Research Catalogue

This page is under construction It contains material created for and in the context of the research project Gifts from the Sentient Forest at the University of Lapland. See https://www.sentientforestproject.com

This project aims to develop transcultural approaches of inspiration (which we regard as mutually appreciated intentional and reciprocal artistic influence based on solidarity) by combining approaches from contemporary music composition and improvisation with ethnomusicological and sociological research. We encourage creative (mis)understandings emerging from the interaction between research and artistic practice, and between European art music, folk and non-western styles, in particular from indigenous minorities in Taiwan. Both comprehension and incomprehension yield serendipity and inspiration for new research questions, innovative artistic creation, and applied follow-ups among non-western communities. The project departs from two premises: first, that contemporary western art music as a practice often tends to resort to certain degrees of elitism; and second, that non-western musical knowledge is often either ignored or merely exploited when it comes to compositional inspiration. We do not regard inspiration as unidirectional, an “input” like recording or downloading material for artistic use. Instead, we foster artistic interaction by promoting dialogical and distributed knowledge production in musical encounters. Developing inter­disciplinary and transcultural methodologies of musical creation will contribute on the one hand towards opening up the—rightly or wrongly supposed—“ivory tower of contemporary composition”, and on the other hand will contribute towards the recognition of the artistic value of non-western musical practices. By highlighting the reciprocal nature of inspiration, creative (mis)understandings will result in socially relevant and innovative methodologies for creating and disseminating music with meaning. The methods applied in the proposed project will start out from ethnographic evidence that people living in non-western or traditional societies often use methods of knowledge production within the sonic domain which are commonly unaddressed or even unknown among western contemporary music composers (aside from exotist or orientalistic appropriations of “the other”). The project is designed in four stages: field research and interaction with indigenous communities in Taiwan with a focus on the Tao people on Lanyu Island, collaborative workshops in Vienna, an artistic research and training phase with invited indigenous Taiwanese coaches in Vienna, and feeding back to the field in Taiwan. During all these stages, exchange and coordination between composers, music makers, scholars and source community experts will be essential in order to reflect not only on the creative process, but also to analyse and support strong interaction between creation and society. Re-interaction with source communities as well as audience participation in the widest sense will help to increase the social relevance of the artistic results. The University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (MDW) will host the project. The contributors are Johannes Kretz (project leader) and Wei-Ya Lin (project co-leader, senior investigator) with their team of seven composers, ten artistic research partners from Taiwan and six artistic and academic consultants with extensive experience in the relevant fields.

A worklog exemplifying my practice of making situated interventions through narrative storyworlds and animated worldbuilding. My art often brings some conditions attached that aim at transforming the mindset and routines of the environments I enter, as a way to ”world” them. Constructing alternative inner story worlds has always been the basic mode for me to perceive the world, process the world, and to find ways to act in the world. worldbuilding as an artform also serves my interest in systems and “the whole”. an interest that brings about the desire for sustainability, for things to be fair, balanced, for “the whole” to sustain and thrive. My artworks often materialize as a response to something in my environment, a response that carefully takes form within the fictive storyworld. Examples of responses are a proposal to update the permanent exhibition on mining at Tekniska Museet, staging a shutdown of the university or introducing climate budgeting into film courses. This method of careful responses aligns with the concept of “worlding”, a term from material feminist thought about making “cuts” in the world, enacting interventions that produce the world I inhabit. “Worlding” is acknowledging the relations, how I am entangled in the world, while acting. Being embedded in a “storyworld” gives me the critical distance that enables me to respond more creatively, ”as if” things could be a whole lot different. Due to my interests in the full range of things, from material to structural to epistemological and ontological, I prefer to make interactions on all levels simultaneously in order to trace their effects, how they are connected, how they interact and affect one another. In order to reach initiated understanding into all parts of “the wholes” *I often engage in transdiciplinary collaborations with researchers from many different disciplines.

Esta experiência criativa foi desenvolvida na disciplina de Epistemologia da Cultura, do Mestrado Interdisciplinar em Dinâmicas Sociais, Conexões Artísticas e Saberes Locais do Centro de Ciências de São Bernardo, da Universidade Federal do Maranhão. Vivenciamos a paisagem sonora da Igreja Matriz do município de São Bernardo, localizado no estado do Maranhão. Destacamos a sua importância religiosa, histórica, cultural e afetiva para a cidade, utilizando recursos poéticos e performáticos, a fim de evidenciar a paisagem sonora como expressão cultural. Buscamos compreender a relação entre os sons e a memória afetiva, investigando como a sonoridade influencia as percepções e lembranças do espaço, bem como refletir sobre a experiência performática, destacando o processo de escuta ativa e de imitação dos sons do ambiente. Como aporte teórico para alicerçar o processo criativo, utilizamos autores que discutem a escuta e paisagem sonora, em especial R. Murray Schafer, Pierre Schaeffer e Marisa Fonterrada.

This artistic research project investigates the ceramics workshop as a dynamic site at the convergence of art, pedagogy, and ecopolitics. Utilizing practice-based, iterative feedback loops, it explores how cycles of making, reflecting, and teaching with clay evolve concepts, methods, and material outcomes in an ongoing dialogue between agencies.^1 Clay is reimagined beyond a primitive arts and crafts medium as an infrastructural archive that embodies ecological, political, and urban narratives. Grounded in a material-ecological framework and informed by critical theory from Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, and Donna Haraway, the project situates ceramics pedagogy within an experimental ecology of keythings; clay, tools, kilns, residues, and bodies, that co-constitute knowledge.^2 This research embraces contradictions and complexities of wicked ecological problems, fostering a pedagogy of “comfortable discomfort” that resists mastery and embraces provisionality.^3 The research unfolds over a time of wicked problems: war, speculated ecological collapse, institutional fragility, and the difficulty of knowing which crisis demands priority or whether these crises are in fact complicit in one another. Within this uncertainty, it is also considered how to navigate complexity with mindful presence, cultivating forms of practice that allow us to remain responsive without paralysis and eventually if this approach could be conducive to locate stable solutions and re-inject questions stemming from the practice back into practice and beyond.^4 Outcomes include pedagogical models and artistic works that demonstrate how material practices mediate relations between sustainability, ethical responsibility, and creative agency. Ultimately, the project envisions the ceramics studio as a vibrant, relational ecology that invites ongoing inquiry into the entangled systems constituting artistic research, practice and pedagogy.^5 ^1 Patricia Leavy, Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice, 3rd ed. (New York: Guilford, 2024). ^2 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). ^3 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016; Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). ^4 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). ^5 Patricia Leavy, ed., Handbook of Arts-Based Research, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford, 2025). Participants: Alevtina Lyapunova, Ana de Sousa Cardoso, Asya Marakulina, Bahareh Rahimi, Buket Özalevli, Carmen Kalata, Ebba Sofie Olsson, Esther Vörösmarty, Gloria Bergner, Heidi Noémi Ramskogler, Julia Stakhorska, Lili Marie Theilen, Luisali Theisen, Maria Milagros Ainchil, Olga Shapovalova, Oliwia Wioletta Kalwa, Prima Mathawabhan, Siha Kim, Tabea Briggs, Tim Morris Schiffer, Yeonkyeong Park together with Kristin Weissenberger and Zahra Mirza

This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, production, performance, and technology. This interview features Icelandic composer and pianist Eydís Evensen, whose work bridges classical tradition, improvisation, and post-classical minimalism. Her music draws on the landscapes of her homeland, translating memory, nature, and emotion into a cinematic and introspective sound world. In the conversation, Evensen reflects on the hybrid role of today’s composer, the fluid boundaries between writing, producing, and performing, and the ways in which technology and collaboration shape her creative process. Evensen’s insights reveal a practice rooted in both discipline and intuition, a music that moves between solitude and dialogue, the organic and the digital, embodying a poetic vision of creation where sound becomes a mirror of place, memory, and human resilience.