Research Catalogue

The EcoSomatics Conversations Series invites sharing of engagement, practices and thinking around environmental awareness through embodiment activities, dance and art. It posits a definition of EcoSomatics as of the body-mind-ecology and takes the form of open public dialogues between two (or more) people: independent artists, practitioners, and academics. The project was conceived by Dr Polly Hudson, (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham City University), and the conversations are co-convened with Dr Karen Wood, (Birmingham Dance Network and C-DaRE). The conversations took place virtually with a large international audience, and the podcasts are audio recordings of the live events. It is supported by funding from ADM Faculty Research Investment Scheme, Birmingham City University. Image by Ming de Nasty.

In this exposition, I discuss the multimedia installation "Esparto, approached", to which I opened doors last May 10th, 2025, in Organo Hall, Helsinki Music Center. "Esparto, approached" is the first of a series of three installations representing the artistic component of my doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. The research project in which this installation is contextualized is currently titled "Listening through remembrance: An autoethnography of presence in the age of disposability". In this artistic research, the notions of listening, remembering, and presence-making are interwoven in an attempt to understand how we confer meaning and value on things despite our embeddedness in a world of disposable nature, where things are susceptible to being quickly discarded, replaced, and, therefore, forgotten. This exposition opens up a space of reflection in the aftermath of "Esparto, approached". The installation represented a collective recall of the field practice that led me to search for signs of durability in abandoned contexts of my homeland in rural Southeastern Spain. This exposition poses the following questions about it: What happened? (Description); What does "what happened" mean? (Analysis); And, how does "what happened" keep happening now? (Further becomings). The objective of creating an online exposition right after the event is to open a window to the reflective process of this investigation before its completion, thus making visible its traces. The process itself is therefore turned into an accessible outcome that manifests the continual nature of the project as a whole.

Tässä ekspositiossa (KAS-kuvagalleria) voit tutustua KAS! Kontula Art Schoolin aikuisten kollektiivin jäsenten elokuussa 2024 toteuttamaan Taking Some Space -seinämaalauskokonaisuuteen ja työskentelyprosessiin. Maalauspaikka (Emännänpolun alikulkutunneli) sijaitsee Kontulan ostarin välittömässä läheisyydessä. Ekspositio mukailee taiteellisen toimintani logiikkaa: toiminta sijoittuu konkreettiseen paikkaan, Itä-Helsinkiin ja Kontulaan, kartalle. Maalaamme kartalta tarkemmin rajattua paikkaa, jonka ympärille alkaa kokoontua toiminnan myötä joukko erilaisia ihmisiä, jotka tekevät erilaisia taideteoksia. Nämä ihmiset tekevät samalla myös paikan: ottavat sen haltuun ja määrittelevät sen käytöstä. Eri ihmisten kokemukset paikasta voivat vaihdella ja olla myös ristiriidassa keskenään, jolloin paikkaan kohdistuu erilaisia taiteellisia ja sosiaalisia neuvotteluja. Mitä syvemmälle paikkaan sukeltaa, löytyy sieltä myös kaikki se hiljainen tieto, joka näkyvien teosten pinnan takana on olemassa. Tätä hiljaista tietoa pyrin avaamaan (yhteisö)taiteellisen (toiminta)tutkimukseni avulla. KAS katutaidekartalla näet myös aiemmin Kontula Art School -hankkeen aikana (2019-2025) toteutettujen julkisten ja yhteisöllisten teosten sijainteja ja nimiä. Kuvagallerian prosessikuvien valinnassa olen käyttänyt (tutkimus)eettistä harkintaa. Olen myös halunnut nostaa esille erityisesti erään työparin teosta, joka kärsi maalausprosessin aikana sekä töhrimisestä että kriittisesti keskeneräisen teoksen päälle ennenaikaisesti levitetyn suoja-aineen ja sen poistamisen aiheuttamista vahingoista.

This publication presents the outcomes of the Connective Symposium, which took place at Fontys Academy of the Arts in Tilburg, in November 2022. The symposium was the first time that the professorship and research group Artistic Connective Practices, initiated in 2021, opened its work to the international field: We invited practitioners from all over the world to share their work and exchange about the concept of "artistic connectivity". "Artistic Connectivity Unfolding" is an attempt to share the experiences during the symposium with the broader artistic research audience, and to contribute to the body of artistic research work that is socially engaged. The exposition is potentially many things: In part, it is a piece of documentation of the symposium, in part reflections on and proceedings of it. It is also an explorative contribution to our emerging and unfolding discourse of artistic connectivity, — unfinished, fluid and moving — and thus a springboard for our future work on artistic connectivity.

In this contribution, I introduce and outline productive possibilities that LED ticker displays and love letter writing can offer for facilitating careful listening and non-coercive participation in artistic research, and in research-driven artistic practice. Briefly put, by the term “careful listening” in this context, I refer to modes of listening that are attentive to the contents of what is being said, but that also allow for and encourage the reflection of the subjective and “intra-active” (Karen Barad) dimensions inherent in, and the material-performative and situated conditions of, listening. The term “non-coercive participation”, for its part, refers here to participative art-based practices that are careful – or caring – in the sense that they leave room for different modes or “degrees” of participation, and in that they aim to take the potential processes of exclusion and coercion rooted in the practical decisions and material circumstances regarding the devising and realization of the given project into account. Operating on the premiss that reading can be considered as a form of listening and attending to the text and its contents (Michelle Boulous Walker), and drawing on two recent endeavours I was part of in different yet cross-pollinating roles – as an advisor and collaborator in the artistic research project ‘TACTICS for a COLLECTIVE BODY’ (AP Schools of Art Antwerp, 2020–22), and as the artist-initiator of the installation ‘Love Letters’ in public space (Kunstzelle, WUK Vienna, 2023–24) – I discuss and present, first, ways in which love letter writing can function as a tool for – or mode of – careful listening, thereby fostering democratic and attentive dialogue between investigators within the frames of an artistic research project, and as a tool for offering a caring and accessible starting point for non-coercive participatory art practice. Secondly, I aim to show how the use of seemingly simple LED ticker displays can promote careful listening and non-coercive participation both in research workshops, showings, and artistic practice while, in the Rancièrean sense, also making the material-performative, “intra-active”, situated and auditive qualities of text and reading visible and sensible.

Lectures, panel discussions, and conferences are formats for collective listening, but they took on conventions that make listening difficult: reading aloud complicated texts, speaking quickly in order to squeeze as much material as possible, showing slides with long texts, sitting for a long time without moving. Silence is considered awkward, so there is little time to think about what has been said. In this video paper, I dissect the decorum of oral presentation formats in academia and outline how the attention of the members of an audience diverges and converges with that of the speaker. I also share some observations about verbalizing non-verbal ideas, in particular about how a text description at the beginning of a project can tie its loose ends too tightly. At the end of my talk at the Klagenfurt conference, I handed out questionnaires, in which I asked the audience members to mark the sentences which they remembered from my talk. Then, while another presenter was speaking, I drew a graph of mind wandering of the audience members based on the questionnaires and showed it at the end of the session. In the second part of this video paper, I explain the process of evaluating the responses and present the resulting graph.