Research Catalogue

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.

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.

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.

Playing the Mountain is an artistic research project investigating balance as the dynamic interplay of yinyang, through the practice of taijiquan (a Chinese internal martial art). Based on this embodied practice, I explore balance not as a state but as movement, by transposing this dynamic of opposing forces into a constellation of participatory, sculptural and expanded cinema forms. Drawing on principles of Chinese aesthetics from a diasporic perspective, Playing the Mountain deploys artistic strategies to consider agency, (non-)presence, tension, and resistance. This constellation traces unseen forces through kites, music, geological processes and Chinese calligraphy, gathering different ways to ask: what are the implications of understanding balance, not as a state, but as a process? This research project manifests through material investigations, martial arts practice, participatory exchanges and collaboration, as part of my broader PhD-in-Practice research project, undertaken at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The exhibition and writing workshop were presented in Summer - Autumn 2022 at Centre[3] for Artistic + Social Practice, in Hamilton, Canada, curated by Lesley Loksi Chan; the kite-making workshop was conducted in Summer 2024 at Decentric Circles Assembly in Warsaw, Poland (various sites), curated by the Work Hard! Play Hard! working group. Download Accessible PDF

I am a composer, musician and radio producer, and in this exposition I explore how I brought my artistic practice into dialogue with a cartographic approach called deep mapping to create a sound installation called ECOTONE: A Sonic Journey Through Kildimo-Pallaskenry. Deep mapping encompasses the discursive and ideological dimensions of a place, such as memories, imaginations and the multiple realities that exist in our surroundings (Bodenhamer et al. 2015; Roberts 2016; Biggs and Modeen 2020). The approach has spatial considerations and adheres to locations and boundaries, but what is added is a reflexive narrativity that includes the complexity of human stories and identities that exist in a place. Deep mapping has the capacity to bring together histories, mythologies, facts and fictions, and weave them together in expressing a place. In this work, which formed part of my practice-as-research PhD, I developed a sonic deep mapping approach that involves recording the music, sounds and stories of place, and re-imaging them through my composition practice. This research explores a new approach to understanding and representing place, and adds a new perspective to the field of deep mapping. I propose that my sonic deep mapping approach forges connections between creative process, people and place. It invites us to listen deeply to our surroundings and to create representations of place that bring us into the realm of imagination and connection. Download Accessible PDF

This exposition invites you to reflect on the various things you do in your doctoral artistic research and to consider how these activities might form an interconnected system — a methodology. In a guided tour of words, images, and visits to my garden, I reconsider several research models I encountered as a PhD student investigating transdisciplinary performing practices. However, my primary aim is to carve out a pathway — from model to metaphor — one that offers a viable means of seeing your doctoral project existing within a terrain of complexity rather than utter chaos. Throughout the exposition I employ metaphors inspired not only by my artistic work, but also by my garden in Abruzzo, where I lived throughout my PhD studies. To fully discover Abruzzo, it is necessary to slow down — even allow yourself to get bored — before inevitably being revitalized and inspired by its natural beauty and ever-welcoming ambiance. I hope you will embrace this exposition’s journey. Permit yourself to be a rural-Italian wanderer, enjoy the breaks, and take extra ones so you can also enjoy an espresso or glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. Download Accessible PDF