Research Catalogue

Center for Art Design + Social Research Un-Writing Nature Spoleto, Italy

This exposition is a guide for students and teachers alike on the methodical approach of the subject Aural Skills and Improvisation.

Is there a method to die?

 In the spring of 2009, I attended a course in aesthetic-based qualitative research at Stockholm University. My mother was becoming very weak at the time. As I set out to write on method and methodology within the course, she had to go to hospital for some days during which I kept her company as much as I could. Tests didn't prove anything wrong with her though, and she was sent back home. When she was lifted from the stretcher and gently put her back in her own bed by the transport team, she looked around her and smiled. From the well-known paintings on her walls and the books in her bookshelves, she turned her attention to at me. Still smiling, she looked into my eyes, saying: "And now begins a new and exciting phase in our lives."

Less than a month later, she deceased. 

 The day after her death, I took one of her carpets on the back of my bike and went to the shore of a lake to clean it, the way she used to do it when I was a child. Out of this situation, the question emerged. Absurd though it seemed, it echoed through my further reading, listening and thinking.

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.