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.
Cultivating Companionship A conversation about cornfields and communities.
(2024)
author(s): Lina Maria Hülsmann
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Our connection to the land is crucial, yet the Anthropocene mindset alienated us from being part of nature.
This research paper is a thorough report of fieldwork, map studies, interviews, experiments and theories related to the domain of philosophy, biology, anthropology, sociology and ecology. By consulting a variety of literature resources of renowned thinkers like Donna Haraway, Arturo Escobar and Bruno Latour you share with them to envision the Anthropocene as a fundamental crisis of modernity with an emphasis on the human detachment from nature.
Working with the corn plant as a symbol of Anthropocene agriculture, this thesis deals with the topics of community and the importance to embrace biodiversity. Based on a case study in Bersenbrück, a small town in North-West Germany, I raise the alarm about one of the most disputable topics in today’s agriculture industry: monoculture.
Since the 1960s the landscape has been dominated by maize being the main cause for the transition from small-scale, self-sufficient farming towards the industrialized production of cornfields.
The origins of the cultivation of the maize was regarded to bind together families and communities, today it has a devastating effect on bio-diversity. On a larger scale maize appears to enforce a capitalist structure of food production and is considered one of the largest contributors to the emission of climate change.
Further, the research leads to opportunities that evolve out of the current agricultural situation. Material experiments with a waste product of monoculture-maize plantations, testify how a deep interest and curiosity can evolve into spatial design and encompass a ‘new level of esteem’. These spatial and material proposals allow the formation of new relationships between humans and nature, between communities and ecosystems.
To ‘cultivating companionship’ expresses optimism and call-to-action in order to contribute to a resilient future where participation as a form of civic engagement and social solidarity is its main core.
The concept of companionship became also a tool that results from empathy, sensitivity, care and compassion, building op on a critical lens, aiming to work together within the situation, the site and the inhabitants.
Terrania
(2023)
author(s): Nat Grant, Nicky Stott
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Terrania is a gothic eco-drama podcast project exploring gender-queer and disability themes in the face of climate catastrophe. This project draws on contemporary environmental realities to explore how (dis)abled, genderqueer bodies might be reimagined in dystopian and utopian futurity narratives.
The application of creative practice as a means of disrupting or re-defining the dynamics of power in, with or for different communities.
(2022)
author(s): Sabrin Hasbun, Gareth Osborne, Rachel Carney, Julika Gittner, Catherine Cartwright, agnes villette, Harry Matthews
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
In this exposition, seven research practitioners investigate how creative practice can be applied as a form of knowledge production in order to disrupt or re-define the dynamics of power in a range of different contexts. These applications of creative practice take varied and complex forms, often transferring creativity from the practitioner-researcher to their participants, increasing participant agency or re-defining existing hierarchies, as they form, empower, and enlighten real and conceptual communities. This collaborative exposition has been developed through presentations and discussions over the course of two years. Although each researcher applies different methodologies to their individual projects, our work as a group followed a pattern of creative practice, reflection, and reformulation, as we responded to each other’s research, creating a research community of our own. We want to emphasize that creative practice can not only disrupt or re-define the dynamics of power in a range of different contexts, but that it can do this in an infinite number of ways. In this variety and adaptability lies the potential of creative research.
You and Me and Everything Around Us
(2021)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Single-channel video with text and voice-over. Invitation at the Women Artists' Movement Show, The Crypt Gallery, London, 2009.
One Way Street
(2021)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Single-channel digital video with voice-over. Shown at: "Take 291", 291 Gallery, London; "Troma Fling", Independent Film Festival, Edinburgh, 2005.
Research Speed Dating
(2020)
author(s): Pauliina Laukkanen
published in: Research Catalogue
An account of a Research Speed Dating session in the Nordic Summer University's (Dis)Symposium Pleasure and Playfulness in Times of Crisis Helsinki gathering, on 26th July 2020 on Harakka Island.
Demmin – letting a city sound
(2020)
author(s): Mareike Nele Dobewall
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The project ’Demmin – eine Stadt zum Klingen bringen’ (’Demmin – letting a city sound’) explores the history and stories of the German city of Demmin in a dialogue between the local choir, Peenechor, and the site of Haus Demmin. During a two-week workshop the choir and Mareike Dobewall explored how to vocalise other stories, of the inhabitants of Demmin and the two decaying buildings known collectively as Haus Demmin (the ruins of an 11th century fortress and a former mansion). In a sonic dialogue between ageing voices and decaying architecture a vocal performance in the open air was created. Stories, history and fairy tales took new shape through vocal music, and un-listened sound was given presence. The site-determined performance allowed for the memory and the imagination of the visitors and the participants to rise up and become a part of a holistic experience.
Mapping Methods of the Millbank Atlas
(2019)
author(s): Shibboleth Shechter, Marsha Bradfield
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The Millbank Atlas is part of an ongoing collaboration that manifests as live projects developed in response to local desire and needs. Staff and student researchers of Chelsea College of Arts (a constituent college of University of the Arts London) come together with residents and others of the Millbank neighbourhood in Westminster to bring the Atlas into being. As both process and outcome, the Atlas creates meaning through conceptualising Millbank as comprised of reciprocal relations among the College and surrounding businesses, residential blocks, civil society groups, transportation links and other amenities, infrastructure and further aspects of this built and natural environment. Central here is the lived experience of Millbankers - those who reside, work and study in this London locale.
In what follows we revisit The Millbank Atlas to draw out a nascent aspect of our paper for VI Art of Research (AoR 2017). This begins with scoping our presentation for this conference, which was titled ‘The Millbank Atlas: Catalysing Practice-based Research in a Spirit of the Civic University’ to refresh our interest in the agency of collaborative practice-based research. We review our claim that as a community of practice < > practice of community, the Atlas catalyses through chiasmus. With this established we turn to our immediate concern: the catalytic role that mapping plays as the core practice in The Millbank Atlas. Drawing on Denis Wood’s sense of mapping as an alternative to mapmaking, we go on to propose the Atlas as an instance of counter-mapping. Aspects of the Atlas’ production, exhibition, dissemination and other impact are discussed with reference to counter-mapping as an emerging field with political purchase. Evidence of this includes the vital work of the Argentinian collective, Iconolasistas and the Counter\Mapping campaigns out of Queen Mary University in the UK.
The third part of this paper returns to the three core questions of AoR 2017. These we addressed at the conference with reference to the Atlas’ catalytic potential to generate communities through collaborative, practice-based research. In what follows here we consider the questions from a fresh perspective: the agency of counter-mapping to produce new understanding that is not only communicable but also critically compelling. Drawing as both a literal act of inscription and as figurative language proves vital in this regard (e.g. mark making but also drawing metaphors, such as drawing together, drawing out). The paper concludes by insisting that the catalytic value of counter-mapping resides between the critical and creative process of making the maps and their outcomes as evidence-rich artefacts. Finally, we indicate a direction for future enquiry: probing the agency of counter-mapping as practice-based research that gains traction through the maps’ discursive production as they are read and negotiated.
urban peripheries workshop Vol. 1 publication
(2019)
author(s): Maiju Loukola, Bea Tornberg, Una Auri, Virpi Nieminen
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition is a visual and textual map of exploratory projects by 10 Aalto ARTS students and 12 Universität der Künste students in their collaboratory workshop URBAN PERIPHERIES Vol. 1 in Helsinki/Espoo, during 5-20 February 2019.
The exposition is composed by the Aalto ARTS students and their supervisor, and it reflects the interventional works realised by the ARTS + UdK students, and experimental texts realised by the ARTS students after the actual workshop.
The exposition similarly works as a basis for the second part of URBAN PERIPHERIES (Vol. 2) that will take place in UdK Berlin in December 2019. It thus also outlines possible scenarios to be explored on grounds of the first workshop.
From 'Highbrow Art' to Participatory Culture – A Potential for Change
(2016)
author(s): Barbara Lueneburg
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Through the arts research project TransCoding (funded by the Austrian Science Fund as
PEEK AR 259-G21) we wish to encourage participation in the development of a musical-multimedia show and an audiovisual installation by offering participatory culture via the web 2.0.
Since February 2014, the TransCoding team has built a network of various social media channels around a main hub, the WordPress site what-ifblog.net. Here we introduce our topics of multimedia art and contemporary (art) music, community participation, and the ongoing creation of our show under the categories "Art we love", "You, us and the project", and "Making of", respectively. In a fourth category we choose "identity" as our main topic for the content of the show and the blog. The concept of identity offers a framework for the project that is universally relevant and unites our otherwise diverse international community members.
The blog is our main contact point with our community, currently at more than 1000 members, and affords them the opportunity to participate in our project. Via calls for entries we encourage our visitors to contribute images, sounds, and texts that we incorporate in our artwork. Through our social media channels we invite to speak out, share discourse and take influence on the creation of our artwork, thus empowering our followers to express their own identities and participate in the creative process.
We afford our community members authority in shaping our work and offer them a platform to meet and make their interest clear. As we invite contributors to exercise influence in the joint artwork, we look at change as viewed through the power relationship between artist and community. The (commonly) hierarchic relationship between the artist and audience/followers is being changed into one of permeability and mutual influence.
Consequently we explore not only how the artist as researcher can engender social change, but also how the participating community can do so through their contributions to the project. By delving into the participants' motivations, we learn more about their interests as well as about their reasons for creating and for wanting to be a part of our participatory community. The romantic principle of the individual composer-genius working beyond established rules or external controls is obsolete for us; we investigate the role of the artist within this community
and ask how granting creative influence to our community alters traditional (power) models of artist-audience relation and if the interaction consequently adds meaning to both.
TransCoding is located at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz/Austria.
Contents:
1. Introduction: Introduction to TransCoding-From 'Highbrow Art' to Participatory Culture: what is it about and who is involved?
2. Methodology: Positioning ourselves as researchers and artists in the respective fields and introducing the central artworks and the strategies employed in our research project.
3. Case studies: Detailed investigation on the level and the area in which we grant authority in decision-making to our community. Outline of areas of success and conflict our project yields.
4. Conclusion: Demonstration of how TransCoding engenders social and/or artistic change.
Debris (Enlightenment Panel no 2)
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Sculpted and painted wood, combined with treated rusty objects. Duct tape with boat paint models for metal sheet sculptures, 2020. Digital drawings, 2021, 2023. Dutch steel sailing boat part-restoration and renovation, Amsterdam (with Sean A. Hladkyj), 2019-20.
Relief and improvised sculptures made with industrial paints, as well as found objects, were exposed to weather conditions, including heavy rain and wind, over a few months on a floating timber raft. Working with the changes the weather was causing to the ad hoc studio, I made changes until the painting was finished, photographed, then dumped. The relief was collected. I applied the colours from those available in a symbolic manner, abstracting the view of a ghetto in a large city. The objects stand for the landmarks.
The pieces would comprise of the scenography for a theatre performance, informed by my conversations with a theatre lighting technician. The event would also include a donation event of the art objects. See external link for the theatre play, based on the tradition of the philosophical dialogue and employing the idea of performing philosophy to make it accessible to a wider audience.
Political asylum has been traditionally offered to people who flee from their countries of origin and citizenship, because of violations of their dignity, which is a human right, for their political beliefs and related activities. Currently, seven human rights of mine, five basic, have been infringed in the United Kingdom, where I have been a citizen since 2011; the origin is my native Greece. Political asylum is only offered to people, who are non-citizens of the country where asylum is sought from. At the same time, political asylum has become harder to offer, due to the global nature of persecution of whoever is perceived as a dissident.
Since 2020, Forza Nuova, the Italian affiliate of the Greek Golden Dawn, has participated in the organised international criminal case, of which I have been the target, originating from my native Greece, "accelerating" in the Netherlands and the UK in 2020, Covid-19.
Notably, Roberto Fiore, Forza Nuova's leader, inherited briefly Alessandra Mussolini's post in the EU parliament.
Drawing on the philosophical notion of impossible objects, the works attempted an indirect postcolonial critique; a suggestion for alternative, autonomous lifestyles; and a performative metaphor for global refugees.
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.
Terrania [submitted to RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research - 2023-03-15 23:09]
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Nat Grant, Nicky Stott
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Terrania is a gothic eco-drama podcast project exploring gender-queer and disability themes in the face of climate catastrophe. This project draws on contemporary environmental realities to explore how (dis)abled, genderqueer bodies might be reimagined in dystopian and utopian futurity narratives.
Why does she cry salty tears while he touches the sea
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Jenný Mikaelsdóttir
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
Summary:
"Why does she cry salty tears while he touches the sea". Follows a search for understanding how being in cold water has a relationship with humans. More specifically if the sea is for people to be in or not - the upbringing stories from Iceland and a Nordic background is noticeable in how the author approaches the subject of the sea. From the perspective of being cautious towards it, yet fearful and therefore the quest is giving contrast on how the sea shapes people. On an emotional level yet spiritually as well. Questions regarding people’s place within the social context and, with others. The personal writings is intertwined with challenges people face and how it’s displayed in the art world. Research into how artist have dealt with overcoming bigger forces than themselves. The social element of a sea swimming community is discussed where recent acknowledgment in a modern society to be in cold water is ever present. This is done by interviewing people who have been tuned in with the sea, a former sailor and a sea swimmer.
The paper is divided into four chapters. Their titles serves the focus points. In Salt water, a look into the unknown, how artists deal with the sea as a natural force, admiration towards the sea with a connection to the emotional state. Community, is where the unknown offer a place to belong to, observing from a distance as well inside a sea swimming community. In Rituals, sea swim is investigated as a social act binding the community. Tales brings storytelling with focus on sailors and sea creatures.
Rethinking urban movement through the frame of radical psychiatry
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Dora Ramljak
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
Research is the ground for exploring the world. My research paper serves as a guide in the sensorial and caring experience of the world around us as. Written in stages in which patients enter and experience the sensory room, the transition from history to the future opens space for discussion and implementation of observed practices in individual realities.
The beginning chapters introduce radical movements in psychiatry while outlining the historical formation of disability as a social issue. Discussion around illness and disability is observed trough political and philosophical frame. Historical examples provide insight into how the space of the institution itself can re-shape into a progressing form, how the discussion about institutionalised people is de-stigmatised once the closed system of a hospital or an asylum opens to its surrounding environment, and how this can affect the position of healthcare, psychiatry specifically, on the level of a state.
The chapters bring forward current knowledge around body memory and studies around sensory treatments in institutionalized settings. In this chapters, the body is not solely observed in the setting of a hospital or asylum, but brought in the context of perceiving the body as a social and cultural object.
Short poetic digressions are moments of personal reflection, automatic writing that reminds me of moments when I saw the necessity to provide alternative models of care.
The paper contains interviews and transcriptions of conversations I had with my commissioners. Through conversations with medical workers and artists, I reflected upon the current state of care provisions, ranging from institutional care to self-care. The dialogues show sensibility and understanding that a shift in healthcare towards the re-humanization of the ill is needed.
Written in-between moments of working with materials in the workshop settings, research has acted as
words meet material
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Jelena Škulis
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
several authors met
in one millennium
and made words
nasty
our contribution to the common minority is meager but necessary / Elias Canetti, from Die Blendung, 1935
aspiration is to
reduce text
in its production
the conclusions are yet to come
questions will come at the end
-
Here I present little passages written by using autoethnographical approach and researching most important issues I cope during creative process. Selected short texts are the part of the artistic research connecting to themes about material and art through words. These little messages I call literature tattoos – usually performed on the skin, but the same action can emerge in the brain structure after reading. The video and artwork ’I have tried everything, nothing works’ were made in 2019, during the residency which was a part of Doctoral studies in University of Bergen, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (Norway). There I was first time not using physical contact with community or handwork but was learning new technology - jacquard.
The texts in artwork =Co woven quotes from the books about artistic research. The set of rules or the menu of instructions are shown as possible (un)helper if you wish to perform (un)successful research being an artist. Phrases were picked out from books intuitively while practicing AR. The question is if, why or when they are helpful.
The whole AR is about analyzing links and boundaries between community, text and material.
Hustadt project
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Apolonija Polona Šušteršič
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In 2008 I received an invitation from the City of Bochum to make a conventional public art work in Hustadt, a suburban neighbourhood on the city’s south-east edge with an interesting beginning and turbulent recent history. Built in the late 1960s for approximately 6,000 inhabitants, the area was intended to be a Universitätsrahmenstadt – a residential area framing the campus of the Bochum University – built to offer professors, students, academics, and public employees nearby housing. As a result of various social, economic, and political developments related to today’s global situation, Hustadt has since then encountered many changes.
Today’s inhabitants of Hustadt reflect a microcosm of the world; approximately 56 different nationalities live in the neighbourhood, with many different cultures, lifestyles, and habits coexisting every day in close proximity to each other. High unemployment, lengthy integration processes, and the constantly changing community limit the possibility for its inhabitants to relate to the place as their home. As a result, Hustadt has the reputation of being a ghetto; its bad name has stigmatised the area.
Planned to last only nine months, the project turned into a three-year process of negotiations, discussions, and actions. It evolved into a self-organised initiative together with local activists (Aktionsteam) and provoked a huge discussion within the city legislature. The Hustadt Project was finally accepted in the urban regeneration plan for “Innere Hustadt” as part of “Stadtumbau West” – the Urban Regeneration Programme for Hustadt, Bochum. We managed to expand the initial budget for public art by 500% and turned a conventional public art commission into a sustainable participatory project.
More than an architectural object or urban infrastructure, the Hustadt Project was mainly a process composed of several parts. With Akstionsteam we researched the existing situation, through many formal and informal meetings, discussions, and workshops with people living in Hustadt and developed different activities for the neighbourhood in order to test the location, to encourage them to act on and react to present conditions, outside of official social institutions, to create a place by themselves and for themselves, using the results as arguments in political discussions. The entire process led to the drafting of a proposal for and the eventual realisation of the Community Pavilion – Brunnenplatz 1, a multifunctional infrastructure for the main square in Hustadt, a meeting place for inhabitants.
The Community Pavilion – Brunnenplatz 1 became a self-organised mini cultural institution that will continue in the future to work closely together with its inhabitants (Summer Film Festival – Hustadt 2012). The custodian for the Community Pavilion has become the UmQ e.V. – University meets Querenburg, Association for Street Culture, which will also care for the Pavilion in the future.
The Hustadt Project became a platform that stimulated the imagination about the future of the place and its inhabitants. The project focused on and addressed distributions of power in public space; the role of the artist/architect within urban regeneration projects; the issue of “spatial justice”; and the appropriation of public space.