Research Catalogue

From the intersection between Sign Language and dance, choreographer Laisvie Ochoa, is exploring the feeling of loss. In a duet with Dennis Massar, and using material developed with Anneloes van Schuppen, the work presents a visual expression of movent that seeks to honor what her mother left her.

COLLABORATIVE MUSIC CREATION: leading conservatory students in musical creation processes This research is about the development of active autonomous creativity among conservatory students in classical departments. In this exposition I will discuss the nature of collaborative creation processes, and critically investigate my own role as a coach and facilitator of these processes in order to better understand how ideas are being generated, developed and ultimately shaped into a performed piece. The investigation will be illustrated with a selected number of projects I have been involved in during the years 2017-2020.

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.

This research examines Giovanni Battista Bovicelli’s Regole, passaggi di musica (Venice, 1594), a Renaissance treatise on (vocal) ornamentation. By analyzing Bovicelli’s diminutions, this research aims to identify his characteristic stylistic elements as a composer and singer. Beyond defining these elements, the findings provide a solid foundation for comparing his style with that of Giovanni Bassano, previously studied, and for applying Bovicelli’s techniques in newly written diminutions. More broadly, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of late 16th-century Italian diminution practice. Bovicelli’s treatise offers information for singers about text placement, presents examples of diminutions for various intervals, cadences, and melodic contexts, and includes his own diminuted lines of well-known pieces of the time. This research focuses specifically on the examples of diminutions, analyzing them according to seven musical criteria: note values, range, intervals, melodic sequences, rhythmic patterns and/or sequences, standard figures such as trills and turns, and ficta application. Additionally, in cadences and melodic contexts, the extent to which the original melody is preserved is assessed. The results of this analysis are presented in tables and graphs for a clear overview. Additionally, the research includes a comparative analysis of Bovicelli’s and Bassano’s diminution styles, clarifying both their individual characteristics and, very carefully, broader trends in 16th-century Italian diminution practice. Furthermore, newly composed diminutions in Bovicelli’s style demonstrate the practical application of the findings. These diminutions are written on the well-known Anchor che col partire by Cipriano de Rore (1516-1565).

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 BA Photography Summary: "Why does she cry salty tears while he touches the sea". Follows a search for understanding how being in cold water has a relationship with humans. More specifically if the sea is for people to be in or not - the upbringing stories from Iceland and a Nordic background is noticeable in how the author approaches the subject of the sea. From the perspective of being cautious towards it, yet fearful and therefore the quest is giving contrast on how the sea shapes people. On an emotional level yet spiritually as well. Questions regarding people’s place within the social context and, with others. The personal writings is intertwined with challenges people face and how it’s displayed in the art world. Research into how artist have dealt with overcoming bigger forces than themselves. The social element of a sea swimming community is discussed where recent acknowledgment in a modern society to be in cold water is ever present. This is done by interviewing people who have been tuned in with the sea, a former sailor and a sea swimmer. The paper is divided into four chapters. Their titles serves the focus points. In Salt water, a look into the unknown, how artists deal with the sea as a natural force, admiration towards the sea with a connection to the emotional state. Community, is where the unknown offer a place to belong to, observing from a distance as well inside a sea swimming community. In Rituals, sea swim is investigated as a social act binding the community. Tales brings storytelling with focus on sailors and sea creatures.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 Master of Photography and Society On 12 May 2008, at 14:28 Beijing time, an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale struck my home province of Sichuan, China, killing 69,227 people, leaving 17,923 missing and injuring 374,643 in various degrees across China. At the time, I was at university in another city far from home. In this thesis, My beginning question is how to fit myself who is absent from this earthquake into its history and the memories shaped by it. As a practitioner and researcher of photographic images, I want to reach out beyond the physical and psychological distance to the real memories of the earthquake understand its impact by describing, speculating and analyzing ready-made images about it and by explaining my own visual strategies, such as making and reworking photographs on this topic. These images contain 1) group photos of local people before the earthquake who were separated from each other in life and death by the it, 2) video clips taken by television camera reporters and other anonymous people on the day of the earthquake, and 3) the visual outcomes produced by people who look at or photograph the earthquake ruins which turned into tourist attractions now. In these ways, I highlight that we can encounter actively that earthquake through dealing with photographs about it and new photographic actions since then, in order to find possibilities to shape the postmemories for those Chinese who, like me, were absent or irrelevant at the time of the earthquake. In September 2022, a new strong earthquake occurred in Sichuan. I regard it as a bridge to relate the 2008 earthquake to present-day China. At that time, China was still in the midst of an extremely rigorous Covid-19 prevention and control phase, with various restrictions trying to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 cascading from the top down. By putting the two earthquakes together to discuss, I argue that Chinese people should remember the disasters of the past so that we can find our place in new dilemmas to deal with them. We should face up to the pain others have experienced and are experiencing and reach out to help, instead of ignoring or avoiding our responsibility. As a Chinese studying an English-taught MA program in the Netherlands, the differences between the Chinese and English contexts, the temporal distance between the current Chinese context and the European historical context were gaps that I could not avoid in this thesis writing. These gaps are reflected by describing and reflecting on my act of going to the former site of the Auschwitz Concentration camp. Acting as a spokesperson, I brought the inappropriate reactions of some Chinese people in the present to the plight of their compatriots to that field of traumatic memories, emphasising the importance of confronting one’s own absence and distance from the disaster from the other’s side.