All presenters
 

Art,Technology, Materiality

Co-Creative Knitting – explorations of an improvisational practices
Marie Ledendal and Charlotte Østergaard

Format: Lecture Performance

Marie Ledendal, fil. dr. Textile Designer, Senior Lecturer in Applied Visual Communication, Lund University. Charlotte Østergaard, Designer, PhD student, Lund University.

The presentation discusses the interplay between making and thinking, encompassing both human and non-human agencies, resulting in co-constructed knowledge and meaning through performative and co-knitting practices. The performative lecture presents a collaborative work-in-progress project that explores dimensions of co-creative knitting practices.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

We explore the intricate sensory "dance" of influence – where the co-knitting becomes friction and coexisting. As we knit, our fingertips encounter the materiality of the yarn as the clicking of the needles creates a rhythmic and auditory connection. The artistic practices become core to a way in which knowledge manifests in our bodies.

Art,Technology, Materiality

"Topo Terra" Laborator
HUNITI GOLDOX (Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox)

Format: Lecture Performance and Screening + talk/discussion

Huniti Goldox’s “TOPO TERRA Laborator” is a new-media lecture and installation that unveils new or hidden terrains, impacting geographies and their material composition and resistance. Their research on ecology, enforced mutation, and water politics over the last 5 years spans locations in Jordan, Tunisia, Germany, and Albania.

HUNITI GOLDOX ( Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox) explores political impacts on water bodies & landscapes. Through various mediums, they challenge dominant narratives & fixed geographies.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

The practice immerses participants in sensory experiences, exploring water, geological formations, and their links with human and more-than-human entities. Through storytelling, video screenings, and physical samples, their research reveals slow violence against landscapes and bodies, uncovering water's generative aspects, unpacking multifaceted tales.

Art,Technology, Materiality

Cosa Bella Mortal: A Work of Friction
Elizabeth McTernan

Format: Reading

I will read excerpts from my project ‘Cosa Bella Mortal: A Work of Friction’. The piece is an artwork in the form of a lyric essay, centered on the topic of friction, both physical and metaphorical. It was published as an online project in May 2023, commissioned for the art-science research group ‘Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting’ (EER).

Elizabeth McTernan is an artist based in Berlin and Iowa City and a visiting professor at the University of Iowa. Her work is a research-oriented exploration of measurement and media ecologies.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

It braids reflections and experiments on: friction-driven world-building, resistance, mortality, grief, twinning temporalities, shifting material identities, more-than-human (re)compositions. The narratives toggle between the science of friction, studio and scientific experiments with materials, intimate recollections, and multi-layered ecologies.

Art,Technology, Materiality

Site-integrity: between the lived experience and representation of place
Julie Marsh

Format: Performance + talk/discussion

The site performance will introduce and examine the research methodology ‘site-integrity’, a site-specific and collaborative artistic practice that presents space as dualistically experienced and represented. By actively involving the audience, the research activity becomes an embedded engagement in the site of which it is part.

Julie Marsh is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster. UK.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

This site-specific artwork clearly articulates the material, architectural, social, political, and institutional discourses present in 'site' since it constitutes an interface between them, a dynamic network or system of exchange.

Art,Technology, Materiality

Drawing maps and reading landscapes
Marcia Nemer

Format: Lecture/talk and installation  

An invitation into a landscape of research through the reading method that created it. Dis/un/re/assembling texts, moving them to a new space. Each text is no longer isolated on the page, but flowing, following a logic of meaning. The object, at the same time, is a map and a bird ´s eye view. Its geography created and explored by the act of reading.

Marcia Nemer is a PHD student at Stockholm University of the Arts. Her project "Staging Absence" investigates this concept in relation to the work of the actor, moving between theatre and visual arts.

What in your research is most urgent to share right now?

The reading method, and the object it generates re new developments in my research, extending beyond the usual boundaries of my practice. I am very excited to share this work in this moment of uncertainty, where things are still being discovered and understood. Through sharing, discussing and questioning, this process arrives to a further understanding of its place in my research.

Art,Technology, Materiality

Bugs: Glitching Photography
Nina Mangalanayagam, Louise Wolthers

Format: Lecture/Talk/Reading

This research is a collaboration between Nina Mangalanayagam, artist and Senior Lecturer at HDK-Valand, and Louise Wolthers, Head of Research and Curator at The Hasselblad Foundation.

We will share research informing the exhibition Bugs & Metamorphoses at the Hasselblad Center (2025). Inspired by Legacy Russell’s intersectional feminist glitch manifesto and Jussi Parikka’s media-theory beyond the human-centric, we approach friction through the figure of the glitch, the bug and insect, as a refusal and a potent critique.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

Our curatorial research project proposes a new turn in glitch art where the glitch as ‘bug’, as insect, offers perspectives beyond a formal error as visual disruption. Employing glitching in ways that point towards in-betweenness in bodies, technologies, and other non-human beings opens up for new approaches to interspecies ecologies and symbiosis.

Art,Technology, Materiality

KhipuKoding & The Neokhipukamayoqs
The Neokhipukamayoqs

Format: Performance + talk/discussion

The KhipuKoding performance (sound + code) was created within a shared experience with another artist, part of an artistic movement I call the Neokhipukamayoqs: the Andean encoders/decoders of the knot system.Called khipu, these experts can annotate information in such fiber supports. Now, we will delve into our practices together.

A pioneer in the development of D.I.Y. textile controllers as sound interfaces, Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (SE) is a trans-media artist, doctoral researcher in SKH and curator of Peruvian origin.

What alliances does your research enable by attending to frictions, resistances, and tensions in the contemporary artistic, cultural and political landscape?

I define the Neokhipukamayoqs as a group of artists and coders working with and around the khipu, a knot-based Andean notation device. Some of us are South American, but others come from the Euro-American hegemony. In this alliance friction holds potential for change, the Neokhipukamayoqs come together to question the current social, cultural and economic hierarchies.

Art,Technology, Materiality

The Corrupt Index. Towards archives and their corruption: decolonization of archives and emergence of anarchive.
Luca Cacini, Basak Tüsüz and Anuj Malhotra

Format: Lecture/Talk/Panel

The Corrupt Index is a research and artistic project investigating the concept of anarchive, its critical approach to conservative archival and classification systems, and the dominant approach to knowledge through the bio-art practice.

Luca Cacini is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. His work interrogates the intersections of technology, queer ecology, and Capitalism. Basak Tüsüz bridges arts, architecture, technology, and culture through storytelling and blends them in designed, artistic and curatorial ways, creating interdisciplinary dialogues, narrative and immersive experiences. Anuj Malhotra is a filmmaker and critic based out of New Delhi. His work exists at the intersections of the fluid archive, open architecture, indigenous forms of storytelling and a study of chance.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

The project aims to explore alternative modes of knowledge production by engaging with bio-art and utilizing slime molds as living creatures. By shifting the focus from human-centered perspectives, the project examines the agency and intelligence of non-human organisms.

Art,Technology, Materiality

Interspecies Incubation: Redefining Incubation Through Interspecies Assemblages
Nadja Reifer

Format: Lecture Performance/Panel

The Interspecies Incubation project promotes artistic interspecies collaboration to reshape anthropocentric incubation theories. By including slime molds and machine learning, it seeks to foster a deeper connection with the environment and encourage a rhizomatic mindset for a more equitable coexistence, viewing friction as an opportunity for dialogue.

Bio-artist Nadja Reifer (communication research and design) explores nature, technology, and the unconscious in immersive installations, collaborating with organic matter, organisms, and algorithms.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

While conventional theories often prioritize conscious thought, I emphasize the significance of the unconscious/uncontrollable aspects of creativity. By reconceptualizing incubation theories to include non-human actors, I aim to shift the focus towards interspecies assemblages. Observing and caring for these actors fosters empathy and sensitivity.

Bodily and Vocal Practices

Plastic Extension of Music
Bertrand Chavarria-Aldrete

Format: Lecture/Talk/Installation

Plastic Extension is a new form of music interpretation that goes beyond translation, synaesthesia or musical analysis. This form of creative criticism takes the instrumental interpretation of a work (the praxis) as a gleaning phase, a poietic process preceding the plasticity of an art work, an intervention in music performance. 

Bertrand Chavarria-Aldrete is an international prize winner artist working with various methods all originating in sound: performance, composition, poetry, theatre, plastic, and visual arts.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

Plastic Extension is a creative tool for performers to deactivate the historical weight of classical music performance, breaking with the world-wide distribution of music and against neoliberal labor practices. Rethinking and creating new ground and platforms for classical music performance. An emancipation tool for performers in classical music.

Bodily and Vocal Practices

Who cares for whom? Performing consent negotiation.
Elena Zanzu

Format: Lecture Performance

This is an invitation to (negotiate) some practices around power dynamics, consent negotiation and care, from which the performance 'EZ' (“no” in Basque language) emerged. How can we create a safe(r) space to make vulnerability possible and attractive? What are we consenting to without knowing? Who takes care of whom? Who cares for whom?

Elena Zanzu (they/he) is a researcher, author, performer, curator. Some of their interests are: gender, ethics, consent negotiation, power dynamics, care, and methodologies of artistic research.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

My artistic practice and research feel the tension between solitary research and the craving for encounters, connections, dialogues, and negotiations. In my performance EZ, I invite the audience to a negotiation to build something together, where the most important aspect of this building is the generation of the relationship.

Bodily and Vocal Practices

Consensual Fault Lines
Estrellx Supernova

Format: Mini Performance + Workshop Lecture

A Recipe for Awakening Voice as Limb:
- An interview unfolds between the participants and myself + sharing video excerpts of Animate, Intimate (Cycle 1);
- Writing a letter to __________;
- A mini warm-up consisting of moving, shaking, vocalizing;
- The excavation of a score called [before after core, non-sensing], alone, in pairs, as a group.

Estrellx (they/them) is an Afro-Guatemalan-American choreographer, performer, curator, creative producer, and writer. Choreographically, they ask, "What do we do with the legacies we have inherited?"

What in your research is most urgent to share right now?

- How do we engender more eco-socio-politically sustainable, accessible, and diverse models, practices, performance works?

- What are the affordances and limitations of the respective mediums we are working with and how can we co-create erotic assemblages that expand and erode these limits?

- How much discomfort is essential for growth?

Bodily and Vocal Practices

I am worried for men
Freddy Houndekindo
Marcus Doverud

Format: Performance + talk/discussion

The project I am worried for men proposes to look at performance practices as sites of resistance to normative discourse and representation. I use contact improvisation/partnering and wrestling to interrogate patriarchal masculinity and violent culture. Male intimacy is here perceived as a potential remedy to revisit and reenact maleness.

Freddy Houndekindo is an interdisciplinary artist positioned at the intersection of music, spoken word poetry, dance and performance. His work critically reflects upon notions of identity, masculinity and collectivity.

 Marcus Doverud works with choreography, dance and music in performance contexts in Sweden and internationally. His work is characterized by connections between bodily and acoustic expressions.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

Partnering practices render practicants dependent from each other. I’m proposing to look at interdependency as an ethical framework that could produce a new aesthetics and methodology. Through wrestling and the juxtaposition of different mediums I engage in the practice of frictional kinship. To remember and reimagine brotherhood.

Bodily and Vocal Practices

The Body of the Beholder
Maipelo Gabang

Format: Lecture Performance

I will be sharing my musings on deadpan as it relates to my racialised and gendered positionality. In conversation with Tina Post’s writing on “the aesthetics of Black in-expression” my intentions are to offer an analysis of my strategies, their effects and the responses to them within the frame of a socially and culturally hegemonic institution.

Maipelo is a Botswana-born and South African-trained embodied practitioner. The focal point of Maipelo’s research and practice is Black Womanhood within the African diaspora.

What in your research is most urgent to share right now?

The legibility of the written theoretical/conceptual underpinnings which have been informed by the combination of external academic references and the analyses of my auto-ethnographic observations. As well as, my ability to feasibility express/transmit these findings through a choreographic and embodied practice.

Bodily and Vocal Practices

Embodying an Ecological Condition: Transcorporeal Attunements to Motion in the Body-World
Rhiannon Newton

Format: Lecture/Talk/Reading

My research focuses on the intersection of bodily practices and ecocultural knowledges. I highlight how dance practice methods develop transcorporeal attunement to motion in the body-world and foster understandings of a condition of mutability that undisciplines dominant anthropocentric perceptions of human separateness from the environment.

Rhiannon is an Australian dancer, choreographer, educator, and researcher who lives on Gadigal land (Sydney). Her practice aims to foreground embodied interconnection with the more-than-human world.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

As I attend to the material and energetic movements that traverse and connect across the threshold space between the inner and outer environments of my body, the notion of friction offers a way of attuning to the multiple bodies that enable my motion and considering the ecological byproducts and chains of action my dancing involves me with.

Bodily and Vocal Practices

Thinking Through Tango into drawing - a frictive intimacy.
Sarah Tutt

Format: Lecture/Talk/Reading

Thinking Through Tango explores how the relational, frictional, co-existence between two people in one dance might translate onto acts of drawing between two bodies either human or other-than-human. It forms part of a doctoral project looking at the gesture of push as a frictional and sensorial agent in drawing.

Sarah Tutt is a UK-based artist-researcher. She is currently undertaking a PhD at Nottingham Trent University (UK) and is a member of the Drawing Research Group (UK).

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

Friction is sensed and felt through embodied listening, attunement to material and bodily resistance, sound, traction, vibration and by being grounded whilst in movement with other. It is made knowable through acts of drawing and resulting drawn objects that archive the gestural inscription of a material encounter.

Bodily and Vocal Practices

Mas as Divinity
Waldane Walker

Format: Workshop

When I play MAS, I play miself!
The groundation of African Caribbean Masquerades inside ritual and spirituality has clarified the intensified interrelation that resonates at the core of the expressive identity. Playing MAS (masquerade) is the amplification of oneself through a connection with the divinity within.

Creole Performance Artist Waldane Walker defines their interactions by the mantra “Make your world smile”. Their work provokes socio-political concerns of gender, identity, and race.

What in your research is most urgent to share right now?

MAS as Divinity aims to invoke the practice as an encounter that offers liberation from the oppressed expressive self. Through invitation to connect with the self through somatic MAS based movements the practice provides a space wherein the highest self can be encountered, which clarifies one's being. 

Concept and Composition

Listening Into
Anya Yermakova

Format: Performance and workshop within an installation

“Listening Into” is an audio installation comprised of sounds recorded in and around WWII bunkers in a forested landscape near St Louis, USA. Leaving visual depiction outside of the presented material, I invite those attending to the installation to listen into a history that is filled with gaps, with violence, and with human irresponsibility.

Anya Yermakova works with proto-rhythms as a tool for understanding non-hegemonic logicality. She holds a PhD from Harvard and is currently engaged in site-specific research in WWII bunkers.

What alliances does your research enable by attending to frictions, resistances, and tensions in the contemporary artistic, cultural and political landscape?

The windy methodological journey of listening into the bunker itself, into the body inside and outside the bunker, into the forest inside and outside the body, into the history inside and outside this site, and so on – accent the bunkers’ ongoing-ness, indestructibility and their signifying of today's escalating global warfare.

Concept and Composition

Skin Couture
Dinu Bodiciu

Format: Workshop and presentation

Skin Couture is a constituent part of my doctoral research. It is a creative exploration that generates new interactions between body and dress that takes skin as site for novel ways of dressing a body. In this research, the body and the garment are co-dependent and symbiotic. Skin couture consists of a range of skin composites.

Dinu Bodiciu is a designer-educator who studied at London College of Fashion where he is currently a PhD candidate and working as an associate prof at West University in Timisoara. www.dinubodiciu.com

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

Through Skin Couture, the layer of fabric (usually the garment) disappears and the human skin becomes itself a garment echoing the question “where does the body and end where does the garment begin”. This work reconceptualises the notion of dress as an embodied extension of the body through which new tactile and affective experiences may be lived.

Concept and Composition

Friction to report deaths at maritime borders: a French-Senegalese dance film apparatus
Elsa Gomis
Bamba Diagne
Johanna Classe

Format: Performance + talk/discussion

The team of the film GÉEJ will present a 30-minutes talk and dance performance to explore the following questions: How can artistic research help thinking border regimes? What are the major stakes at play when co-writing a dance film? How can we bear witness of disappearances at sea while respecting the difficult work of mourning of the families?

PhD in Film Studies and filmmaker Elsa Gomis has taught European cinema at Oxford. Senegalese choreographer Bamba Diagne notably collaborated with Benjamin Abrasse, Olivier Dubois and Erik Kaiel. Johanna Classe is a multidisciplinary artist trained in contemporary dance, Afro-contemporary dance and physical theatre. She is certified in Benesh choreology.

What alliances does your research enable by attending to frictions, resistances, and tensions in the contemporary artistic, cultural and political landscape?

Our research allows alliances between academia and artistic disciplines, between countries sharing colonial past and between citizens separated by border regimes.

Concept and Composition

Speculative Polskas for Karin - A lecture performance exploring the creative potential of embodied knowledge in a collaborative compositional process.
Karin Hellqvist

Format: Lecture Performance

A lecture performance exploring the creative potential of my embodied knowledge during the collaborative compositional process of Liza Lim's One and the Other (Speculative Polskas for Karin). How can my embodied knowledge connected to traditional Swedish folk music be accessed and influence the work?

Swedish violinist Karin Hellqvist is a renowned performer of contemporary music. She has worked alongside many leading composers of today and is currently an artistic research fellow at the NMH, Oslo 

What in your research is most urgent to share right now?

The creative contributions of the performer in the field of contemporary classical music and the transformative potential of (increasingly) overlapping practices between composers and performers.

Concept and Composition

re-mind
Marie Fahlin
Camilla Larsson

Format: Performance + talk/discussion

Together with curator and PhD Camilla Larsson I will perform forms from the process of choreographing the curator role “The Mind” which is one of the characters in the score The Tiger’s Mind, by Cornelius Cardew, that I’ve used as instigator for research on the artistic relation between curator and choreographer and the curator as performing artist

Marie Fahlin did her PhD in Performative Practices with a specialization in choreography at SKH. In 2023, Fahlin began the research project The Curative Act, funded by The Swedish Research Council.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

Friction is felt, sensed and, possibly, embodied, through and in the endeavour of choreographing the incompatible merging of a non-entity, the mind, with the curator character. The performance is a search for forms that simultaneously conveys and produces these frictions.

Concept and Composition

Friction in Motion
Marie-Andrée Robitaille

Format: Performance + talk/discussion

My artistic research explores the potential of situating motion as ontologically primary. At A&C, I will present a series of circus experiments with foil to examine how friction is met when setting the material in motion. What are the implications of avoiding or embracing friction in motion? How does it inform an ethics of movement?

Marie-Andree Robitaille, a circus artist-researcher and pedagogue, holds a degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts in Performative and Media Based Practices with a specialization in Choreography.

What alliances does your research enable by attending to frictions, resistances, and tensions in the contemporary artistic, cultural and political landscape?

In my choreographic approach to circus, I assert a primacy of motion, challenging the neglect of matter and motion in Western thought. By exploring friction in motion, I foster a dialogue between circus-embodied knowledge and contemporary philosophical perspectives on movement, thus enabling new alliances between theory and practice.

Concept and Composition

Duo Works
Matilda Rolfsson and Anna Westberg

Format: Workshop in three parts 

From an improvising musician’s point of view, with a dancer ´s perspective on listening: not only hearing but also seeing and sensing the space, I’m investigating whereas an artistic praxis of an independent interplay between music and dance is possible, and how wholeness arises from individuality in the improvised expression.

Matilda Rolfsson (SE) is a percussionist and improviser. With her artistic research project, she is deepening her artistic praxis of interdisciplinary interplay with dance in free improvisation.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

The research project evolves from what I find to be some of the most fundamental components for interdisciplinary interplay in free-improvisation: dependency and independency; to move and be moved by the other artform without losing the navigation i.e. the sense-based listening, stretching the improvisational habits towards the unknown moment.

Site, Event, Encounter

Cosmologies of asylum: A lumbung collaboration between trampoline house and project art works
Carlota Mir

Format: Lecture/Talk/Reading

‘Massaging The Asylum System’ is a collaboration between the refugee justice centre Trampoline House (DK) and the neurodiverse collective Project Art Works (UK). Setting out to explore how migrant and neurodivergent communities are affected by social systems of care and control, together we sought creative ways to 'massage the system'.

Carlota Mir (1991) is a researcher and curator based in Madrid. She currently combines her PhD research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with her independent curatorial practice.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

Frictions and contradictions are inevitable in artistic initiatives that directly engage with social justice. Bringing together the visions, practices, and creative tools from two very different organizations, this temporary coalition of dissident bodies found a way to make such frictions generative.

Site, Event, Encounter

Tracing the sugar: Re-mapping and creating new narratives on Gothenburg's colonial history
Cecilia Lagerström and collaborators Antonia Aitken, Ami Skånberg, Ellen Nyman, Michael Norlind, Nasim Aghili, Sofia Mussolin, Walmeri Ribeiro

Format: Lecture Performance

This ongoing research project aims to create and share new narratives of Gothenburg's colonial history, incorporating critical place inquiries, re-mappings and performative investigations. The project traces a number of sites in the city where colonial sugar was handled, and unfolds through a wandering, associative approach, old sites leading to new insights.

Cecilia Lagerström is a director, artistic researcher and professor in performance practices at University of Gothenburg. Her work includes physical performance, walking as a critical practice, performative writing and decolonial engagements with place and body.

 Collaborators:

 Nasim Aghili is a Swedish-Iranian artist, director and writer. Nasim works in the performing and visual arts through practices of participatory performance, theatre installation and art in public space, often dealing with the experience of exile as explored via various healing rituals.

 Antonia Aitken lives in lutruwita/ Tasmania. Informed by critical place theory, walking practices, and a material knowledge of printmaking and drawing, her research considers the complexities of walking and making in unceded territories.

 Sofia Mussolin is a visual artist working with video, photography and performance. She is currently a PhD candidate at Federal Fluminense University (Brazil). Her artistic practice considers beyond-human perspectives of inhabiting the world.

 Michael Norlind is a performer, educator and director of physical theater. He is also the artistic director of Gerlesborg's theater laboratory and a senior lecturer at University of Gothenburg with focus on movement training and physical performance.

 Ellen Nyman is an actress, stage director and creator of happenings and video works. She is undertaking her PhD at Stockholm University of the Arts, with a special interest in the link between acting techniques and social adaptation in relation to adoption and black studies.

 Walmeri Ribeiro is an artist-researcher and associate professor at Federal Fluminense University (Brazil). Her work focuses on the relationships between body, performance, media art, and environmental issues. She runs the artistic research platform Territórios Sensíveis.

 Ami Skånberg, PhD in Dance (Univ. of Roehampton), is a performer and artistic researcher. She is Head of Master Dance Education at the Stockholm Univ. of the Arts, and also works at University of Gothenburg. Her PhD research concerned slow walking in urban and other spaces.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

Sensing how the city, its sites, people and histories are tightly interwoven, how frictions from an ignored colonial past, demand attention as we walk through the city. How can we make colonial structures visible but also create other, non-colonial narratives, in the encounter with local history and an archive still dominated by patrons' perspectives?

Site, Event, Encounter

Traumaturgies, and the 'voice under' of strange resonances
Ester Bergsmark

Format: Lecture Performance film/video

I invite you to listen to strange resonances between minerals, jellyfish and waste. These resonances, which emerge through play, become reality in an unspoken, sentient, in-between space, a kind of voice under. A place where grief and trauma, desire and sexuality can be contained, a place where the fragmented can host and hold complexity.

Ester M. Bergsmark is an artist, filmmaker, and artistic researcher based in Stockholm.

What alliances does your research enable by attending to frictions, resistances, and tensions in the contemporary artistic, cultural and political landscape?

I try to find resonances between nervous systems, invertebrates, and treasures of rubbish that become animated through play. A kind of transfeminine sensibility where borders between the tactile, the lived, the beautiful, and the ugly are dissolved, with a strong erotic curiosity creating playful ways out of narrow, frozen, limited states.

Site, Event, Encounter

Fabulous Encounters
Ilse van Rijn

Format: Lecture Performance

Working through the embodiment of language via its materialities, forms, and situatednesses, this research explores storytelling, questioning ways in which untold stories can(not) be shared. It builds on feminist languaging practices and their potentials in today's other-than-human world, in an attempt to say what cannot be said otherwise.

Ilse van Rijn, writer & researcher, is Head of 3rd Cycle at the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film (IPF), Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

'I'm so in love that all I can do is disidentify' (Fred Moten, 2023).

Site, Event, Encounter

Sensorial Encounters with Muddy Resistance: a performative lecture
Lisa Hinterreithner and Karin Reisinger

Format: Lecture performance 

Building on the material agencies of swamps, we propose a twofold reading: situated between resistance and unexpected kinships, how does strengthening multi-sensorial experience unfold relational or contradictory encounters, narratives, and power relationships?

Lisa Hinterreithner, performance artist and lecturer, based in Vienna,
www.lisahinterreithner.at

Karin Reisinger, researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Education in the Arts, mountains-of-ore.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

Critical reading in relation to sensory, watery, swampy and earthy surfaces and/or landscapes also offers encounters with our own watery, swampy and earthy embodiments. The resistant agency of swamps hosts frictions between humans and more than humans, becoming the site of many failed attempts at domination, extractivism, and colonization.

Site, Event, Encounter

Conversing collaborative art practices: Unsettling a ‘Collective Body’
Miro Sazdic, Anette Göthlund, Meike Schalk, Magnus Liljedahl, Lauro Höring, Elizabeth Calderón. Lüning, Rima Nehme

Format: Performative round table conversation 

A conversation between co-researchers (young people, youth leaders, artistic practitioners, researchers) investigating ‘Cultural Commons’ by reflecting upon the sensitive balance between giving support, paving the way for youths, and letting go. Conversing about negotiations, different levels of control and the difficulty of dealing with open processes.

Miro Sazdic is an artist, crafts person, educator, and senior lecturer at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. He received his MFA from Konstfack where he is currently a PhD candidate in Art, Technology, and Design.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

With attention to the perspectives of young people and the underlying social power structures they encounter in their everyday lives, a friction within our own ‘collective body’ is the sensitive balance between paving the way and letting go. What does it mean to ‘take a step back’, when the blueprint for this project is set up by the adults?

Site, Event, Encounter

Scented Rooms; Reclaiming Public Memory
Shauheen Daneshfar

Format: Film/Video + talk/discussion

Through what I'd like to refer to as poetic-politic, Scented Rooms is investigating how poetry can serve as a political tool, giving agency to a shut-down communal space. Re-thinking censored archives, dance, and the utilization of 35mm celluloid film are other key aspects of the artistic work and research.

The presentation features a screening of the thirty-minute documentary film Scented Rooms which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam IFFR 2023, followed by a collaborative reading of the exposition with the same title, which was published in VIS journal for Artistic Research 9th issue 2023.

Shauheen Daneshfar is an Iranian artist currently based in Tehran. Working with analogue material, his research investigates memory, poetic imagery, film, photography and their intersections.

What alliances does your research enable by attending to frictions, resistances, and tensions in the contemporary artistic, cultural and political landscape?

The research navigates contemporary Iran's cultural and political landscape, reflecting on censorship in public spaces and archives, and the interaction of politics and poetry. It reveals challenges in reclaiming collective memory through artistic tools, and aims to cultivate alliances for cultural resilience and societal transformation.

Site, Event, Encounter

Pleased to Meet You
A Performative Encounter with the More-Than-Human

Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir

Format: Performance + talk/discussion

The project How Little is Enough? strives to produce transformative experiences that counteract consumerism, through minimal means. Through the lens of existential sustainability, applying porous dramatugy and performative encounters the research aims to create transformative experiences that create affective bonds between guests and the non-human.

A theatre maker and an artistic researcher working with sustainable methods of performance. Steinunn recently completed her PhD project How Little is enough?  at the Malmö Theatre Academy.

What in your research is most urgent to share right now?

Humans need to be in connection with other humans and the more-than-human, in the same way we need food and shelter. To me making performances is about creating connections. I am interested in affordances, and in using the term ‘relation specific', I aim to highlight the relations that are being afforded, created, and/or reinforced during a performance.

On Walks and Walking

Residency Practices: Walking Together
Amaara Raheem

Format: Walk

We meet at the designated place and time within the symposium and walk together to an open field, at dusk. Here, I offer a walking 'score', a research experiment that we will do alone and (all) together. Accompanying this passage is an audio essay that journeys across (partial) histories of the art of walking and walking as art. Walking Together is the first of an audio series–Residency Practices–that shares my research ‘in-residence’. In this iteration, we explore the simplicity and repetition of walking to conjure a rhythmic force-field where what happens between us emerges in the midst of ‘togethering’.

Dr Amaara Raheem is a choreographer, performer and writer researching methods of ‘in-residence’ as ways to reveal alternative narratives within colonial and decolonial systems.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

In-residence in 16-acres of bush habitat, the site itself is acknowledged as host to an already occurring phenomenon. This enables modes of movement-as-knowing. Walking as wayfinding. Keeping questions of encounter plural, porous. Trying to understand the systems and dynamics and resources and struggles that make this place specific.

On Walks and Walking

Hörselgång
Charlotta Ruth
Daniele Pozzi

Format: Walk

Hörselgång is a relay sound walk exploring alternative modes of being together through the act of listening. It experiments with the friction between presence and absence, present and past, proximity and distance, combining generative binaural audio synthesis with an enhanced listening to the actual acoustic surroundings.

Daniele Pozzi IT/AT https://danielepozzi.com - sound art, electronic music
Charlotta Ruth SE/AT https://charlottaruth.com - choreography, ludic systems

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

We share an interest in putting different models of perception at and in play. In Hörselgång, we are researching forms of coexistence, not in and not outside of this world. Site specific instructions and choreographic clues combined with binaural synthesis and enhanced listening practices, interfere with the subjective situatedness of auditory perception, inviting being "in-between”.

On Walks and Walking

Shared Walks | Futures
Eylem Erturk
Aysem Mert

Format: Walk, installation and roundtable discussion

How do we feel about the future in times of crisis? What future(s) can we imagine when the world’s order tends to change drastically? Following these questions, Shared Walks | Futures focuses on the possibility, desirability, openness and plurality of futures and explores how embodied experience can create space for collective reflection on futures.

Eylem Ertürk is a practitioner-researcher in arts and works at the intersection of memory, politics and public space. She is a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (ÖAW Doc-Fellow). www.eylemduygu.net

Aysem Mert is Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University. She works on discourses of democracy and environment in the Anthropocene and climate adaptation.

What in your research is most urgent to share right now?

By walking in urban and rural environments, participants trace future imaginaries, engage in their environment and interact with each other. This experimental approach to future-making explores how walking together can create dialogical thinking and initiate the collective agency necessary for world-building through imagination and anticipation.

On Walks and Walking

Transversal Listening. Soundwalking through Time, Space, and Technologies
Jacek Smolicki

Format: Walk/Walking workshop

Using a customized audio technology, this hybrid soundwalk takes the listeners across multiple scales and temporalities, connecting the immediate soundscapes with distant places, events and phenomena. The soundwalk is a demonstration of an artistic research into critically and creatively rethinking field recording and listening practices.

Jacek Smolicki is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, designer and educator. His work explores historical, critical and existential dimensions of listening and recording practices.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

I attend to sound as a vector that connects multiple dimensions, scales and temporalities of our immediate vicinity revealing their resonances and dissonances. In terms of concepts, I work with transversality and the ecotone, from Greek meaning 'the home of tension,' and describing zones where several ecosystems meet, collide and interact.

On Walks and Walking

Frictions of walking backward
Fernanda Branco

Format: Walk

Branco will guide participants in an experience of walking backwards. This embodied practice is a way to slow down, to engage the senses, to attune to subtle shifts in perception, to be entered by (rather than entering) an environment.

Fernanda Branco is a Brazilian performer, gardener and poet based in Norway, working with performance, film and installation. Branco is currently a PhD fellow at Oslo National Academy of the Arts

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

Exploring relations of practice and theory through collaborative, embodied, and poetic perspectives, sympoietic frictions are ever present, as is the need for them.

On Walks and Walking

Embodied composition techniques for AR/MR technology performances:
Working with Mixed Reality as a relational montage

Marika Hedemyr

Format: Walk/Walking workshop

This mobile phone-based walk will cover a set of embodied composition techniques for performances that use Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) technologies. I will share how to work with AR/MR as a relational montage, by sharing a set of distinct composition practices that I have developed and articulated in my recently completed PhD.

Marika Hedemyr works with public art, choreography, and mixed reality experiences. Her work explores coexistence through the emotional and political relations between people and places.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

Coexistence is central to my work, focusing on “place” as a way to explore relations between physical, technological and societal bodies. Within the frictions that emerge when various perspectives meet, the need to be open to imagining other interpretations arises. I stage and host such situations as embodied, site-specific, guided mixed reality experiences.

Installation

Queer and Trans on Campus; a photography and text installation  
Ela Przybylo

Format: Installation + meet the artist

Employing black and white photography and descriptive text, this project explores what it means to be queer and trans and on faculty; a personal perspective from a public university in the contemporary United States.

Ela Przybylo is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, and Core Faculty in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Illinois State University.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in your artistic practice and research?

I explore ways space is made at universities, and how these “made spaces” sometimes include and sometimes exclude queer and trans bodies.

Installation

Brutalism Otherwise: Re-Imagining Thamesmead by Way of Ekbatan
Hadi Bastani
Walter Stab

Format: Installation + meet the artist

This work dives into aesthetic, socio-material, and historical affinities and differences between the brutalist suburbs of Ekbatan,Tehran and Thamesmead, London. Explored via the transformative powers of creative collaboration, the work seeks to foster understanding between cultures by transposing subjective experiences from one place to another.

Together, Bastani and Stabb explore relationships between audiovisual material, urban aesthetics and experiences, and place and community-making via the perspectives of their respective fields - sound art and anthropology, and audiovisual practices.

What in your research is most urgent to share right now?

To tease out the transformative possibilities of creative practice in community-making and foster intercultural understanding through transferring experiences of and from one place to another. Considered more broadly, this project aims to document and critically reflect on vanishing brutalist sites around the world and the modes of social interaction afforded by them.