The Group Who Loved to Draw a Flag
(2024)
author(s): Riki Stollar
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
Master Artistic Research (MAR).
Designed by Faina Faigin
Reflecting on personal experiences of being part of some groups and excluded from others makes me wonder how we connect when we are already clinging. Communities can be either chosen or forced, or both, which raises questions about how these bonds are formed and when we no longer belong.
The sea as a site of curation: Reflections on aesthetics education
(2023)
author(s): John Baldacchino
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
With the sea as a “site” of curation, a thalassic approach (as that which belongs to the sea), facilitates a showing of those things that converge upon the contingency of daily living. The case for aesthetics is pedagogical, inasmuch as it provides us with a strategy for exiting into the wider world as we move outside the walls of a building (and that of Bildung). Exiting also implies rejecting all those institutionalized constraints that education’s edificial approach brings to learning. Here, in its aporetic nature, art is one of those few human actions which allow us to articulate and enact a sense of being both strangers and homecomers in our own world. In other words, this is a form of curation that is claimed through the autonomy that it portends.
Fragments
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Linda H. Lien
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Looking for layers, finding fragments.
The Group Who Loved To Draw A Flag
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Riki Stollar
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
Master Artistic Research (MAR).
Designed by Faina Faigin
Reflecting on personal experiences of being part of some groups and excluded from others makes me wonder how we connect when we are already clinging. Communities can be either chosen or forced, or both, which raises questions about how these bonds are formed and when we no longer belong.
Vessels of Home: A Search for Belonging
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Naomi Arabel Moonlion
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 - BA Photography
'Vessels of Home' is a 'Search for Belonging.' As more and more people feel disconnected from the world around them, finding belonging is no longer only a question of physical place, but of creating moments in an imaginative space. These moments of belonging are short-lived, they are hard to grasp and contain in our ever individualizing world. Yet, I believe they can be found and nurtured through conscious acts and rituals.
Rowan Moonlion proposes various ways to cultivate moments of belonging, through stories contained in the vessels of Fire, Earth, Water and Air (Le Guin 2020). Firstly, in Fire, regarding human interactions: rejecting patriarchal and capitalist notions of group thinking, by letting go of identity definitions based on difference. Secondly, in Earth, considering nature: returning to our connection to the land, to understand the unifying power of interbeing. Thirdly, in Water, looking within our bodies: searching for sensorial experiences of belonging by making our bodies our homes. Finally, in Air, gazing in our minds and memories, imagining new worlds, holding stories together with our ancestors.
Witchcraft and Earth honoring rituals are used as a framework to explain and exemplify the four proposed layers. 'Vessels of Home' combines academic research grounded in queer and feminist theory, conversations with witches and other lived experience stories, poetic reflections taken from Moonlion’s artistic practice, and practical tools like rituals, recipes and affirmations. Together the four layers of belonging and the four types of writing form a unifying whole. Moonlion urges you to connect to your own personal form of belonging, and hopes you will learn to understand the value of trying to live in harmony with all else on this Earth.
The elements return again and again in a cyclical manner. The circle of life is ever present.
We Shared A Belly Podcast
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Lakisha Apostel
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'We shared a belly' is a intimate podcast which explores displacement from the perspective of Lakisha Apostel, a person of African descent who grew up on Curaçao. The prevalent presence of displacement within her life and art practice has led her to make this podcast as she concludes her Bachelors at The Royal Academy of The Hague.
This podcast consist of five episodes, each one of them tackle different questions and topics surrounding displacement, origin and the rejection origin. The content moves between the personal and collective with help of authors such as Édouard Glissant and Toni Morrison. One can view the 'We shared a belly' podcast as a precipice from which one can jump into a myriad of different of topics, questions or thoughts surrounding displacement. This podcast is available on the Research Catalogue and Soundcloud.
Soil Stories, Touching with your Eyes and Seeing with you Hands
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Nalani Kailing Knauss
connected to: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
I excavate soil’s history using the lenses of photography, geology, etymology, and anthropology. As a visual storyteller, I engage with soil while digging deeper to address questions of human relationship to the natural world and the feeling of being held within the landscape. I use soil as a metaphor for my personal search for belonging.
Can a visceral, human relationship to the earth beneath our feet help us in our fundamental search for connection? As I unearth humanity’s history, delving into all things soil, starting from an exploration of myths and indigenous beliefs, I start to reflect on my own relationship with the California landscape that I call home. I explore what it means to belong and reconnect. Through the physicality of foraging and making with clay, in combination with photographing rocks as my subjects I reflect on belonging as a human connection to place within nature. I write about the split and alienation humanity has gone though of viewing nature as something separate. The disconnection of the right side of the brain with its childlike playfulness, feeling, wondering, and meandering in comparison with modern life’s prioritization of the left brain with its over efficiency and logic.
What would happen if we started to think about soil as a living body and even as a form of language? This substance that we deem inanimate and dirty, and which we mindlessly dump our waste onto, is the memory keeper of human history.
Beneath the layers of substrate, I am curious as to what terminology we use and why. How are the words we use meaningful, and how do they impact our belief systems and values? Can we unlearn the notion that dirt is dirty? What do words say about other words? How can we redefine our language and in so doing change our belief systems which then affect the way we portray, represent, or photograph the natural world?
Photographic language is also a vehicle for the communication of certain narratives, which in my work I use as documentation. Through photography, I engage in a sensual experience of earth in all its substantive expressions: skin, soil, dust, rock, water. Soil and photography share a similar language. When viewing photography or connecting with earth, the audience leaves with an impression, a trace, which then affects the viewer. As a visual storyteller, I strive to awaken a remembering of ancestral knowledge and remind people of their primal kinship with earth.
Questions arise such as how do we engage with touch? What do we even sense in the landscape of our own body? What does this form of re-earthing and re-wording look like? Within a society that is fueled by consumerism and the all-important “I” as ego, can we, when relating to the natural landscape remember what it means to be collectively human in a symbiotic relationship with soil? Can we create a deeper relationship with something as simple as the ground beneath our feet?
My research has been informed by many a author such as Ursula K. le Guin- The Carrier Basket Theory, Dark Ecology by Timothy Morton, Braiding Sweetgrass- Robin Wall Kimmerer
Staying with the Trouble - Donna Haraway, Spell of the Sensuous David Abrum, Tim Ingold and the discourse surrounding Stadium General here at KABK