Alternative Histori[es]: A Place Where Something Happened
(2024)
author(s): Eliot Moleba
published in: Research Catalogue
Abstract
This artistic research project focuses on narrative accounts of Norwegians who self-identify with a ‘multicultural and/or immigration background(s)’, to explore how their (hi)stories can be woven into the tapestry of the contemporary Norwegian public memory and story. I set out to interview and collect their narrative accounts, which must also be understood as oral (topical) histories, focusing on (hi)stories of their lived experiences, with a special interest in an event that happened in a public space and has been experienced as a meaningful or life-changing moment. Through a collaborative process, the oral (hi)stories were transformed and used to produce interactive monuments installed on the sites where the narrated events took place.
One of the key artistic challenges in the project was to grapple with the question of how not only the collaborators but also the public can be empowered to actively shape and engage with artistic works, becoming co-collaborators themselves.
This artistic inquiry led to the development of monu(mo)ments, an artistic concept and initiative that is dedicated to turning stories of Norway’s diversity into interactive, performative works of public art. The monu(mo)ments are not just symbols of collective memory but embody that very concept in how they themselves function. Through an interactive/participatory design, the public is invited to contribute their own narratives, perspectives, and experiences, shaping the monu(mo)ment's meaning and relevance. They invite the public to become co-creators of the narratives embedded within their communal spaces, fostering a sense of ownership and agency, and blurring the boundaries between artist(s) and public, the past and the present.
The project strives to illuminate the untold oral (hi)stories of these narrators by allowing them to take over public spaces and infuse them with gripping personal narratives to shift how we read those places and (re)negotiate their past/meaning. This is to create an ‘alternative history’, dedicated to writing and inscribing these voices into public spaces and our broader collective imagination.
Other artistic results include a live-action role-playing game (LARP). Furthermore, the larp was modified to serve as a resource for educators, enabling them to address interconnected themes within their classrooms through immersive gameplay. It has been performed in schools, festivals, and conferences in Norway, Austria, and Denmark.
Overall, by creating artistic works that (re)imagining public memory as a dynamic and interactive process, this artistic research project foregrounds and contributes to the ongoing efforts to capture and reflect Norway’s multicultural reality and identity.
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.
Live Archiving - processes of becoming a dragon
(2024)
author(s): Fernanda Branco
published in: Research Catalogue
PDF reflection text by Fernanda Branco
The Aura of Electromagnetic Twilight
(2024)
author(s): Mikkel Wettre
published in: Research Catalogue
In this lecture I reflect on recent artistic work relating to perception, technology and bodily awareness. The lecture was part of the Digital Narratives Network Conference held at UiB in 2019.
The Digital Narrative Network Conference and Exhibition was a cross-faculty initiative at UiB/KMD with a keynote by N. Katherine Hayles on literature and AI, a series of presentations by scholars, artists and authors, and an exhibition of digital narratives, including a sample of my "Twilight Apparatus" sculpture-series.
In my sculpture-work I have taken eyesight and optical phenomena as a starting point for mechanical installations that engage the senses and serve as metaphorical depictions of the relationship between human and technical cognition. My presentation will track the development of recent projects and the role of imaginative awareness.
Spring at Geassemahjohka
(2024)
author(s): Maarit Mäkelä, Priska Falin
published in: Research Catalogue
The video is part of artistic research that explores a dialogue between human, non-human, and forces of the land in Utsjoki, Finland. In this artistic research, walking is used as a method to connect with the environment. During the walks, small amounts of soil – sand, stones, and clay – is gathered and processed further in a studio. Some soil is transformed to slips and used when painting hand-built vases made from the gathered clay. The fired vases are placed temporarily in local rivers. The result is a series of three vase experiments done in a dialogue between human, soil, water, and the forces of the land.
The video presents the third vase experiment, where the vase is built from the local clay. The motifs of the painting are the nationally endangered animals: arctic fox, fell owl and glacial salmon. In the River Teno catchment, small juvenile salmon often spend some of their first years of life in tiny tributaries, which they enter from their birth place, the spawning areas in the main stem of the river. One of these nursery streams being Geassemahjohka. The vase is positioned in Geassemahjohka, which is running to the main stem of the River Teno some 70 km upstream from the estuary. Via the experiment we speculate: can act of crafting vase be conceived as act of caring, the vase being thus a symbolic shelter for the salmon?
Cloak of Longing - Dr Mikey Georgeson
(2024)
author(s): Konfessor Kimey Peckpo
published in: Research Catalogue
The Cloak of Longing has been involved in conference keynote, public and university pastoral occasions. At the heart of my research practice is a desire to liberate capacities of expressivity via a processual use intuitive material vitality. This contingent radical empiricism regards the communication model's need for pre-given therefore-ness as potentially occluding of capacities to work with matter flow – a characteristic of a cosmos of nonhuman agency inside which a performative intra-relational understanding emerges.