No Show
(2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition contains six letters about the work No-Show that was performed in Reykjavík in 2020. The performance is a part of the artistic PhD research "How Little is Enough?" Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters in Malmö Theatre Academy at Lund University. The letters address different aspects of my artistic practice and research such as motivation, method, affect, ethics and the findings.
No Show is a series of five immersive participatory performances, solitary experiences performed in five private homes in different neighbourhoods of Reykjavík in June – August 2020.
Transformative Encounters Podcast
(2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
"Transformative Encounters" is a podcast series dedicated to the exploration and unpacking of the concept "performative encounters" within the realm of contemporary performance and how it can be understood. This series forms an integral part of the knowledge dissemination deriving from the artistic research project How Little is Enough? that is centered on sustainability and social change, conducted at the Malmö Theatre Academy by Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir under the umbrella of Agenda 2030 a transdisciplinary Graduate School within Lund University. In the podcast, Steinunn extends invitations to european artists and theorists, fostering performative encounters where they engage in in-depth discussions and multifaceted explorations of this concept from diverse perspectives.
The podcast series is edited and produced by Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir with the support of Inter Arts Centre at Lund University and Malmö Theatre Academy.
Music: Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir
STRINGS
(2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition is a documentation and dissection of the process of creating "Strings", a series of performative encounters with members of Agenda 2030 Graduate School. The performance is a part of the artistic PhD research "How Little is Enough?" Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters in Malmö Theatre Academy at Lund University. The exposition is a logbook of the process from the moment of conception to the aftermath and follows two dramaturgical tracks, an inner journey and an outer chain of events. The exposition holds a personal diary, correspondence, manuscripts, qoutes from participants, pictures and a video interview with the artistic researcher.
Island
(2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition is a documentation and dissection of the performance Eyja/Island that was peformed in 2020. The performance is a part of the artistic PhD research "How Little is Enough?" Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters in Malmö Theatre Academy at Lund University.
It contains a video essay about the process of creating the work that describes both motivation and methods, a manuscript, photographs of the performance and a video interview with Gréta Kristín Ómarsdóttir a co-creator of the work.
Island
Eyja is a piece about what it means to belong; what ties a person to a community or a place and what kind of commitment it requires to be a part of something.
The challenges of the island reflect the global challenges of current times. In the performance guests are invited to critically investigate their own ideas on what it means to belong.
The guests are invited to mirror themselves in a staged journey through the life and values of the islanders. Through walks, observations, genuine exchange, symbolic gestures and structured dialogue, topics on quality of life on the ´island´ are contemplated.
Lone Wolves Stick Together: Research as a Journey to an Aesthetic Understanding of Immersion and Participation through VR and roleplaying (LARP)
(2024)
author(s): Nadja Lipsyc
published in: Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences
This research explores the artistic and critical potentials of using tools from live action roleplaying (larp) to create narrative VR experiences. In particular, it unfolds the conception, physical play and VR play and production of the live action roleplaying (larp) Lone Wolves Stick Together. Inspired by the film Stalker (1979) by Tarkovsky, Lone Wolves Stick Together stages the immersive environment as an omniscient Sphynx-like character that pushes the players to question one another and to introspect. By using larp and video game design knowledge conjugated to cinematic aesthetics, this research project seeks to honor the creative and narrative potentials of immersion and participation. As such, between 2018 and 2023, this research took the form of classic chamber larps, immersive theater experiences, scenography installation, VR larps (including two other projects: The Space Between Us and Ancient Hours) and a final multimedia installation. The artistic methods rely on principles of environmental design, explored physically through production design and ambisonics, and virtually through a highly reactive virtual environment. The research method is based on a constructivist approach where we experiment to find an answer, not the truth. Here, experimentation is not conceptual but aesthetic: knowledge is lived and felt through artistic experience. Centred around VR and within a film and new media context, this research also develops a reflection on the industrial and technological influences on the creative process and their friction with artistic-research.
Taming Amorphalia
(2024)
author(s): Eszter Mag
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Taming Amorphalia is an experimental documentation of the intuitive processes behind/during the development of ProjectMorpheo – a Master’s Project at SKH. The research aims to further discover the fragile connections between dreams and the materials that surround us. Since ProjectMorpheo is a participatory event, Taming Amorphalia attempts to communicate the background of the research in a dialog-like, interactive way by using the form of a text based role play game.
We Are Public Space: Bodies and Minds in Post-pandemic Cities
(2023)
author(s): Marketa Kinterova
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The project aims to pay heightened attention to public spaces in cities on several levels. The first follows the trend of newly developed privately owned public spaces (known as POPS), which establish a precedent for how corporations and cities define public space and what they prioritize within it. A clear focus on people as consumers – rather than citizens – have several effects, including strict restrictions, the creation of societies of control (Deleuze 1992: 3), and various forms of often indirect exclusion of certain groups of inhabitants.
The second level attempts to accentuate subjective experiences focused on our bodies and making them consciously present in relation to public space. Both layers are a significant component of the performative lecture walks, on the basis of which I introduce the results of interactions with the respondents in my case studies. Finally, I shall describe what cities looked like during the pandemic and consider whether these scenes might be a model for the future. Are we to expect further experiences of empty cities?
När vi ses och Hur gör vi med publikinsläppet?
(2023)
author(s): Karin Bergstrand
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This exhibition shows my project from the Master in Acting 2021-2023 at SKH in Stockholm.
The essay is called "When we meet" and the performative part "How do we let the audience in?"
As an actor and clown, I have worked in many different rooms and with many different audience agreements. Everything from stage-salon situations where the audience knows exactly how to behave and what their participation looks like, to playing for only one person in a hospital bed or in a small rowing boat, where participation must be clearly negotiated and communicated. I've met adults who are world masters of theater etiquette, but can't answer a question if asked from the stage, and I've met children who are wild first-timers who engage in intense dialogue with us on stage.
I am interested in the dialogue between actors and audience and in audience participation. What standards and agreements are they regulated by? How does the fear of making a mistake, breaking the norm, affect the experience of the performance? Does that fear of shame limit what is possible in the theater?
I have also wondered what roles the audience can have, what in a work communicates this role, and whether the audience can change roles in the same work.
In "How do we let the audience in?" you can read about the work with Eva and Margaretha, two half-masks who are both actors but in whose artistry the audience plays very different roles.
Pikatreffit
(2022)
author(s): Christina Stadlbauer
published in: Research Catalogue
A participatory performance proposes intimate encounters with floral life forms. Potentially unexpected effects could be observed. Work in collaboration with The Hot Box.
Territorial Art, Design & Architecture
(2022)
author(s): Sergio Montero Bravo
connected to: Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This collaborative and cross-sectoral project addresses places, environments and spaces beyond mere functional urban endeavors. The project explores possibilities that become visible when public space is viewed from perspectives beyond the urban norm. The aim is to restore lost rural relations and to search for ways to leave the anthropocentric narrative. In the past, densification of cities has been considered synonymous with sustainable development, creativity and innovation. However, a one-sided urban focus leads to disarmament of rural habitats, and dissociation from human interdependence with non-human nature. Today, adaptation to global warming is dependent on the survival of the rural. Therefore, this artistic research project is primarily informed by activities in rural environments together with species and ecologies other than human and urban. The goal is to investigate how art, design and architectural interventions can foster oppositional narratives to anthropocentricity. What I present in this exposition are my most recent collaborations and a journey of professional metamorphosis to reach this goal. The result is a series of ongoing projects and processes that demonstrate how I explore places of communality, togetherness and mutual beneficial interdependency between species.
Arcade: A Guide to the Operas in the Doctoral Project "An Operatic Game Changer"
(2022)
author(s): Hedvig Jalhed
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition is a guide to the four ludo-immersive chamber operas in the doctoral project An Operatic Game-Changer. The operas were created during the period 2016–2020 and are contextualized and discussed in the dissertation with the same title, in which the practice of facilitating operas as adventures rather than spectacles is fleshed out. Through these participatory and multi-disciplinary concepts, conceived with the purpose of generating and analyzing live encounters between professional opera artists and co-playing visitors, immersive features are realized and explored.
Arcade is also a kaleidoscopic performance and an exhibition, designed as an operatic amusement park in miniature, with artefacts and excerpts from the operas, and presented live in connection with the public defense of the thesis in 2022 at the Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg. This online resource functions as an archive of information about the operatic works and their performances, both for those attending the performance/exhibition in Gothenburg, and for those wanting to learn about the project without experiencing this event.
Voicelanding - Exploring the scenographic potential of acoustic sound in site-sensitive performance
(2021)
author(s): Mareike Nele Dobewall
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This practical artistic research project explores how the performance of acoustic sound in dialogue with site can create a sonic scenography, experienced by an audience from within the sonic structures.
Six art projects were carried out in the context of this research. Their form varies due to the site-sensitive approach that is employed: the space and the participating musicians are both the source and the frame for the resulting spatial sound performances.
During workshops the collaborating musicians are introduced to site-sensitive methods. They learn full-body listening, spatial sounding, and space-care. The musicians learn to co-create with the space. In a collaborative process, spatial sound compositions are created using the site-specific sonic material that is elicited from the dialogue between the performers and the space. The relation to the audience plays an important role in the sharing of the performance space and the experience of the sonic scenographies. Therefore, active audience encounter is considered during the creative process towards the performance and it is further explored during each performance.
As sound is invisible and ephemeral it is a vulnerable material to engage with when creating scenographies. In this research its instability has revealed itself as an indispensable quality of a scenography that aims to connect the elements of a shared space and make their relations perceivable.
There is a tendency to make ‘reliable’ material scenographies and to sustain spatial sound through audio systems while attempting to overcome the challenges a site brings to performance. This approach to performance, scenography, and spatial sound composition, however, limits the relation between acoustic sound and site. In my sonic scenographies the performers are dependent on the dialogue with the space in order to create sonic structures that can be experienced by an audience. The attention needed for this collaboration is space-care. It includes care for all entities in the space, and especially the audience. The ephemeral quality of acoustic sound creates an active sonic scenography that performs together with the musicians, and engages multimodal listening.
The resulting spatial sound performance includes the placement and movement of sonic expressions that are specific for each instrument-site relation. In the created performance, as the audience can ‘roam through’ it, they can experience a sonic scenography that unfolds around them. In the interaction of performers and audience in these shared spaces (architectural space and sonic space) a social space can develop that allows for an ephemeral community to emerge.
The Risk of Breaking
(2019)
author(s): Joanna Sperryn-Jones
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
My sculptural installations 'risk' 2011 and 'Celebration' 2015 were developed after I broke several bones mountain biking and wasn’t able to work in my studio for a year. When I returned to making sculpture I found I could only relate to previous artwork by breaking it. I explore how and why my aesthetic preferences changed after experiencing injury, in particular the new element of risk. I reflect on contrasting experiences of mountain biking and being injured, the tension between the support and restriction of being in plaster and my alienation to my broken arm. Through this I question what motivates people to take risks, how our judgement of risk can change in different circumstances, and if the motivation for men and women taking risks is different. I reflect on the risk to the artwork and to the viewer and different forms of risk in artwork. Finally I recount how this informs the making of 'risk' 2011 and 'Celebration' 2015.
HOW LITTLE IS ENOUGH? Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters.
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The exposition is an artistic PhD thesis and contains research outputs in three categories, Performance Archive, Research Publications and Method Development tied together by an essay.
I.Essay:
Testimony of a Pilgrim.
II.Performance Archive:
No Show - exposition.
Island - exposition.
Strings - exposition.
Pleased to Meet You - exposition.
III.Research Publications:
Porous and Embracing Dramaturgy for Transformative Encounters - video article.
A Quest for Existential Sustainability - video article.
Transformative Encounters - podcast series.
IV.Method Development:
ME-THOD.
How-little-is-enough-approach.
Abstract
At the core of this artistic doctoral thesis are four performance projects designed to counter the consumer-driven nature of contemporary performance-making while also addressing the need to develop sustainable methods of performance. Guided by the question: how to construct sustainable methods of performance for transformative encounters? the inquiry transcends the different layers of performance-making to explore the potential of performance as a catalyst for societal change.
As a part of the Agenda 2030 Graduate School, an interdisciplinary research initiative at Lund University, the project focuses on existential sustainability and investigates how performance can enhance participants' sense of meaning and motivation for adopting sustainable lifestyles and increasing sustainable awareness.
The thesis output is presented in three categories; a performance archive documenting, detailing and analysing the performances and their impact; research publications, disseminating findings and key concepts through different public formats; and method development accounting for the methodological approaches that have emerged through the process.
The four performance works of this artistic research are: No Show (2020), Island (2020), Strings (2022), and Pleased to Meet You (2022/2023).
The three publications of the project are: How Little is Enough? Embracing and Porous Dramaturgies for Transformative Encounters, a video article; How Little is Enough? A Quest for Existential Sustainability, a video article; and the podcast series Transformative Encounters.
Utilizing Me-thod, a pluralistic situated methodology grounded in the artist´s personal background and skillset, together with the how-little-is-enough approach, which minimizes production and focuses on essential needs, the project has collected insights into how performative encounters can initiate transformation in participants and foster connections to the world around them, thereby enhancing existential sustainability and nurturing care for the environment. Through repeated cycles of action-based artistic research, employing qualitative materials and autoethnographical approaches, rich data was generated. The findings emphasize the importance of personal engagement, embodiment, and authentic exchange as catalysts for transformation within performative encounters.
Through this investigation, the thesis aims to contribute to the development of sustainable approaches to performance-making that facilitate profound and meaningful human experiences in an era marked by unprecedented societal and environmental challenges.
ISBN:978-91-8104-107-1
Songs We Sing
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Hans Knut Sveen, Alwynne Pritchard
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This project began in 2018, with the simple desire to play songs that we love. These could be pieces with strong associations, ones we had enjoyed singing and playing before, or songs we had never sung and that were, perhaps, even new to us. When the songs were written or what genre they might come from was not important. Original instrumentation (piano, harpsichord etc) and received ideas about vocal style were also not a priority. Finding a way of creating renditions with the tools at hand (Alwynne's voice and Hans Knut's harmonium) is what originally defined the project.
The Many and the Form - Video Documentation of Practical Components
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Edit Kaldor
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Video documentation of the practical components of the artistic research project The Many and the Form by Edit Kaldor, including:
- The video registration of Strangers (2022), a lecture performance that brings together an array of materials from various phases of the artistic research; investigations in different contexts into how lived experiences can be articulated in and through live performance.
- A video documentation of Parallel Life (2021), an interactive performance played for and by individual spectators on the streets of the city, using their mobile phones. The paradoxical situation of social distancing and digital intimacy between strangers formed the starting point of the performance.
–Video fragments of rehearsal experiments and performative works made by participants during the workshops held throughout 2019 at Pleintheater in Amsterdam as part of the artistic research project The Many and the Form. The final outcomes were presented publicly at the Vrije Vloer Festival in November 2019.
Facilitating Performer - Processing Vanity
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Bas van der Kruk
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This artistic research exposition is on interaction, participation and performance. It combines the building of an interactive process in which the audience becomes co-performer or participant. This process is guided by the facilitating performer. Together we (the audience and performer) explore the subject of vanity through this process.
Veranderend kunstenaarschap : de rol en betekenis van de kunstenaar in participatieve kunstpraktijken
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Rina Visser
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This research of Rina Visser is only available in Dutch.
De positie van kunst en kunstenaars in de westerse samenleving is de afgelopen decennia sterk veranderd. Veel kunstenaars voelen zich maatschappelijk betrokken en zoeken naar aansluiting bij de samenleving. Participatieve kunstpraktijken zijn daarvan een goed voorbeeld. Bij deze kunstvorm werken kunstenaars samen met burgers in hun eigen leefomgeving. De kunstpraktijken zijn gericht op maatschappelijke vraagstukken. Burgers worden met inzet van verbeeldingskracht geactiveerd om te reflecteren op hun eigen situatie en zo tot een andere visie te komen. Het werkterrein van de participatieve kunstenaar wordt daarmee van atelier, theater of concertzaal naar de samenleving verplaatst. Participatieve kunstpraktijken zijn zowel sociaal-maatschappelijk als kunst gericht. Door deze nieuwe manier van werken komt de kunstwereld en de kunstenaar in een ander daglicht te staan. Om deze veranderingen nader te kunnen vaststellen, zijn vijf participatieve kunstpraktijken in de Randstad onderzocht. Uit het onderzoek blijkt dat ook de artistieke identiteit van de kunstenaar van invloed is op de inhoud en vorm van de kunstpraktijk. Sommige kunstenaars zijn gericht op het kunstwerk als eindresultaat. Anderen vinden het sociale proces van de deelnemers belangrijker. Ook de invulling van de deelnemersparticipatie blijkt daarmee samen te hangen. Participatieve kunstenaars vervullen een nieuwe rol in de samenleving, namelijk die van netwerkkunstenaar.
Participação cidadã na construção e representação de cidades: contributos de uma etnografia da produção informal do espaço urbano
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Ana Miriam Rebelo
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Suporte da comunicação feita no 1º encontro de Projeto e Ciências Sociais - FAUL - Lisboa
Resumo
Esta comunicação enquadra-se no âmbito de um projeto de investigação que pretende contribuir para a promoção da participação cidadã na construção das cidades e das suas representações, cada vez mais determinantes para os processos de desenvolvimento urbano. A partir do reconhecimento e da análise das interligações entre a cidade e a sua imagem, a investigação incide sobre práticas e estéticas da construção informal na cidade do Porto, abordando a questão da participação em ambas as vertentes: produção de espaço urbano e produção de representações de cidade.
Partindo do pressuposto de que qualquer representação de cidade é necessariamente fragmentária e que deve por isso coexistir, dialogar e confrontar-se com outras representações, procura-se contribuir para um cenário imagético diversificado, observando e expondo dimensões informais dos processos de produção do espaço urbano, frequentemente deslegitimadas, senão proibidas, mas por vezes também alvo de estratégias de comodificação.
A comunicação centra-se no trabalho de pesquisa etnográfica em curso, defendendo a importância desta metodologia para a produção de representações de cidade que possam refletir a complexidade, a diversidade e as contradições que caracterizam a urbanidade. Faz-se uma análise dos dados recolhidos até ao momento e da abordagem que temos vindo a empregar, essencialmente baseada na fotografia - enquanto ferramenta de documentação e enquanto instrumento discursivo - e na recolha de testemunhos junto de habitantes, recorrendo a diferentes metodologias.
Pretende-se partilhar o processo e a reflexão metodológica que o acompanha, assim como discutir as perspetivas de aplicação do material recolhido, no âmbito do nosso projeto assim como no de projetos em diferentes áreas da investigação e da prática da arte, do design, da arquitetura ou do ativismo.
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.