Research Catalogue

'Empowering Collective Performing Arts: A Facilitator’s Collection of Voice and Dance Scores to Overcome Social Barriers' is a practice-led research project that explores the ways to encourage group connection through performing arts activities within diverse communities.

Wang Xiyao (1992) is a leading abstract Chinese painter based in Berlin, whose complex account of intercultural abstraction sees Eastern tradition deep in dialogue with contemporary Western language. It has replaced vivid, multilayered-meanings, deep personal experience, cultural memory, and common history, which have traditionally formalist postulates. Under the mentorship of Werner Büttner and Anselm Reyle and also inspired by Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, and Julie Mehretu, she began to elaborate a dynamic practice based on rhythmically interplaying color, line, and space. Many works are inspired by poetic and philosophical tradition, employing concepts such as Chinese Liu Bai (留白, intentional blank space) and moving into physical expression through dance and martial arts. In this respect, Wang's working process in creation corresponds to the concept of bodily perception in Maurice Merleau-Ponty and experiential aesthetics in John Dewey, considering immersion in the multisensory approach rather than pure visual contemplation. By an original synthesis in manifold aesthetic and sensory modalities, she thus develops multidirectional experiences, which are fascinatingly active and dialogic in the sense that they stir her viewer into an incessant questioning about form, culture, and consciousness.

O papel do corpo na criação do lugar. O percurso físico como motor investigador do percurso, viagem e abstração mental.

Water covers more than 70% of the earth’s surface, and thus constitutes a major section of the ecosystem on Earth. It is a vital element on earth, all life (as we know it) depends on water to be able to thrive. The climate has always changed a bit, but in recent years, due to greenhouse gases, the climate has experienced extreme changes which have also strongly impacted the global water cycle. From melting glaciers to ocean acidifications, flash floods, and prolonged droughts, disruptions in ecosystems now happens faster than most species can adapt to. Because of global warming, the atmosphere can hold and transport more moisture. Water doesn’t have the opportunity to fully infiltrate the soil. This accelerates the hydrological cycle. While it is still important to decelerate this process as much as we can, it is also important to look into strategies of adaptation and think ahead to a future with water that will be compromised. In this book, we explore water futures through the speculative design approach. This design practice aims to challenge preconceptions, raise questions, and provoke debates. It opened the doors for designers to imagine and explore possible water futures globally. We start with the water spring in India where the Ganga river starts, then travel further down the river stream. We end up in the Netherlands where different rivers connect to the sea. We continue where the river meets the sea and travel to the salterns in France and Croatia. Here water changes form, turning into gas and flowing through the air as evaporating steam in the geothermal region of Iceland. Eventually this book will end up with the condensation of the fog net in the Namib Desert.

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