Research Catalogue

Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on crevasses and mistakes, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to slip into another form of existence, say, a chair? Contextual note: These essays were first published as part of the book Choreographic Poetry (2019), a collection of literary scores for dance. They were written in the framework of my PhD in artistic research at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Choreographic Poetry: Creating literary scores for dance. Thanks to the dancers and musicians who contributed to the process of developing the PhD project. To Chrysa Parkinson, Anne Gry Haugland and Bojana Cvejić for their valuable contributions during the process of writing these essays. And to Jeroen Peeters and Mette Edvardsen for further editorial dialogue. Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays. www.jannecamillalyster.no Varamo Press embraces the unexpected and values the arbitrary circumstances in which writing comes into being. Snatching, wording, printing, it gives a paper form to various kinds of literature that have a fleeting life elsewhere. Gestures is a series of essays. www.varamopress.org

Performance philosophy is still something of a ‘wild frontier’ where fundamental questions can be re-posed concerning the nature of wisdom and love, life and truth. For if love and wisdom are not co-extensive with verbal communication, then philosophy may be legitimately pursued by performative means. In this session the participants aim is to enact and unfold a set of trajectories rather than describe or 'define' their work in words alone. Passion and grief are disruptive currencies. Passion and grief not only seem un-necessary for biological life, they frequently threaten it. Yet a life lived without them would seem impoverished. Whether one views these turbulent affects as parasites, invaders, or as the engines of higher culture, they inhabit philosophy as an ineradicable black-market haunts all states and empires. We aim to consider this under-zone on its own terms, weaving theory with demonstrations of transferable techniques for cross-disciplinary research.

This is the shape that my temporary virtual studio had during NPP –New Performative Practice MA SKH Uniarts, Stockholm–.

This artistic research exposition unfolds the shared work between Australian composer Liza Lim and Swedish violinist Karin Hellqvist, from the viewpoint of Hellqvist as performer and co-creator. Together, the artists have created the violin solo work One and the Other (Speculative Polskas for Karin) (2021–22). The Swedish folk music tradition that Hellqvist has carried with her since her childhood, and especially the polska dance, serves as their point of departure. This tradition resides in Hellqvist’s body and performance practice as embodied knowledge – a term introduced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), and it becomes their main path of research. A central concept in the reflections is the ‘artistic palette’ – a concept created by Hellqvist to conceptualise the skills and abilities used in creative work. Hellqvist’s embodied knowledge connected to the tradition is woven into the work through explorations of elements as the specific pulse of the polska and its ornamentation. Furthermore, those embodied skills are explored as decoupled in the third movement, capturing indeterminate aspects. The main question addressed is how the embodied knowledge of Hellqvist’s artistic palette serves as resource and inspiration in the shared process and how it affects the ontology of One and the Other (Speculative Polskas for Karin). Topics of distributed creativity, shared work as mycelial structure, instrument-building, ownership, and temporal ecology are being unpacked in the light of the artistic palette. The artistic research exposition unfolds a compositional process whereby the performer is participating actively, thus problematising the view of where creativity may be located in compositional work. It comprises written reflections, audio examples, pictures, and video material from the creative process as well as a video of the whole work. The research context comprises historical and aesthetic perspectives, as well as recent research on performer creativity and embodiment. Download Accessible PDF

Ars Memoriae, The Art to Remember analyzes the role of art within the larger history and evolution of external memory devices. It looks at material traces of remembering and the invention of an ever-changing body of language expressions, like signs and symbols, to enhance communication capabilities. I followed the process of externalizing emotions, knowledge, and information, starting in the Palaeolithic Stone Age about 3 million years ago, until, in a speculative future, it will be internalized again using artificial wetware, neuro-computers, and DNA coding. > Click on the image to download the PDF.

Why I paint Thousands of Circles explores psychological barriers and multilayered themes that stem from a single horrific event that involved Moran’s father and his brother. The artist collates information, photos and constructs an ar(t)chaeological archive where family photos, product imagery, together with newspaper clips to form units of a historical and psychological mind map. The exposition becomes an auto-ethnographical exploration of mid 90's working class North West London. The repetitive painting process, exposed and documented in the exposition, functions as transformative method, where ambiguous feelings of a violent upbringing are directed towards the creation of a visual system with an inherent logic – “creating some kind of beauty out of ugliness.”