Research Catalogue

The PD Arts + Creative Symposium takes place at LocHal in Tilburg (NL) on 20 June 2025.

Initiated in 2020, 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?

This exposition emerged from my participation in the second interval of the Simultaneous Arrivals (Simularr) Artistic Research Project—a research project inviting international artist-researchers to explore relational, situated, and process-based inquiries in dialogue with core researchers. Core researchers: Nayari Castillo, Hanns Holger Rutz, Franziska Hederer, and Daniele Pozzi. For the second interval, the visual artist and researcher Elena Radaelli and I were invited as visiting artist-researchers. (More information on Simultaneous Arrivals: https://simularr.net/about/) The exposition presents my process during the residency, i.e. my Traces and Paths Towards a Singularly-Plural Companionships. The eight-week residency (3 March-30 April 2024) took place across three sites: Graz (Austria); Lecce, San Cesario (Italy); and Klagenfurt (Austria). The exposition traces this journey through various mediums, including texts, graphics, video and audio material experiments, field encounters, and theoretical companions. My processes, are informed and shaped by my companion collaborators—human (research-creation companions), more-than-human, textual, and material—who co-inform and co-create the unfolding of the research.

reconstruction i-v is a series of works I have been working on for almost a decade. The works take about 2 hours and 40 minutes to perform and explore the dismantling of industry, machines as part of people's intimate lives, and the musical potential of industrial machines and industrial sounds. I use embroidered scores, video and audio files as well as sewing machines and conventional acoustic instruments. In this exposition I present the works and the process of making them. reconstruction i-v was performed in full by Alpaca Ensemble during ARW in Trondheim 2024.

As Long as the Sun lasts was published in 2025 in form of artist book in collaboration with Chippendale Studio. It is a research about comets' behaviour and their capacity of switching on and off in relation to their proximity to the Sun, transforming themselves from cold asteroids into luminous objects with their comas and tails. So I started looking for comets in my daily reality, investigating a connection between me and them, building a narrative on several temporal and physical levels. I began by observing comets as cold, rocky objects until their transformation into luminous bodies, recreating them with objects from my everyday life, trying to identify with them during their journey towards the Sun.

Occupying a space whilst being one ourselves. The materiality of the body coming in a state of symbiosis with the places it chooses to position itself and the objects it chooses to surround itself with. Deconstruct and reconstruct. Remove parts of yourself, shed skin, cut your hair, change your weight, add others, change. The transfiguration of one’s materic flesh, in the progressive becoming one with the environment that surrounds it. The research begins from the consideration of the body taken as material, as a space, a meeting point between exteriority and interiority. The body that shares its own materiality with the places it finds itself in; they influence eachother.