Research Catalogue

Design, 1995-96, 2023. Design, 1996-97. Photography, 2010, 2011. Essay, 2015. Collage Text, 2022. The exposition serves as commentary and guide on the place of art, in a gradually environmentally and technologically challenged world. I designed this exposition as a 'teaser' on how architects, who work mainly conceptually, might conduct research from different art and media sources, as well as their own broader artistic work. In this art and design context, I further make a commentary on outgrown conceptions of the foreign, in terms of the so-called "exotic', and the non-foreign,within the political context of contemporary globalisation. Thus, I raise open questions on the impact of architecture and design on global politics. The re-design proposal, inspired by De Stijl, illustrates the modernist historical view that art appears to be regressive, rather than progressive: as soon as a movement or a school becomes established, reaching its culmination, it starts declining. Finally, I have included a graduate school architectural design project in the archaeological site of Eleusis accompanied by new commentary. With essay about experimental film making in the British avant-garde, published in "Architecture and Culture" journal, 2015, which is about the environmental challenges of the urban environment. The reference to the TV show "Alone", a competitive prize show of sole or two-person players, is a reminder that humans can live in the natural environment developing survival tactics already applied by their ancestors. I included those references to make hints at the relationships between film, television and contemporary architecture as an artistic medium, in the old-fashioned tradition of architecture belonging to the fine arts. About how to navigate this exposition: Scroll from top to bottom, then from bottom to top, then scroll to the top right, then scroll to the bottom right. For Luke, who I haven't met; with respect and care.

This exposition contains a database of materials resulting from the artistic research "Phytopoetic Creation: An artistic and ecological intervention", within my doctorate studies in Performance at the Department of Comunication and Art (DeCA) of University of Aveiro (UA), Portugal. As these results were mostly documented through video, audio and photographs, I decided to use this platform as a medium to share these moments that were central to this artistic research, also containing a published article. The form of relationship established between these materials, with mutual connection and sharing of information and resources, was similar to a network that was developed throughout this research, through practical experience and application. This network, here refered as "Plant Wide Web", contributed crucially to the creation of the final artistic product of this research, "Intertwined Paths: an embodied journey of connection with plants" (2024).

It Will Be Fine, is engaging in the language of visual representation through the combined mediums of painting, photography and artificial intelligence (Ai) together with images held in the Special Collection picture archive in Bergen. To reflect on the ways in which meaning and memory is constructed and conveyed through visual forms and knowledge systems.

In February 1967, a funeral service was held for the Georgian singer and choirmaster Artem Erkomaishvili. As they bore his body from the municipal theatre in Ozurgeti to his family plot in a nearby village, a recording of the Georgian Orthodox rite for the dead emanated from a portable tape player. The voice on the recording belonged to Artem himself – by this time, no one else in officially atheist Soviet Georgia knew the traditional requiem chants. The previous year, Artem had been involved in an experimental recording at the Tbilisi Conservatory, and he later applied the same technique to capture the three-part chants: going back and forth between two tape recorders, he overdubbed his own voice until all three parts were layered together. Artem’s remarkable, six-decade career stretched from the earliest commercial recordings of Georgian folk music in 1907 to the widespread use of consumer tape-recording technology in the 1960s. His chant recordings – both the conservatory project and the private funeral tapes – were made outside of formal channels of music production and distribution, employing amateur equipment and foregrounding the intimacy of the unvarnished voice. In this way, they resemble magnitizdat, the private tape recordings of poetry and song that circulated unofficially in the late Soviet period (Daughtry 2009). Made at a time when sacred music was still heavily censored, Artem’s recordings occupied the grey area between officially sanctioned and explicitly dissident expression. Building on recent work exploring sound in everyday Soviet experience (Cornish 2020) and expanding the discussion of Georgian music beyond the disciplines of folklore and ethnomusicology, I argue that such private practices of listening and recording provided a means for Georgians in the post-Thaw era to grapple with questions of faith, the loss of tradition, the polyphony of a fracturing state, and the afterlife of a single voice.

This article provides an overview and analysis of transformations of the Belarusian political soundscape. Based on the author’s archive of audio recordings made in Minsk and other Belarusian cities in 2016-2023, the article analyzes how protesters and the authorities used voices, noises, and music during the major political protests of recent years. The field recordings became the starting points for a further discussion on the multifaceted role of sound, music, and silence in contesting for urban and political space in Belarus. The “loudest” period in the country’s recent history is then put in a wider context of studying the clashing ideologies of the authoritarian regime and the democratic, pro-independence movement. The study of audio materials is accompanied by participant observations, interviews, and an extensive analysis of Belarusian and international media that reveal various sonic practices used by the country’s and its critics. The primary goal of this article is to address the gaps in studies of the contemporary Belarusian political soundscape and independent music scenes.

Sashko Protyah is a film director and activist from Mariupol, Ukraine. He's a co-founder of Freefilmers, a collective of artists and filmmakers. In his films, he works with topics of memory, otherness, and alienation. Now Sashko is based in Zaporizhzhia and volunteers for IDPs and the Ukrainian army. This interview was taken in February 2024 over email.