The Research Catalogue (RC) is a non-commercial, collaboration and publishing platform for artistic research provided by the
Society for Artistic Research. The RC is free to use for artists and
researchers. It
serves also as a backbone for teaching purposes, student assessment, peer review workflows and research funding administration. It strives to be
an open space for experimentation and exchange.
recent activities
Artistic Research and Collective Intelligence Workshop - Conservatorio di Padova
(2026)
Kobi Admin, Pasquale Savignano, Antonella Benanzato, Julian Scordato, Alessandro Fiordelmondo, Daniele Pozzi, sergio marchesini, Valerio Orlandini, Mattia Pizzato
Exposition supporting the Artistic Research and Collective Intelligence workshop, 14-15 January 2026, Conservatorio di Padova.
Theme: In recent years, latent space has become a recurring notion in the field of AI and generative art, but the term has a much broader origin and resonance, finding relevance in various fields of knowledge such as psychology, biology and computer science. Translated into the field of artistic research, latent space can refer to indefinable and potential configurations, to a fluid and interstitial zone in which knowledge and imagination take shape through non-linear processes and intuitions. The workshop will offer a space for discussion and experimentation, welcoming proposals and reflections on the processes of artistic research, to investigate unforeseen configurations, lateral paths, and methodological deviations.
The activity is promoted by the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome as part of the Enacting Artistic Research project.
La violenza della creazione
(2026)
Xichen Qian
This research explores creation as a form of violence that operates through interruption, erasure, and bodily pressure rather than through visible conflict or aggression.
Through a conference-performance, writing is treated as an unstable action: it begins, stops, fails, and is physically destroyed without revealing its content. The work focuses on moments where creation resists completion, and where decisions to stop, delete, or abandon become central gestures.
By placing the performer behind the audience and withholding textual legibility, the research shifts attention from meaning to process, from narrative to tension. Creation is approached not as expression or inspiration, but as a concrete and irreversible experience that acts upon the body and its limits.
In the Mirror of Care Work
(2026)
Inga Gerner Nielsen
In the Mirror of Care Work researches skills within Nordic interactive performance practices. Using the mirror as a metaphor for visualisation and connection, artist Inga Gerner Nielsen brings into conversation the work of nurses and interactive performers. By inviting in the perspectives of care workers and looking into the history of their profession, Inga engages in discussions about the politics, mythologies and poetics of her own field.
What do we see when we look in the mirror, and when that mirror is a nurse? Do we, as performers – like the nurses were once said to – abide by the feeling of a calling? Does this involve a kind of spiritual care for our audience? And what of the nurses’ working conditions should we perhaps try to adopt as (care giving) performers?
The project visited Stockholm (MDT) in September 2023 and Helsinki in January 2024 in a two-day symposium to meet and exchange with local artists about the aspect of care work in their artistic practice .
The project is based in a long-term collaboration with the nursing school at UCN Hjørring & Thisted in the north of Denmark. Together with teacher of the History of Nursing, Helle Kronborg Krogsgaard, Inga gerner Nielsen is developing ways of integrating interative performance excersices and visual art into the teaching of 1.st, 4th and 7th semester nursing students.
recent publications
Reinventing Regietheater: The Actor-Director Relation in Rehearsals
(2025)
Johannes Maria Schmit
This thesis, (Documented Artistic Research Project (Doctoral Thesis)), investigates the crisis of Regie (i.e. of the agency of directing) in a post-#MeToo landscape. It argues that the outset of this crisis lies in an expansionist gesture – rooted in the avant-gardist ambition to merge art and life – by which directors have conflated artistic mandate with managerial control; a gesture culminating in the toxic institutional cultures painfully exposed during the last decade. Starting from this point of no return, the thesis examines the question of how to acknowledge the fact of directorial power abuse without cutting our practices off from the potential – or even the necessity – of directorial agency as such. Its title “Reinventing Regietheater” thus carries the tension between a historical form of theater (generally known as “directors’ theater”) and a yet-to-be-found future expression.
Conceived as artistic research, the discrete focus of the thesis is the rehearsal space and its confines. Within the micro-scale of the latter, the crisis of Regie reverberates first and foremost in the non-foreseeable instances of the actor-director interaction; namely in the increasing scrutiny applied to the tool of improvisation. In contrast to the prevailing strategy of eroding the rehearsal space’s symbolic boundaries (in the interest of directorial accountability), the thesis conceptualizes – practically as well as theoretically – a “Space of Rehearsals” as a heteronomous zone of safe but ecstatic play. This “Space of Rehearsals” is constructed through a rehearsal method informed by the psychoanalytic concept of transference as well as the interaction framework “Wheel of Consent”.
To answer its main questions, the thesis presents a “written part” as well as a set of “online resources” containing the documentation and “re-stagings” of the practical experiments. Four “books of Regie” present methodological reflections, a critical genealogy of a theater of directing (based on the author’s symptomatic practice) as well as the central concepts. Three so-called “Pre-studies”, devised through practical work with professional actors/collaborators form the empirical basis of the thesis, sketching out different possibilities for the actor-director relation in a re-invented Regietheater.
In the proposition resulting from the above, directorial agency does not necessarily sit with the director. Nevertheless, the disciplinary divide between actor and director is upheld; as well as the radical asymmetry in the distribution of authorial power, albeit in temporally limited and co-curated iterations. The main argument of the thesis is thus that the artistic potential of the historical form of Regietheater can be salvaged without taking a revanchist or revisionist stance: the idiosyncratic directorial agency known as Regie has its place in consent-based rehearsal settings.
Home page JSS
(2025)
Journal of Sonic Studies
Home page of the Journal of Sonic Studies
The zoo: A mise-en-scène
(2025)
Jocelyn Michel Janon
The zoo is not a neutral site of animal display but a meticulously curated mise en scène where scenography dictates perception.
This exposition reframes the zoological garden as a dispositif of control, foregrounding fabricated rock formations, artificial lighting, and concealed barriers as theatrical devices.
Through square format photographic series that exclude animals, the work exposes the zoo’s fragmented geographies as staged spectacles designed for human imagination rather than ecological integrity.
The project interrogates authorship, agency, and representation, inviting viewers to reconsider the zoo as a cultural theatre of estrangement and illusion.