Research Catalogue

Initiated in 2020, Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orient to self, others, world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? A dorsal orientation foregrounds an active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

This exposition or archive is a work in progress, under construction, for gathering material of encounters with junipers.

Only Here to Adore is an artistic research of the interaction between garden owners and plants. It unfolds in three parts. The first part takes place at Landlyst Plantecenter just outside Hjørring in the North of Denmark where Gerner Nielsen interviews garden owners about what they have purchased at the garden center and their hopes and dreams for their summer garden. These interviews form the foundation for developing scores and a choreography for a performance that Gerner Nielsen and another performer will show at Vendsyssel Kunstmuseum in Denmark. The performance is also filmed by Louise Ørsted Jensen and turned into a video work. Curated by Skal Contemporary

The long-neglected industrial wastelands of Romania present themselves as heterotopias in need of help. Post-Communist industrial ruins form a link to a multi-layered and difficult past, and their systemic erasure has contributed to a collective amnesia that perpetuates historical trauma and denies the local population access to the landscapes, natural and artificial, that tie them to a shared past and a collective cultural identity. This contribution aims to illustrate one methodology of bridging the gap between preservation through museumification and invasive architectural intervention. In this context, artistic and design-driven research practices can enable the emergence of ephemeral creative spaces that foster engagement with industrial heritage and reach beyond commodification and capitalist exploitation.

Agnès Varda was more a photographer and invested in photographic storytelling in her fictions and non-fictions, such as the murals in Faces Places (Visages Villages, 2017). Experimental photographic narration and her artwork-like uses of the internet therefore is not a coincidence. In her internet accounts, she posed with her fans, while her Instagram account looks like an experimental work, an exhibition, open to the public and unfinished. In her first photograph, she is holding a necklace with a cat figure in her hand.

A person listening to Ludwig van Beethoven might think he is in a Jean-Luc Godard movie. An opponent of laws and canons. Beethoven sought to break the convention and laws of harmony. Johann Sebastian Bach, in contrast, never attempted to break the traditions.