16th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research

7, 8 and 9 May 2025

University of Porto, Portugal

Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation: Towards Non-local collaborative Art Practices

Søren Kjærgaard, Carla Zaccagnini, Amilcar Lucien Packer Yessouroun 
 
Friday, May 9, 2025 - 10:30
40 min Presentation + 30 min Discussion
Moderator:
Room:

'Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation: Toward non-local collaborative art practices' investigates the resonances of concepts from quantum theory in the realm of transdisciplinary practice-based artistic research. Throughout a series of protocols using diffractive methodologies, we intend to translate and embody concepts such as spacetime, entanglement, non-locality, uncertainty, indeterminacy, and superpositionality, and embed them as tools for our artistic practices. These concepts were chosen for their singularity in physics, but also for the ways in which they confront ontoepistemic pillars of ‘Modernity’, such as sequentiality, determinacy and separability.

The research is carried out by a transdisciplinary non-local core ensemble formed by Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Packer, and Carla Zaccagnini. The cities we inhabit – Copenhagen, Sao Paulo and Malmö – have been our laboratories. Departing from tools and methods learned from each-other's disciplines, we have been creating scores to guide our relationship to these urban spaces. The scores conduct our collective experiencing of our cities through a practice we call ‘non-local walking’, involving a diffractive methodology of reading and listening, and the entangled collecting of objects, words and other affections found in the urban terrain. These experiments are conceived as a boundary-crossing transdisciplinary methodology through which we seek to engage with a non-local city, creating a relational, critical consciousness and sensing that stimulates unexpected outcomes.

These scored performances have resulted in cartographies, drawings, moving sculptures, audio works and writings. Across these various materializations of the non-local walks, unexpected connections, constellations, and coincidents e/merge, unveiling yet unheard polyphonies that give resonance to the urban spaces, as potentized terrains awaiting (re)circuitry, and, as fields of forces that await to be (re)experienced.

Søren Kjærgaard

Rhythmic Music Conservatory


Søren Kjærgaard is Associate Prof., Vice Principal and Head of Educations, R&D at RMC in Copenhagen. Kjærgaard explores ways of sharing embodied sonic knowledges in performative formats, along with the trans/interference of sonic identity through diffractive methodologies.

 

Carla Zaccagnini

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts

 

Carla Zaccagnini is the Prof. at School of Conceptual and Contextual Practices at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Zaccagnini uses a variety of media and techniques to explore strategies of displacement, thereby challenging the modernist Western gaze and knowledge through different epistemological paradigms.