Research Catalogue

This is the website and the open archive of the four-year research project HOW TO DO THINGS WITH PERFORMANCE? funded by the Finnish Academy. Nämä ovat nelivuotisen Suomen Akatemian rahoittaman tutkimushankkeen MITEN TEHDÄ ASIOITA ESITYKSELLÄ? verkkosivut ja avoin arkisto.

50 A3 drawings black and coloured markers, including: 3 A3 collages on paper with newspaper cutouts and printed photos. 12 A4 drawings on paper with coloured markers, glued on A3 paper + 1 A3 with black ballpoint pen and markers, glued on A3 paper. 13 A3 drawings on paper with black marker, and red, pale blue, gold, pink and orange markers +1 A3 two-sided. 17 A3 drawings on paper with coloured markers. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover with red nail polish. 1 text drawing on sketchbook cover inside. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover back inside with black, orange and gold markers. 22 A4 drawings with ballpoint pen. Some of the above is preparatory work for 4 large prints and 13 paintings. The 12 A4 glued on A3 are preparatory work for a collage on panel. I made the art between 2023-2024, from the perspective of the observer. Most of the research material came out of crime and fraud reports. I started writing the blog afterwards, since the summer of 2024. I adopted the visual vocabulary of the graphic novel, which I partly studied and read a lot about, looking at different graphic artists' work, when I was attending classes at the University of Malmo, Sweden, in 2012, to familiarise myself with elements of game design. Much of this work is, amongst other, about children. I wanted to emphasise that, by intentionally applying stylistic elements from children's drawings, in a naive and loose architectural composition, using heavily the black marker and stick figures. Adopting this visual approach, I also wanted to evoke a comically sharp twist, as satirical comment, in the British tradition of political satire, to the otherwise dark subject matter. Finally, the artistic style refers to the populist character of actors, mainly far right of the XRW, but also others. The text is written like a trip-hop song. Parts of the analysis is inspired by Saul Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's example of mathematical calculation. I used plenty of popular and less popular literary and philosophical references, for the visual art and in the writing. Saul Aaron Kripke was the inventor of the possible worlds philosophical hypothesis, which was seminal for philosophers working in the area of contemporary analytic metaphysics, including the theory of counterparts and the theory of names. He died in 2022. Lauren Berlant was a cultural theorist and gender studies scholar. She died in 2021. In the style of art, I was inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat's drawings and paintings, which are laden with input from popular media sources, like jazz music and television, recorded in an automatic and naive drawing manner, turned into abstracted paintings. For Nikos ('Rama', 'Mr X'), Filip ('Philip'), and Brandon - August, September, and October 2024. For "Daddy G" and 'Eric' ("Her Man") - December 2024, January 2025. Who are not politicians, but are doing something political, so they must take care. See also exposition "The Loot", under 'Art and Activism Exposed as Research Blog'.

Documentation of preliminary steps and collection of musical material and related reflections during the first Term of the Master's Program in Improvisation and World Music. December 2022

Maria Vilkovisky is a poetess, musician, artist, and curator born in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She graduated from the Kazakh State Conservatory as a violist, worked in the opera house orchestra, studied at the “Musagethes” literary school for writers in Almaty and at the curatorial summer school in Moscow. She is co-founder of a long-term para-institutional project called Krëlex zentre (together with Ruthia Jenrbekova), and from 2011–2014 she ran an art space in Almaty. She lives and works in Almaty and Vienna. Ruthia Jenrbekova is an artist and researcher from Almaty, Kazakhstan. She holds an MA in ecology and works as an intermedia cultural organizer. She is co-founder of Krëlex zentre together with Maria Vilkovisky. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and lives and works in Almaty and Vienna. Her fields of interest: queer ecology, material semiotics, arts-based methodologies, transfeminism. Krëlex zentre is a paranormal art institution that builds on cultural traditions of intermixed planetary diasporas, develops inclusive aesthetics, and promotes queer cosmo-politics. This interview by poet and Sound Studies scholar Vadim Keylin took place from March to April 2024 via Google Docs and has been edited for clarity. Literature references were added during the editing process.

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.