from all over the world to share their work and exchange about the concept of "artistic connectivity". "Artistic Connectivity Unfolding" is an attempt to share the experiences during the symposium with the broader artistic research audience, and to contribute to the body of artistic research work that is socially engaged. The exposition is potentially many things: In part, it is a piece of documentation of the symposium, in part reflections on and proceedings of it. It is also an explorative contribution to our emerging and unfolding discourse of artistic connectivity, — unfinished, fluid and moving — and thus a springboard for our future work on artistic connectivity.

In this contribution, I introduce and outline productive possibilities that LED ticker displays and love letter writing can offer for facilitating careful listening and non-coercive participation in artistic research, and in research-driven artistic practice. Briefly put, by the term “careful listening” in this context, I refer to modes of listening that are attentive to the contents of what is being said, but that also allow for and encourage the reflection of the subjective and “intra-active” (Karen Barad) dimensions inherent in, and the material-performative and situated conditions of, listening. The term “non-coercive participation”, for its part, refers here to participative art-based practices that are careful – or caring – in the sense that they leave room for different modes or “degrees” of participation, and in that they aim to take the potential processes of exclusion and coercion rooted in the practical decisions and material circumstances regarding the devising and realization of the given project into account. Operating on the premiss that reading can be considered as a form of listening and attending to the text and its contents (Michelle Boulous Walker), and drawing on two recent endeavours I was part of in different yet cross-pollinating roles – as an advisor and collaborator in the artistic research project ‘TACTICS for a COLLECTIVE BODY’ (AP Schools of Art Antwerp, 2020–22), and as the artist-initiator of the installation ‘Love Letters’ in public space (Kunstzelle, WUK Vienna, 2023–24) – I discuss and present, first, ways in which love letter writing can function as a tool for – or mode of – careful listening, thereby fostering democratic and attentive dialogue between investigators within the frames of an artistic research project, and as a tool for offering a caring and accessible starting point for non-coercive participatory art practice. Secondly, I aim to show how the use of seemingly simple LED ticker displays can promote careful listening and non-coercive participation both in research workshops, showings, and artistic practice while, in the Rancièrean sense, also making the material-performative, “intra-active”, situated and auditive qualities of text and reading visible and sensible.

Lectures, panel discussions, and conferences are formats for collective listening, but they took on conventions that make listening difficult: reading aloud complicated texts, speaking quickly in order to squeeze as much material as possible, showing slides with long texts, sitting for a long time without moving. Silence is considered awkward, so there is little time to think about what has been said. In this video paper, I dissect the decorum of oral presentation formats in academia and outline how the attention of the members of an audience diverges and converges with that of the speaker. I also share some observations about verbalizing non-verbal ideas, in particular about how a text description at the beginning of a project can tie its loose ends too tightly. At the end of my talk at the Klagenfurt conference, I handed out questionnaires, in which I asked the audience members to mark the sentences which they remembered from my talk. Then, while another presenter was speaking, I drew a graph of mind wandering of the audience members based on the questionnaires and showed it at the end of the session. In the second part of this video paper, I explain the process of evaluating the responses and present the resulting graph.