Research Catalogue

I dedicate this work to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call for acts of restoration for our damaged planet. In my project, I choose song composition and performance as a way to find pathways for personal and collective restoration. Through the methods of artistic research I write songs inspired by my experience of ecological grief, academic reading, interviews to song composers, and journaling. As a contribution from my work, I present a new compositional methodology, Sonic Geographies of Hope. This methodology calls for song composers to write songs grounded in personal and collective grief of our damaged planet. I suggest that these type of songs can become an act of restoration and create collective resonance for more hopeful ways of existing and experiencing the world. This methodology is heavily influenced by the work of A. Hazelwood and her methodology Geographies of Hope in Praxis (2020). While I draw inspiration from this methodology, my work focuses mainly on emotional geographies. This work represents a starting point to explore song methodologies that can nurture immaterial geographies leading to concrete, structural ecological restoration. It is an exploration to find ways to restore yourself to continue to fight for the dignity of the places, more-than human life and people we love.

In this artistic research I approach performance art as a language formed through the interplay of materiality, duration, and multiple forms of agency. I adopt a linguistic lens, not to reduce performance art only to language, but to use it as an analytical tool to render its characteristics, regularities, and modes of operation visible. A work of performance art emerges within relations between the performer’s corporeality, materials, space, and time. It weaves together visual, conceptual, and embodied thinking, privileging ephemerality and immediacy over permanence. The audience is integral to the work, as performance is an ephemeral art in which performer and audience share the experience in the same moment. Documentation, especially photography and video, enables the reshaping of temporal and spatial relations, as the camera frames, selects, and reconstructs the situation. My inquiry focuses on relations among human, more-than-human, and nonhuman agents. I situate my practice within the field of new materialist and posthumanist contemporary art, where works take shape through multilayered collaborative processes across diverse agents. Performance studies serves as one of the conceptual frameworks.

In her video performance Alphabet of Performance Art Leena Kela performs with the materials and objects that are typical for performance art. The work is based on over 15 years of research within the art form. She has selected 26 different materials and objects that form the language of the performance art and will perform them from A to Z. If A is an apple, what do you think P could be? Paint, paper, piss?

This exposition inaugurates the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer today. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators integrate composition, production, performance, and technology into their artistic identity. This first interview features Luca Longobardi, who reflects on his hybrid practice across classical and electronic music, immersive performance, and sound design, offering insights into the fluid boundaries between writing, production, and live interpretation.

This small handbook shares the learnings from participatory online concerts which were developed as part of the "music as an invitation" project. Using the two concerts developed for the "music as an invitation" project as case studies, this book presents the basic steps on putting together participatory online concerts. It also brings up some discussion about some relevant points to be observed during those steps, drawing specifically from the experience in the "music as an invitation" project. This handbook aims to contribute to other curious and adventurous artists and producers who are interested in exploring creative ways to share music with their audiences. By exploring participatory ideas in online concerts, here we thrive to do what music does best: bring people together. The "music as an invitation" project was a Marie Słodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Research developed at the University of Bergen, funded by the European Union.

My PhD project explores the aesthetic and affective codes of a particular notion of indebtedness, a 'feeling of indebtedness,' as an outcome of German educational efforts institutionalized in Istanbul over the course of the 20th century. I interrogate this feeling through the lens of affect theory as a pedagogical 'genre,' by bringing my research closer to Black studies and critical migration studies. My high school, the İstanbul Erkek Lisesi [Istanbul High School for Boys, also known as Istanbul High School], which is housed in the former headquarters of a 20th-century European credit institution named the Düyûn-ı Umûmiye [Ottoman Public Debt Administration, OPDA] becomes the imaginative site for 'desire-based research,' as Eve Tuck suggests. If this German school abroad were a credit institution, a time machine, how could it inform me about the historical processes through which a 'feeling of indebtedness' educates collective desires conforming to German labor, emancipation, and citizenship models? Keeping Lauren Berlant’s concept of 'cruel optimism' dear to my research, I question whether the German pedagogical promises in Asia Minor pose an obstacle to the flourishing of migrant subjects desirous of German education. Thus, I critique the violent histories along the modern German-Turkish industrial complexes of labor, culture, and military. I lean on intergovernmental agreements and familial biographies of labor, migration, and conversion. In pursuit of affective remedies for such histories' violence, I depart from 'redemptive migrant images' of my solo exhibition 'Teneffüs' [Recess], which opened at Salt Galata (Istanbul, 2022) in the former headquarters of the Bank-ı Osmanî-i Şahane [Imperial Ottoman Bank]. Employing my methodology of 'flickering migrations,' I hope that it inspires a thriving culture of memory and accountability.