Research Catalogue

New creation - Sign Language and Dance - Video Projection and dance

I include questions I was given at the Janine Antoni workshop, Toynbee Studios, in 2010, as feedback to my work, which I presented with my artistic pseudonym, Betty Nigianni. Much of Janine Antoni's art is about the female body and cultural identity. I address the participants by the first names they used to introduce themselves at the workshop. The questions were given in writing to each participant by the rest of the group, to offer material for thinking further their artistic practice in their own time. I include the answers I would give now, if I was asked the same questions. Artists, architects and designers give interviews about their work. Amongst them, architects tend to write more and publish more written work in relation to their practice.

I like to approach my body of work as being one big opera. Every object, wearable object or costume serves the opera. Every spatial costume a backdrop, every sculpture a prop, every wearable object a costume, every costume a character. One day I will make an opera consisting of all my works. Welcome to my world, welcome to my opera

The long-neglected industrial wastelands of Romania present themselves as heterotopias in need of help. Post-Communist industrial ruins form a link to a multi-layered and difficult past, and their systemic erasure has contributed to a collective amnesia that perpetuates historical trauma and denies the local population access to the landscapes, natural and artificial, that tie them to a shared past and a collective cultural identity. This contribution aims to illustrate one methodology of bridging the gap between preservation through museumification and invasive architectural intervention. In this context, artistic and design-driven research practices can enable the emergence of ephemeral creative spaces that foster engagement with industrial heritage and reach beyond commodification and capitalist exploitation.

Agnès Varda was more a photographer and invested in photographic storytelling in her fictions and non-fictions, such as the murals in Faces Places (Visages Villages, 2017). Experimental photographic narration and her artwork-like uses of the internet therefore is not a coincidence. In her internet accounts, she posed with her fans, while her Instagram account looks like an experimental work, an exhibition, open to the public and unfinished. In her first photograph, she is holding a necklace with a cat figure in her hand.

A person listening to Ludwig van Beethoven might think he is in a Jean-Luc Godard movie. An opponent of laws and canons. Beethoven sought to break the convention and laws of harmony. Johann Sebastian Bach, in contrast, never attempted to break the traditions.