Research Catalogue

Unstable Systems Instability can be a creative force in art, design, and architecture. Artists, designers, and scholars work both with and against systems that are ever-changing, fragile, or unpredictable. Whether dealing with technological systems, ecosystems, social structures, or sensory experiences, instability is often a prerequisite for creation. Instability opens pathways for new ideas and processes, reshaping how we approach and redesign the systems that shape our lives. It can also refer to the creative act itself—one that does not follow predetermined trajectories or established norms. Art, design, and architecture serve as tools to disrupt stable systems and/or shed new light on systems that appear stable but in reality, they are not. No system is truly stable, and when we resist that instability, it becomes a problem. Instability is perhaps the only certainty we can rely on. Hugarflug 2025, the annual conference on artistic research, will take place on September 11–12. It will serve as a platform for research that engages with instability across various systems—from technological advancements such as AI and interactive systems to issues related to politics, society, and the environment. We will explore how instability functions as a tool for generating new possibilities while also fueling unrest and transformation within society and academia. The Iceland University of the Arts invites proposals of all kinds, including presentations of ongoing or completed research by our faculty, students, and collaborators.

In these works I have explored how I can relate to my environment through my daily practices of teaching, eating, animating etc. I begun the project by improvising lectures for various audiences I wanted to have input from. I have lectured to all possible enteties in the ecosystem I am a part of, from blueberries to colleagues to films. Every time something new continues to take shape. The exposition include essays, paintings and animations.

Conceived and co-organised by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin, this Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) provides contexts for coming together via the exchange of language-based research. The intent is to support developments in the field of expanded language-based practices by inviting attention, time and space for enabling understanding of/and via these practices anew.

This exposition centres around the fieldwork and shooting process of my documentary feature film, 11 Underground (Chico Pereira, 2024). 11 Underground is a reenactment film project based on a mining strike that happened in Almadén in the summer of 1984, in which 11 miners locked themselves in at 650 meters underground to protest their precarious working and social conditions. After 11 days of enduring the dark and toxic underground galleries, the Almadén Mining Company finally accepted the miners’ claims and the miners came out of the dark hole, received as heroes by their neighbours. As a local filmmaker belonging to the first non-mining generation in over 2000 years, I thought of the premise of making a reenactment film in town: what if 11 people locked-in in the underground mine for 11 days now to pay homage to the 1984 strike? Out of this rather strange proposition there was a desire to create an event -partly social, partly artistic-, that could help to collectively reflect -or re-imagine- our present by reenacting a collective action from the past. On the one hand, 11 Underground can be presented as a loose reenactment that reproduces the form and duration of a past strike: 11 people confined inside a mine for 11 whole days. On the other hand, the speculative character of this what if scenario (what would happen if..), opens these 11 days to the unexpected, to new actions and directions that might emerge from the implementation of that speculative scenario into the town’s present reality. The intrinsic relation of reenactment with the past, together with the future-oriented nature of what if scenarios -as ways of engaging creatively with possibilities- are, in fact, representative and metaphorical of the current situation of Almadén, which tries to construct a future from the remains of the mining past, while deeply struggling with the negative consequences of the lack of structural plans after the end of mining. Overall, the way this artistic research approaches reenactment is by using the historical referent (i.e. the past mining strike) as a documentary scenario and performing it in the current socio-political conditions, opening the possibility to intervene in the present and collectively imagine possibilities for a better future.

The artistic research project TiO₂: The Materiality of White (MoW) is led by Associate Professor Marte Johnslien, Department of Art and Craft, Oslo National Academy of the Arts. The project builds on her PhD project White to Earth, completed at the same department in 2020. MoW is funded by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills (HK-dir) through the Programme for Artistic Research for the period 2022–2026.

The artistic intervention "Foot Baths for All" (2024) emerged from an ethnographic exploration of collective forms of life on wastelands in Switzerland. Ethnographic insights regarding self-organized care, occupation, informal infrastructure, gift economies, and the shared use of water and electricity were fictionalized and recontextualized in the inner city of Zurich, in order to explore new forms of appropriation and participation in urban life. This exposition aims to share the results and experiences of this research through multiple formats: a video documentation, a how-to guide, and a text that offers insights into the ethnographic research and its translation into an artistic intervention, conceptualizing "Foot Bath Urbanism" as an artistic method for city-making from below. This project is situated in the field of artistic urban research. It is based on an expanded notion of art that moves beyond institutional contexts to intervene directly in public urban spaces through installations and performative practices, following approaches such as “New Genre Public Art”. The how-to guide is connected to instruction-based art, challenging conventional notions of authorship while emphasizing accessibility, participation, and interactivity, rooted in the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Fluxus movement.