Research Catalogue

Een artistiek onderzoek naar contact, verbinding en gemeenschappelijke grond.

The research project 'Lessons in the Shadows of Death' explores and exposes an almost lost tradition of public mourning - the Art of Lamentation. The project follows the structure of the 17th century musical genre 'Leçons de Ténèbres' – traditionally composed as vocal ‘lessons’ performed during Easter week contemplating the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and based on the Biblical Lamentations. The overall purpose is to create and promote an intra-active 'grief-entangled' music practice in relation to public mourning and wounds of loss. Previous artistic research on vocal mad scenes, lamentations and Nothingness (Laasonen Belgrano 2011) and performance philosophical explorations of apophenia and autopoesis (Price 2017) has since 2019 merged and developed into a growing archive investigating ‘ornamentation-as methodology’. The primary aim of this project is to transform the ornamented music and words of Michel Lambert’s nine Leçons de Tenebres from 1661 into nine video-essays. Together with an international network of artists and scholars we will bring the 17th century musical mourning to a contemporary Jerusalem – a city which lives as a symbol of any falling, wounded and embodied space-time. The project reconfigures the Art of Lamentation as a living practice for a wounded world in need of re-learning how to attend to existential consciousness and communal grief.The research project 'Lessons in the Shadows of Death' explores and exposes an almost lost tradition of public mourning - the Art of Lamentation. The project follows the structure of the 17th century musical genre 'Leçons de Ténèbres' – traditionally composed as vocal ‘lessons’ performed during Easter week contemplating the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and based on the Biblical Lamentations. The overall purpose is to create and promote an intra-active 'grief-entangled' music practice in relation to public mourning and wounds of loss. Previous artistic research on vocal mad scenes, lamentations and Nothingness (Laasonen Belgrano 2011) and performance philosophical explorations of apophenia and autopoesis (Price 2017) has since 2019 merged and developed into a growing archive investigating ‘ornamentation-as methodology’. The primary aim of this project is to transform the ornamented music and words of Michel Lambert’s nine Leçons de Tenebres from 1661 into nine video-essays. Together with an international network of artists and scholars we will bring the 17th century musical mourning to a contemporary Jerusalem – a city which lives as a symbol of any falling, wounded and embodied space-time. The project reconfigures the Art of Lamentation as a living practice for a wounded world in need of re-learning how to attend to existential consciousness and communal grief.

Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orient to self, others, world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? A dorsal orientation foregrounds an active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

In this exposition, Falk Hübner and Heleen de Hoon share the process and reflections of their collaborative research project "Running Tilburg". In this project, Falk aimed to connect to an urban surrounding by means of long distance running. In September 2021, Falk Hübner started his work as professor of Artistic Connective Practices at Fontys Academy of the Arts in Tilburg, The Netherlands. Together with dramaturge Heleen de Hoon, he decided to get to know and connect to the city and the new surroundings by running it, and explore running as a connective practice - literally through spending time with feet on the ground. Heleen and Falk asked a group of colleagues, all living in the city, to share places to run by, and related stories to these places. Guided by these stories Falk and Heleen created a map and a script for a 53K run, documented by video, photos and field notes. Rather than presenting conclusive findings and final reflections, the purpose of this exposition is to share the documentation of the process and the experience. Thus, we understand the project and this exposition quite literally as a first step to lead to potentially next and new steps.

This project investigates Western musical instruments as being critical and even dangerous sites, which should be approached with the greatest of caution. Approached as liminal interfaces between the living and the dead, suspended between past(s) and present(s), turning these instruments into both paranormal and parasitic sites, which should be treated as such. Instruments as pathological contaminated bodies of parasitic discourse ready to jump at you and embed themselves in you, sedimenting within you and, subsequently, playing you. Instruments as haunted sites saturated with ghostlike matters of toxoplasmatic ectoplasm, fostering ghosts with the capacity to possess and inflict pain on to other bodies, active in the past as well in the present. With an interest in the notion of instrumentalization and what instruments can mean, control, and do to bodies, instruments are approached from a safe(r) distance through different (group) interventions, raising questions on how best to emolliate and soften the instrumental body? How to soften the big silent? How to soften the sedimented?

In my artistic research project, I embarked on an exploration of the continuum between the roles of a music producer as both facilitator and initiator. Through in-depth engagement with real-world scenarios in professional music production, I examined the dynamics and nuances of how these roles negotiate, intersect, and shape the final artistic outcomes. This investigation not only unveils the intricate processes that underpin music creation but also highlights the implications these negotiations have on the resulting works of art. The findings shed light on the subtle artistry embedded in production decisions and offer a fresh perspective on the evolving landscape of music production.