Research Catalogue

Exposition supporting the Artistic Research and Collective Intelligence workshop, 4-5 October 2025, Porto Academy of Fine Arts. 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.

WAP/Walking As Practice Program takes place where the forest meets the sea in the Northern Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden. It is a program for self-identifying walking artists. Exploring and sharing strategies for proximity through artistic expressions in the field of walking practices, creating a transformative, dynamic space for art that engages with life and nature. This involves critical and poetic explorations influenced by the immediate surroundings. We participate in each other’s walkshops or interventions, and we also host Share Sessions to familiarize ourselves with each other’s practices. Additionally, we introduce the Research Catalogue for final dissemination, where each artist create their individual exposition.

Art activism is powerful. Also known as activist art, protest art, visual activism, artivism and creative activism, it changes lives, situations and is and has been a powerful weapon across a whole spectrum of struggles for justice. Teresa Sanz & Beatriz Rodriguez-Labajos(2021) relay that art activism has the unique ability to bring cohesion and diverse peoples together and it can, as Zeynep Tufekci notes, change the participants (2017). As Steve Duncombe & Steve Lambert (2021) posit, traditional protesting such as marches or squats are no longer as important as they once were. As a result of my own lived experience in activist activities, I very much agree with Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell (2012) that the reason people use art activism is that it works, by enriching and improving protest. In the past, when I lived in a metropolis and was not a parent, I used to be an activist. Now I no longer have immediate access to international headquarters at which to protest and I have to be concerned with being arrested, I am hindered from protesting. This project is an attempt to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism. By devising methods which include at least one of the following: that do not require on-site participation, that can take place outside the public gaze, that reduce the risk of arrest, that open up protest sites that are not “big targets”, that include remote locations, that involve irregular timing, my thesis aims to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism to those who are underserved by more mainstream methods of conducting art activism. Textiles have unique properties that enable them to engage in subterfuge and speak loudly through care and thought(Bryan-Wilson, 2017). They have strong connotations of domesticity, the body and comfort that can be subverted within art activism to reference lack of this domestic warmth and protection(O’Neill, 2022). Being a slow form of art-making, they show care and thought, attention in the making, so that the messaging is reinforced through this intentionality in slow making.

The presentation focuses on inclusive sensory drawing as a way to observe, notice and interact with non-human species in local nature, imagine their perspectives and reflect on the experience. It is known that many people today feel alienated from nature while on the other hand connection to nature is linked to pro-environmental behaviour. As an artist and art educator I have been wondering how participatory artistic and educational practices can reinforce the emotional and physical connection with nature, how to create conditions for perceiving the intertwinedness and mutual dependence, moreover, what could be the role of art and art education in the post-growth conditions. Drawing is not a new method for observing nature, but I find the inclusive drawing activities to be relevant to facilitate creative nature experience in contemporary context. As an artist, I have been using sensory drawing and realised how using the pencil and brush as facilitators help me to concentrate, slow down, notice interactions and sense myself as a part of the ecosystem. I have used the embodied and situated artistic thinking as a source for drawing walks and workshops in gardens, forests and parks and introduce some of the simple exercises in this presentation, asking how and which drawing and painting approaches facilitate active engagement with the environment and what is the intersection between artistic practice, environmental and artist pedagogy. I describe the specifics of four methods. These kind of curated nature experiences offer possibilities to recognise other beings, their relationships and ourselves as related to them through actions and reflections.

xeno-/exo-/astro -choreoreadings is a postdoctoral artistic research project that explores research questions that reopen site- and place-responsive choreographic practices by expanding the notions of ‘site’ and ‘place’ to outer space. The prefixes in the title refer to planetary conditions to which I do not have direct access. Another key choreographic exploration focuses on embodying hyper-reading and examining the impact of digital reading on embodied artistic practice. Hyper-reading refers to a computer-assisted, screen-based reading practice that has become common in contemporary daily life globally. It connects the reader to the limitless cyberspace. The research project blends these two spatial dimensions, in which the examination of the notions of choreography and choreoreading happen. The research process is multidisciplinary and hybrid in nature, producing artworks, traces, and reflections. The results are presented in this exposition as artworks and as reflections on the choreographic practice that this process has clarified. Download Accessible PDF

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