Research Catalogue

This exposition proposes “artistic ecosystems” as a speculative framework for understanding creative processes shaped by interspecies collaboration and posthuman thought. The entry explores how art involving non-human agencies challenges anthropocentric norms and redefines authorship, participation, and temporality. Through a personal selection of immersive, site-specific, and ecological works by artists such as Westendorp, Eliasson, Huyghe, and Denes, the author outlines the beginnings of a doctoral research trajectory. These projects exemplify sympoietic, open-ended modes of creation, positioning performance and art-making as a fragile, relational ecosystem of human and more-than-human entanglements.

An overview of Elisabeth Belgrano's artistic / performance / research and teaching in higher arts education 2004-ongoing

Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023. MA Interior Architecture -INSIDE “Lingering in Spaces” explores how architecture and space can shape people’s perception of time and how to create spaces that encourage lingering, slowness, and presence. In a world driven by speed and productivity, contemporary spaces often fail to support deep, meaningful experiences of time. In my research paper, I realized how space and nowadays acceleration affect not only people's time perception but also their health. Through a combination of theoretical research, spatial analysis, and personal observations, I investigated how rhythm, movement, materiality, and sensory engagement can influence our subjective temporal awareness. I found not only the effects space has on people's time perception but also the elements that could reconnect us with the present moment. The project began as a personal fascination with how different spaces affect my experience of time. Observing how time stretches while gazing out of a train window, or compresses in confined urban settings, and how time disappears during flows of rhythmical activities like yoga, I became interested in how architecture could be designed to create a more conscious engagement with time and encourage people to slow down. While sharing my experiences of slowing down, I ask you- when was the last time you lingered?

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we, in our role as lecturers, conducted hybrid workshops with design and art students from ten partner institutions on five continents. Our goal was to explore soundscapes from different viewpoints, and we were deeply impressed by the outcome. The recordings and their accompanying images and conversations dissolved geographical borders along with social, cultural, and structural differences. Following Hartmut Rosa, we understand this atmosphere of connection produced between the participants and the soundscapes themselves to be a resonance space, which only became explicit to us after some time had passed. In this article, we re-interpret this space through personal recollections and theoretical positions, and claim that such a collaboration holds pedagogical and artistic implications for future teaching and creative practice. These include not only the impact upon technology in the classroom, temporal perception, inter-relationality, and care practices, but also the artistic benefits of opening up spaces of resonance as a means of engaging with the challenge of intercultural communication and witnessing in our global world.

In the globalising world, our cultural influences have become more diversified than ever. At the same time, the code of good conduct on honouring intercultural sources of inspiration is still being written in the collective consciences of artists and audiences alike. The current mindset is being explored in an artistic research project, of which the concert this article focuses on was a component. “Approcreations”, an experimental solo concert, was atypical in terms of the conventions of the instruments played. The recital trialled the public’s receptiveness by developing pioneering uses for a tradition-oozing instrument while casting thoughts into the perception of artistic identity in the crossfire of preconceptions, aftermaths of colonialism and cultural appropriation disputes. Would the public’s sentiments differ from the performer’s expectations? The author, having developed a time-tested perspective after decades of international touring as a non-African player of the Mande diatonic balafon, now zeroes in on the factors influencing how we interpret and feel about culturally complex art practices. Sociocultural and symbolic connotations of musical instruments are analysed in light of the affordance theory, and the instruments’ evolution from cultural assets into universal vehicles for human creativity is pondered upon. Video samples from the concert stage concretise words into sounds and colours. The outcome of this artistic component is then inquired based on both self-reflection and audience feedback. Finally, as the controversy around cultural appropriation vs. inspiration extends beyond music to encompass a broader range of performing arts, the conclusion seeks to identify tendencies in the findings that might benefit art practitioners in other genres as well.

This exposition presents parts of a practice-based artistic research project, Acts of Transfer, a collaboration between artist Katy Beinart and writer Lizzie Lloyd (2020–2021). The project consists of a series of ‘chapters’ which revisit artworks from the recent past that involved social engagement or public participation, documenting both the process and outcomes of our returns. Acts of Transfer was interested in what the afterlife of such artworks might be and how they might be meaningfully represented in the future. Each return or ‘chapter’ generates new artwork, while retaining some sense of the original. They include a range of outcomes: excerpts (screenshots, photographs, readings, instructions etc.) from the original artworks made by our participants, as well as our own documentation through photography, drawings, and notes taken during our returns, alongside passages of experimental writing and films. In presenting parts of this project in Acts of Transfer: Documentation as Creative Reimagining, we further explore how documentation might serve as a means to reenact and reimagine the artworks to which we returned. In each case, we consider how aesthetic, emotional, physical, psychological or conceptual transfer might signify to those involved and to future audiences. We expose the complicated relationships that underlie practices that rely on participation, and highlight how meaning develops beyond the immediate duration of such projects. What follows renders these complications tangible, leading to new artworks that are intentionally emergent and fragmented. We look to evoke the effervescent experience of participating, remembering and communicating experiences of social, relational and durational artwork, to hold fast to what is lost and what might be reimagined.