Research Catalogue

The project 'Breaking Circles' is matriculated in the field of social design - an area within the design field that has renewed itself in recent years. Social design is user oriented towards vulnerable and exposed groups within society. Serving a sentence in prison is often associated with a range of penalties. Norway has only one penalty; denial of freedom. The inmates have the same rights as the rest of society, and are supposed to take part of it. The Norwegian Correctional Service’s unofficial slogan reads: ‘better out, than in’ meaning that rehabilitation overcomes penalty. The inmates have both the right and a duty to work, getting educated or attending amendment programs. The goal of their work is to qualify for working life after prison. Having to go to prison will without a doubt be a personal crisis for anyone, and can lead to loss of jobs, housing, personal economy and social network. Inmates could benefit from building professional networks to avoid seeking out old acquaintances in criminal networks after prison, heading into criminal relapse. Having worked with design projects in the western region of the Norwegian Correctional Service, I have seen the vast areas and systems within prisons and the service that are untouched by design strategy. Design has considerable potential to help inmates benefit from their surrounding systems, both within prison and outside. I aim to use social design to ease inmate’s transitions to becoming potential employees through their work within prison. To be able to do that, there are several problem areas to address: the content of inmate’s work in prison, inmate’s tools of sentence progress, barriers between prison and society and the lack of established professional networks to prevent criminal networks taking over after serving. Using graphic design and visual communication in social design can contribute to a dawning interest in design and creative practice to prevent recidivistic crime and social marginalization. Breaking Circles is a project with a strong emphasis on design experiments through field work in a real-life context: prison.

Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on crevasses and mistakes, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to slip into another form of existence, say, a chair? Contextual note: These essays were first published as part of the book Choreographic Poetry (2019), a collection of literary scores for dance. They were written in the framework of my PhD in artistic research at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Choreographic Poetry: Creating literary scores for dance. Thanks to the dancers and musicians who contributed to the process of developing the PhD project. To Chrysa Parkinson, Anne Gry Haugland and Bojana Cvejić for their valuable contributions during the process of writing these essays. And to Jeroen Peeters and Mette Edvardsen for further editorial dialogue. Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays. www.jannecamillalyster.no Varamo Press embraces the unexpected and values the arbitrary circumstances in which writing comes into being. Snatching, wording, printing, it gives a paper form to various kinds of literature that have a fleeting life elsewhere. Gestures is a series of essays. www.varamopress.org

Performance philosophy is still something of a ‘wild frontier’ where fundamental questions can be re-posed concerning the nature of wisdom and love, life and truth. For if love and wisdom are not co-extensive with verbal communication, then philosophy may be legitimately pursued by performative means. In this session the participants aim is to enact and unfold a set of trajectories rather than describe or 'define' their work in words alone. Passion and grief are disruptive currencies. Passion and grief not only seem un-necessary for biological life, they frequently threaten it. Yet a life lived without them would seem impoverished. Whether one views these turbulent affects as parasites, invaders, or as the engines of higher culture, they inhabit philosophy as an ineradicable black-market haunts all states and empires. We aim to consider this under-zone on its own terms, weaving theory with demonstrations of transferable techniques for cross-disciplinary research.

This Book of Scores presents the standard music notation for the compositions featured in the album 'Portfolio'. Each piece is crafted for solo bass guitar, pushing the instrument's expressive boundaries and revealing its rich polyphonic potential. Through inventive arrangements, these compositions invite bassists to explore new dimensions of solo performance.

Welcome to "Studies in Kunstvakidiotie". Here, you can browse through the photographs, essays, drawings, audio and video clips. ‘Studies in kunstvakidiotie’ is the doctoral research of Mirjam van Tilburg at Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA). This is a study in arts education from within the arts. She tries to shift the dominant image of life-long-learning (LLL) and provide insight into the possibilities that this LLL space also provides to art teachers. By searching in this way, more and more became clear about life-long-learning of art teachers. Therefore, a linear cause-and-effect narrative did not seem to do justice to the subject matter. The term ‘studies’ in the title is sketchy — it also involves repetition and seeking connections and, above all, it is a derivative of studio and study. Five essays form the markers within ‘Studies in Kunstvakidiotie’. Together, they construct a narrative. The essay ‘(onder)zoek in kunsteducatie’ describes practices and values that stem from Mirjam van Tilburg’s artistic practice: education. The motivation behind this research is that art teachers find LLL events to be limited. The essay ‘LLO als commoning practice’ discusses the possibilities of commoning practices. The examples: The New School Collective and studios are outlined herein. The studios are the experiment within this doctoral research. During the winter of 2020-2021, Mirjam van Tilburg worked with ten art teachers. The experiment of this doctoral project coincided with the Covid-19 crisis. Together they occupied artist studios in Tilburg and Rotterdam to de-automate and look at teaching practices. The essays ‘Blik’ and ‘Tijd’ therefore propose two topics of conversation within LLL: the ‘aesthetic glance’ and the temporal experience of ‘interruption’. These essays question the efficient and productive order prevailing in the work environment and LLL of art teachers. The essay ‘Herontdekking van Kunstvakidiotie’ is the story of a change in the craft of art teachers in the first Covid-19 crisis year. The term ‘kunstvakidiotie’ in the title cannot be directly translated into English because it is a compound word and may have specific connotations in the Dutch context. The essay describes how in these studios, art subject teachers had one foothold: artistic fervour.

Our bodies are porous entities that interconnect with and depend on the broader collectivity of human and nonhuman life that exists within a shared environment. Using the figuration of synthetic bodies, this exposition aims to examine the relationships in which we are enmeshed as our bodies absorb and excrete chemicals. With a focus on involuntary exposure to industrially manufactured chemicals (as opposed to exposure to naturally occurring chemicals or voluntary experimentation with chemicals of all types), this exposition invites readers to learn about the chemicals to which we are exposed and by which we are affected. With the ubiquity of chemicals in the environment, who are we becoming? How do chemicals affect us and how do we interact with them? How can we live well with chemicals in spite of their potential to harm? Adopting a decolonial feminist, posthumanist, and new materialist approach and embracing queer ecological sensibilities, this exposition develops protocols for embodied and materially embedded research practices that trace the effects of exposure to chemicals in everyday life. In so doing, it aims to demonstrate how we might build resilience through encounters with toxicity, contamination, and impurity. Download Accessible PDF