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 artist-researchers Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Packer, and Carla Zaccagnini. The cities we inhabit – Copenhagen, Sao Paulo and Malmö – have been our laboratories. Since March 2023, we have been conducting artistic experiments, accompanied by collective study sessions among ourselves and with a group of students, also encompassing workshops and lectures with specialists.

Departing from methods learned from each-other's disciplines, we have been creating scores to guide our relationship to these cities. The scores conduct our collective experiencing of our cities through methods such as diffractive reading and listening, or the entangled collecting of objects, words and other affections found and experienced in the urban terrains. These artistic 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.

In this exposition we want to share one of these lines of performative research that we call 'Non-local walks'. Departing from the concept of non-locality we have been investigating how to establish new ways to entangle our practices and collaborate across urban spaces transnationally – to produce works together, at the same time, while not in the same place – reducing physical displacement. As such, we attempt to approach the cities as potentized non-local terrains awaiting yet unseen, unheard circuitries, and, as fields of forces that await to be experienced.

'Non-local walks' is thus a collaborative method based on walking simultaneously in the different cities we inhabit by following a score composed by the group. For each (scored) experiment, we depart at the same moment and walk for an agreed amount of time, experimenting with different modes of moving, reading, listening, seeing, sensing, sounding and thinking through these urban spaces. While digitally mapping our routes and paces, we physically perform defined tasks in order to later assemble, analyse and experiment with our findings in further configurations. The performed tasks can include photographing, reading, writing, recording sounds, collecting objects, drawing shadows, etc.

Across these various materializations of the non-local walks, unexpected connections, constellations, and coincidents e/merge, having resulted in cartographies, drawings, moving sculptures, audio work, writings. The ongoing investigations and play with various transpositions of our work, dynamically un-settles the materials, calling for a continuous reworking, revisiting and re-walking of the scores, routes, sites, sources that weave through our practice.