Summer academy for artistic research 2024

Academic event Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki

The Summer Academy for Artistic research – SAAR – 2024 will bring together up to 18 artistic researchers and 9 supervisors for an intense and stimulating week in August. It is organized by the University of the Arts Helsinki (Uniarts Helsinki). The venue for SAAR 2024 is Hanaholmen – the Swedish-Finnish Cultural Centre, in the city of Espoo in Finland.

SAAR

SAAR is a joint Nordic project between the partner countries Finland, Sweden, and Norway. The summer academy provides a supportive setting where artists undertaking a research education (PhD candidates, Doctoral candidates, Doctoral students, or Research fellows in artistic research) from all fields collaborate, present their on-going artistic research, and receive feedback from peers and experienced tutors from leading academic art institutions.

The Nordic SAAR network is coordinated by Uniarts Helsinki and governed by a Nordic Steering Group.

Each participating country and the partner organizations in the SAAR network select their participants internally and informs prospective applicants how to apply, as well as inform participants about travel arrangements.

Practicalities

Travelling

Arrival time: Saturday 17th 2024 at 13:00 (Finnish time) in Helsinki
Departure time: Friday 23^rd 2024 afternoon or Saturday 24th 2024 morning

The institution of each participant will cover the travel costs. Please contact your own country’s contact person/institution for more details after you have been accepted to SAAR.
There is no fee for the participants.
The accommodation costs will be covered by the Nordic SAAR Network
Breakfast, lunch, coffee and dinner are included in the accommodation
Dietary restrictions will be taken into consideration
Sauna facilities and swimming pool will be available for participants during the week. You can also swim in the sea
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The weeks program includes excursions outdoors – please note that regarding functional clothing! As much as possible also other parts of the week’s program will be held outdoors.

Accommodation

All participants will have individual hotel rooms. Accommodation is included in the network fee paid by the participating country.

Venue

Hanaholmen – the Swedish-Finnish Cultural Centre
Address: Hanasaarenranta 5, Espoo (city)
Tel: +358 (0)9 435 020

How to get there:

By taxi from airport: ca 40-minute ride.
By metro: under 10-minute metro ride to Koivusaari/Björkholmen station from city centre (Kamppi station) and a 1,1 km walk from Koivusaari/Björkholmen metro station to Hanaholmen/Hanasaari cultural centre.

Working methods

SAAR provides a supportive peer-learning environment where PhD candidates and research fellows in artistic research share their ongoing research and receive feedback from peers and experienced tutors from Sweden, Finland, and Norway. Besides collegial sharing of ongoing research, the aim is to reflect on the institutional differences and diversity of artistic research in the Nordic countries. The programme builds on the questions emerging from the participants’ research methods and processes.

Willingness to share and engage in collegial dialogues is a key prerequisite for participating in SAAR.

This year’s theme: Sharing of methods / methods of sharing

This year’s summer academy focuses on sharing of methods / methods of sharing. We will work in small groups facilitated by the supervisors/tutors towards concrete ideas of how to give something further to our peers and communities; how to make our methodical steps strong enough to continue existing beyond ourselves, how to make them survive us. The programme is structured around moments of sharing and moments of collecting (described more in detail below). Along with the collegial encounters and discussions, the aim of the work in the small groups is to collect insights and methodical ideas to be included in a collective toolbox, a collection of materials that will be shared with the whole group of participants at the end of the week.

The programme will also include thematic evening sessions, excursions and moments of socialising as well as focus conversations that can take the form of individual tutoring, peer-to-peer talks or trialogues.

Many of the sessions will take place outdoors. Please take proper outdoor clothing with you.

Session concepts

Introduction marathon:

Please prepare to introduce yourself through your artistic research (max 10 min. including the setting up of the equipment needed in the presentation). You can answer questions like what, where and how. You can include images, sound, PowerPoint or a participatory exercise in your presentation. We will go through all the introductions on Saturday.

Exploration on Pentala Island:

The island is a world. The task is to explore this world in small groups (2–4 people) and to make notes of the individual ways of doing it. What do I do when I do what I do? What kinds of things do I pay attention to? How do I establish connections? What are my strategies for making observations and notes? The individual notes made during the excursion on Pentala will later feed into the work done in the “collecting sessions”. You are allowed to explore the island alone, if you strongly wish, but don’t get lost in the forest. Please keep in mind that you need to get back to the boat in time.

Optional morning session:

Whoever is willing to facilitate an optional morning session before the day’s other programme, should announce it on the previous day on the information board in the main meeting room. This can be a small demonstration of a method or practice you find worth sharing (bodily exercise, score, feedback method…). Please include all necessary information in the announcement (such as: when and where, do participants need to sign up or take some utensils with them, etc.). Please plan the activity so that the session ends at latest at 9:20.

Sharing session:

The rationale of the sharing sessions builds on the fact that sharing of research methods, processes and outcomes is both a matter of research ethics and of responsibility towards the research community and public funders. In each session one participant shares their ongoing research in a format they have chosen (40 min.). The sharing is followed by a collegial discussion about the shared materials and issues (40 min.). The third part of the session (40 min.) is reserved for meta-reflection in three steps: 1) Discussion about how the chosen method of sharing worked and what could be developed further and how 2) Everybody writes personal feedback to the participant whose research had been shared 3) Everybody writes notes about how the sharing moment and discussions in the session could contribute to the toolbox. These notes will be processed further in the collecting sessions. The sharing sessions are moderated by the tutors. Each participant will share once during the week. As many of the sharing sessions will take place outdoors, the participants are encouraged to think of the sharing methods and formats beyond traditional PowerPoint presentations.

Collecting session:

Each small group works during the week collectively towards a toolbox to be shared with other groups at the end of the week. The collecting sessions are reserved for this purpose. In these sessions the small groups work in a self-organized way without the tutors.

Focus conversations:

During the week the participants can sign up for a series of 45-minute talks with a tutor or one or two peers. The focus conversations can take the form of an individual tutoring session, a thematically delimited discussion or an informal conversation with a colleague or two. The flap board in the main meeting room will be used for scheduling.

Toolbox:

Premises: Successful research is never accomplished alone, nor it is conducted without methodical steps and some kind of tools. Each researcher has their toolbox, knowingly or unknowingly. In artistic research, methods often emerge first through the processes of making. Methodical steps rely on tools. Tools have their affordances, but they can always be bent towards unanticipated ends. Sharing of tools enhances the possibilities and methodical development of each individual research process. Aim: At the end of the week all four small groups share the collection of tools that they have collectively worked on with an open source -attitude. Ideally, these toolboxes would include something that all participants could easily take with them and use in their research after the SAAR week. The toolboxes are meant to survive, to live further.

Optional evening programme:

On some evenings some of the tutors offer informal thematical sessions. The topic of each evening session will be announced on the previous day on the flap board in the main meeting room. Possible reading materials will be distributed per email.

Programme

This year, in collaboration with the SAAR Steering Group, the Uniarts Helsinki’s supervisors prof. Otso Aavanranta, prof. Mika Elo and university researcher Pilvi Porkola have developed the programme together with the supervisors from Sweden and Norway (Petra Bauer, Martin Soderkamp, Tao Sambolec, Solmund Nystabakk, Linda Lien). The practicalities are coordinated by the SAAR network coordinator, specialist Michaela Bränn (Uniarts Helsinki).

Saturday 17.8.2024

Note: times are given in Finnish time.

13:00 Lunch at Hanaholmen restaurant Plats

After lunch gathering in main meeting room Skiftnyckel.

14:00 Introduction marathon: all participants introduce themselves (max. 10 min. each)

16:00 Coffee

19:30 Dinner

20:30 Free socialising together

Sunday 18.8.2024 – Excursion day

9:30 Excursion to Pentala Island by boat

The boat from the shipping company FRS leaves at 9:30 from the Hanaholmen boat pier.

Task 1: Get to know at least one person not belonging to your own small group

12:00 Lunch at Café Pentala
The café is located beside the Pentala Archipelago Museum.

Task 2: Exploration. The island is a world. The task is to explore this world in small groups (2–4 people) and to make notes of the individual ways of doing it.

17:00 Boat leaves from Pentala back to Hanaholmen

19:00 Dinner at Hanaholmen

20:30 Free socialising together

We will make an outdoor excursion to Pentala island on Sunday for the whole day. Pentala is a charming and pittoresque island, part of the Summer islands in Espoo, in the Gulf of Finland – one of the “10 000” islands situated on the Finnish southern coastal archipelago. It hosts a historical fisher’s abode turned into a museum, varied terrain with meadows, forests, marshes and rocks, a lake, as well as varied seaside scenery including a beach. It is possible to swim there.

For this excursion, please bring along proper outdoor clothing (windbreaker, some warm clothes, walking shoes), a water bottle, and – if you wish to take a dip in the sea – a swimming suit. There are toilets, drinking water and huts for weather shelter on Pentala. For exploring the island and especially if you venture off-track, please be aware that there might be mosquitos and ticks.

Participants

Doctoral candidates

Timo Tähkänen
Starting year: 2023
Bio: Timo Tähkänen is a visual and drag artist and a first year doctoral student (2023->) in The Academy of Fine Arts, The University of the Arts Helsinki. They obtained an MA in Fine Art at the Academy of Fine Art (Finland) in 2014. They graduated as a visual artist from the University of Applied Sciences of South-Karelia (Finland) in 2007.

Research: In my artistic research “Crooked Ears, Struggling Works” I ask how art pedagogical thinking and listening in the queer body affects my artistic practice. What kind of information does my research setup produce, how and for whom is it important? My research consists of three artistic components and a written commentary.

Jenna Ristilä
Starting year: 2021
Bio: I am a Finnish pianist doing artistic research at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts, Helsinki. In addition to research, I work as a freelancer, mainly with singers. I have worked as a music director and pianist in several operas for both adults and children, and I like planning lied programs around different themes. In 2014 I graduated as a Master of Music from the Department of Performing Arts at the Sibelius Academy, and in 2018 I completed my second master’s degree at the same university, this time with vocal coaching as my major.

My artistic doctoral research focuses on Finnish composing women from the 19^th century until today. The main research question is how gender comes into play within the trifecta of composer, work, and performer. The concerts shed light on different aspects of this question. Women’s Salon (2022) focused on small-scale piano music and solo songs, and in the program notes I wrote about women composers and the challenges they have faced. Woman and Sonata (2023) consisted of three sonatas, and I wrote about the multiple ways in which gender is embedded in sonata form. Dancing Woman (November 2024) will include solo piano music related to dance, and I’m planning to write about what it feels like to be a woman, a pianist, and on stage. My last concert, Travelling Women (2025), will focus on questions of nationality – who can count as a Finnish composer and how the nationality can be a complex phenomenon.

The written part of my research will be two articles, the first one of which I have begun drafting and hope to send to be published later this year. Both articles will be about feminist music analysis. In the first I analyze Carita Holmström’s four Södergran songs using a self-crafted combination of analytical methods – performer’s analysis (Björkman 2019), dialogic music analysis (Moisala 2003) and experimental, descriptive analysis (t. ex. Guck, 1994; 2006; 2015). In the second article I will analyze Laura Netzel’s relationship to sonata form using Sonata Theory.

Jack Faber
Starting year: 2019
Bio: Jack Faber is a Helsinki-based artist-researcher and filmmaker whose work explores narratives of surveillance, survival and new species relations. Investigating their interconnections and role within escalating security, economic and ecological crises, his practice focuses on climate crimes and cinema. His use of drones, phones and new technologies in unexpected ways, often involve altering them into means of questioning the militarization of public spaces and open territories. In his work he examines climate conflicts zone and possibilities of emancipatory engagements through a hybrid of salvaged footage, archival materials, documentation and scripted works. He sensitively uses humour, transgression, and immersion for in-depth studies of possible species equality in relations to AI, animals and human rights.

Research: ‘Eco Noir’ explores the relations between surveillance and new species relations through the cinematic gaze. In the new grounds where these fields meet – with their exponentially growing use of drones and A.I. technologies – ‘Eco Noir’ suggests a cartography of correlations between the security and climate crises, with the impending aftermath of ecological and economic collapses. Although academic research has been done in these fields separately, this study is the first to merge the three (surveillance, cinema and species survival) to investigate their mutual influences, especially with the accelerating extinction economies of surveillance societies with their dependence upon development of threshold technologies, following the Corona crisis.

The lockdowns of 2020, when only animals and drones roamed outdoors while most of humanity was in confinement, is one glance into the new species relations ‘Eco Noir’ research and their future possibilities. The study examines how the ancient connection between humans and animals – which used to be at the center of our social, economic and cultural existence – is changing radically in the current age. While the presence of animals has been marginalized, replaced, and reduced either to a consumption object or a spectacle, autonomous machines, better known as drones, have come to the foreground.

Guided by Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and assimilating traits and characters of animals, drones are now transforming the traditional relations between humans and other species. ‘Eco Noir’ investigates how this transformation is seen and envisioned through cinema and visual arts. Drones’ appearances in a rich variety of feature fiction films (Blade Runner, Terminator, Interstellar, The Bourne Legacy, Dune, Syriana, Don’t Look Up, etc.) questions both surveillance and survivability in public and cinematic spaces. Together with contemporary artworks and textual resources (Steyerl, Virilio, Haraway, Mbembe, Forensic Architecture, Trevor Paglen, etc.) they address inequality and oppression concerning animals, A.I., and human rights. Studying these appearances as means to produce new knowledge, the research offers imaginative possibilities to explore the yet-uncharted territory of the relations between humans, other species and autonomous animal-like machines.

Elly Stormer Vadseth
Starting year: 2023
Bio: Elly S Vadsethis a norwegian- american interdisciplinary artist and doctoral candidate at the institute of Art and Media studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She holds an interdiciplanary MFA with a concentration in Media Arts and Performance/ choreography from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (2018), Boston, USA, where she was a Tufts Institute of the Environment fellow in artistic research (2018-2019). In embodied dialogue with discourses in environmental humanities and eco-feminism her place-sensitive work and research circulate around sense-making and interspecies way-finding in shifting land and water ecologies.

Research:Gelatinous Epistemes: Interspecies hydro-choreography and the expanded moving imageis a transdisciplinaryPHDprojectin artistic research.The background for the project is dramatic ocean change:coastal ecosystems are in the process of adapting to new ocean realities. Fish populations are declining or migrating from their nested ecologies, while the gelatinous migratory ctenophora and jellyfish seem to thrive and continue their cyclical survival choreographies. Marine biologicalscientists are predicting that the biomass of ctenophores and jellyfish will increase in the ocean, possibly with less biodiversity of other marine species.My artistic research question isHow does the oceanic choreography of ctenophores translate into an audio-visual hydro-choreography that expands our imaginary of the ocean? How can artistic practice be used to research and animate ocean ontologies?

In the project, ‘gelatinous epistemes’ is researched and expressed through choreographic formations and moving image methodologies. I study and document the already present, or speculative future hydro-choreographies of the ctenophora and interconnected humans in selected ecosystems with unique climate zones. From this sitespesific research, I co-imagine and film new interspecies choreographies that speculatively merge human and more-than-human corporeal perspectives, thus actualising the real in new ways.

The research is carried out in two climate zones/locations, (the tempered cold zone of the Oslofjord/NO as well as in a coastal fishing village where the ctenophora might migrate in the future (Berlevåg/NO now cold zone). In addition to the coastal locations the project also takes place in in the context of the deep sea through involvement in the NTNU research project “Visualizing the Deep Sea in the Age of Climate Change”.

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Amy van den Hooven
Starting year: 2024
Bio: I am a multidisciplinary designer focused on re-imagining healthcare. My interest in designing to improve the way care is provided comes from both a personal place of living with an auto-immune disease and a collective place as there are an increasing number of people suffering silently.

My recent work has been developing tangible forms to help people communicate the complexity of their pain. I continue to explore the use of objects and develop new art inspired approaches as a method to open-up dialogue in health settings. Designing to connect people and to create a safe place for discussing, questioning, and re-imagining healthcare is at the core of my design practice.

Research:The title of my PhD is “Clinic of the Future: Designing for Dialogues about Care.” The clinic of the future is an invitation to engage in meaningful dialogue and a proposal for a brighter and re-imagined approach to what the clinic can be. In this project, I explore the use of design and art methods to open up dialogue, with the goal of collectively questioning, challenging, and re-imagining the way we discuss and practice care. What defines the clinic? How can we see the person in need? What dialogues must take place to better understand care?

When thinking about how to design ways to facilitate dialogue about pain, suffering, and care, I am inspired by artistic methods of expression. These methods challenge the medical notion of having to quantify experiences. Instead, they promote openness and the storytelling of the complex nature of illness experiences. For example, in workshops and one-on-one settings, I am exploring the creation of artifacts with participants and testing toolkits that aim to work as prompts and tools for conversation. These methods are evolving into a unique way of creating connections between participants, while also serving as a means to collect research and gather information about sensitive topics such as care.

With the insights, objects, and impressions collected from the use of these methods, I aim to observe and learn about what care means to people. My goal is to test whether these methods function as a form of communication, while also transforming these insights into scenarios or illustrating visions for what the future of the clinic and care could be.

Susanna Laaksonen (she/her, they/them)
Starting year: 2023
Bio: Sussu Laaksonen is a writer with credits in film, television, theater and media art. They have a long interest in somatics and movement, and have been fascinated by the pre-verbal, somatic aspects of the writing process since 2009. In 2023 they published a narrative non-fiction book, Vapaan kirjoittajan anatomia (Anatomy of a Free Writer) on the subject and begun their doctoral studies. To support their research on the somatic emergence of the writer’s artistic process they are also studying micro-phenomenology, and will graduate as an ISMETA-certified somatic movement practitioner in 2025.

Research: Small dance – the somatic emergence of the writer’s artistic process
The writer’s creative process is a little researched topic. For a time, literary theory paid little attention to the writer. Professional writing education emphasized product, not process. Creativity research focused on maximizing productivity. Artistic research has become an avenue for artists themselves to elucidate how art creates meaning. Literary artistic research emerges in this context.

Traditionally, writing was considered to be a cognitive activity. Today, cognition is increasingly recognized as an embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, and affective process. In the realm of continental philosophy, corporal hermeneutics and body poetics address how the body creates meaning and becomes present in text. Somatic methods from therapeutic contexts are making their way into writing pedagogy.

My research project is aimed at understanding the embodied experience of the writer’s process. I will recruit 6-9 creative writers from diverse backgrounds and lead workshops featuring freewriting exercises and somatics. We will trace the felt sense of emerging work. I will interview the group members using a micro-phenomenological research approach to elicit precise descriptions of somatic experiences and to analyze the differences and similarities

My thesis will intersperse participants’ writing, interviews, descriptions and analysis. I will produce a piece of experimental writing that puts aside analysis, metabolizing instead my own experience as writer/researcher.

Writers are uniquely equipped to describe the sensory qualities of their process. My project leads to a fuller, fleshed-out understanding of writing as an art form and creativity as an embodied practice.

Oliver Hambsch
Starting year: 2023
I am a German / South African artist who grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. I studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, where I completed my MFA in 2022. In 2023 I was accepted as a PhD research fellow at the Kunst og Handverk Graphics department to conduct research in the field of printmaking. My research is primarily concerned with the materiality of print as a means of creating analogies with which to investigate greater conceptual issues. My practice is varied and ranges from traditional to experimental printmaking to video and sound.

Research: My project, preliminarily titled “Material Memory”, is rooted in printmaking. I locate it in the triple intersection of the three fields of printmaking, materialism and memory studies as viewed through a hauntological lens. Print has long been used as a metaphorical device to help conceptualise memory by likening memories to impressions or imprints left by an event on the mind’s cognitive surface. The analogical parallels are not only linguistic but are also rooted in material and process. While the vernacular metaphor of memory as an impression is engaging in its simplicity, it is also reductive and misleading. I propose that using a holistic approach to printmaking that extends beyond the image and includes material and process as essential meaning-forming aspects, new visual analogies that consider current science-based understanding of memory and speak in ways where written or spoken language fail can be generated. Additionally I consider the affective and hautological properties of personal memory and nostalgia. The research proposed for this project will focus on an experimental methodology with materiality and process in the workshop. The intention of my artistic research is to produce artwork that responds to my theoretical concerns through a contemporary printmaking practice. In addition to Printmaking Theory, the study will also draw on theories such as Materialism, Photography Theory, Intersubjective Memory and Hauntology, as well as draw on the work of several other artists to establish a theoretical and practical foundation on which to conduct research.

Martyna Kosecka
Starting year: 2023
Bio: Martyna Kosecka’s music grows out of her interest in philosophy, physics, linguistics and the mythologies and fables of the world. She is a Polish composer, performer, conductor, curator and researcher in new music. In her projects she works with narratives, microtonality, symbolism and ritualism, by using multidisciplinary solutions. She emphasises the richness of transcultural relationships in art, drawing from the cultures of Iran, Poland and Norway, the countries she has connected through her life.

Since 2023, Martyna holds a Ph.D Research Fellow position at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo (Norway), pursuing her research on mini-opera and the role and treatment of women in contemporary society. Her compositions are published by Donemus Holland. Her music is performed at festivals and concerts around the world, including the International Festival of Contemporary Music Warsaw Autumn, rainy days festival, OstravaDays Festival or Music Biennale Zagreb.

Research: The research will focus on the development of a series of short opera concepts that I will compose and stage myself. The compositions will address different structural content and attempt to transcribe the full operatic form into an equally developed, condensed version. The main aim of the study is to define the existence of the mini-opera and to present the reasons for its visible presence in contemporary art: the purpose of its emergence and its growing popularity, its duration and narrative framework, and aesthetical decisions in a nutshell. Most importantly, it is also an investigation into how I approach the mini-opera, what this form means to me and how I intend to use it in my further compositional development. Through the social critique addressed in the short opera concepts of my artistic research and their transdisciplinary interweaving, I want to discuss certain universal experiences and concerns related to a theme close to my heart – the role and treatment of women in contemporary society. My artistic research seeks to find answers to these questions:

The mini-opera and its time frames. How does the shortening of the dramaturgical plot affect the form’s content, and in what areas does it redirect the perception of the short opera as musical drama?
Opera character and video-opera character. How does this interaction expand perceptual strategies and make the performance on stage multi-dimensional?
The composer – social activist or sensitive artist? Why manifesting through art?
Contemporary Opera – Contemporary Theatre – Contemporary Performance – what elements of each define their existence in my mini-operas, how, in what ways and to what extent? What then is a mini-opera?

Mini-operas will be representations of a short form with the qualities of a large form, and are brought to life through a transdisciplinary approach by binding music, instrumental theatre, experimental theatre and the world of opera with anthropological perspectives, sociology, video, new media and, above all, reflections on the situation of women’s rights.

Maria Lindeman
Starting year: 2023
Bio: Maria Lindeman is studying for a PhD at the opera department at Stockholm University of the Arts, exploring artistic leadership and contemporary expressions within the field of Opera. She has previously been working with directing, dramaturgy, acting and teaching within the field of Performing Arts. Recently she has also been focusing on interdisciplinary expression and interactive experience in the contexts of opera and installation art.

Research: Her research project focuses on artistic leadership and the specific capaciousness required in interdisciplinary and collaborative creative processes. She explores this in practice through workshops and performances and the main themes during the previous year have been; Emerging technology and Improvisation. The aim of the practical explorations is to find possible new expressions and ways of working within the field of opera, and to understand which aspects of the leadership and the creative process that lead the way to these alternative expressions. The performance Currents has emerged as a result of these explorations, and it includes a semi-improvised musical score, interactive hologram projections and motion sensing technology.

Mari Synnøve Gjertsen
Starting year: 2024
Bio: Mari is an architect and PhD candidate with a master’s degree in architecture from NTNU (2017). As a practicing architect she has worked with housing projects in urban or semiurban contexts, cultural buildings, graphical design, urban furniture, and cross-disciplinary projects with artists and writers. Since 2021 she has been teaching at NTNU in the course’s City and Town Planning (Arkitektur 5) and Large Buildings (Arkitektur 6), where they have explored time as a thematic approach to sustainability in architecture and planning.

Research: The Atlas of Time
This artistic research project is based on the notion that our understanding of reality is subjected to fictions, stories we connect to things and actions that make up our understanding of the world. These, often unspoken, ideas shape our built environment, and are frequently mistaken for truths.

The symbiotic evolution of fossil-based technologies and other societal developments (economic, cultural, political etc.) over the last 300 years has locked us into an unsustainable status quo, that seems almost impossible to escape. A condition that the human ecologist Andreas Malm refers to as a carbon lock-in. I suggest there exists a carbon lock-in of fictions, or fossil fictions, that is carried from the past into the future by our built environment, proliferated daily by our failure to address them and our continuation of status quo thinking in planning, design and construction processes.

To investigate these fictions, I will employ aesthetic map-making as a method of artistic research, because of its inherent ability to combine the tacit knowledge of sensate experience and the specific knowledge of science. This research will use the familiar format of maps in new and different ways to explore the spatial implications of our current fossil fictions and in what ways they might be both a result and a cause of a society where these stories are so engraved in our common consciousness that they seem to be above change.

With a hope to shift perspectives and trigger new stories.

Sara Inga Utsi Bongo
Starting year: 2023
Bio: I am a lecturer and practitioner within the field of duodji, narrowly described as crafting methods inherited by the Sami people. I prepare and make duodji of hide and fur from reindeer. I also work with textiles, yarn and other materials related to duodji. In these processes I highlight ethical and aesthetical values and ideas, and strive to maintain, develop and transfer traditional knowledge. Inspiration is aquired from land, the reindeerherding lifestyle and the rich and adaptable duodji traditions.

I hold a masterdegree in duodji from the Sami University of Applied Sciences, a certificate of apprenticeship in the field of leather and fur duodji and have practical pedagogical education.

Research: Suotna savkkuha – Sinew Whispers

of Forgotten Pewterthread Ornaments

of their shapes and relations

land, animals, plants, cosmology, mythology, maker and community

aesthetics, powerrelations

of a reapproach with reindeerhide, itself and accessible metals

The reapproach is about becoming familiar with pewterthread ornamented duodjiitems, collected from the northern Sami area during the 19^th century, to European museums.

We may call the process a rematriation of spinning the spindle, again make a thread with reindeersinew and metals. Again ornament, on hide, what once was, yet in the age of tomorrow.

The research aims to unlock what the gathering and preparing of materials and the making reveal of relations; of ethics; of stories; of valuable knowledge. It explores the ability of reindeersinew, copperfilaments from damaged electronical devices and botanical printed reindeerhide as materials, as sources for thinking, to raise awareness.

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Aku Meriläinen
Starting year: 2023
Bio: Aku Meriläinen is a media artist and researcher who develops practices beyond the normative expectations in works that integrate digital technologies and performing arts. At the moment they are interested in combining artistic processes with social media to identify discriminatory cultural features from the crip perspective. In their artistic research project Nakurampa (Crip Sex Worker) they have started to do online sex work as a non-binary person who lives with multiple sclerosis. The project aims to challenge the dominant male gaze in porn from a queer and anti-ableist perspective and to diverse the ways disability is perceived.

Research: My research focuses on, through the means of artistic processes, the tendency of the able-bodied, heterosexual and cis-gendered body to appear as a norm in relation to sexuality and sex work on social media platforms.

My research asks, how negative cultural meanings associated with disability can be countered and dismantled with online sex work on social media. What kind of understanding does the synthesis between artistic processes and social media reveal to challenge and resist the dominant logic of able-bodied heteronormativity? What kind of restrictions and positive impacts do the new technological platforms have on artistic process that aims to unravels stigmas in sex work and sexuality of people with disabilities?

Nakurampa (Crip Sex Worker) is a multi-year performance that takes place on social media platforms, where I do online sex work openly as a person living with multiple sclerosis (MS), who identifies as non-binary and pansexual. I consider the social media platform as a performative space for the pornographic images and videos that I publish during several years as part of the Nakurampa project.

My research represents artistic research that engages with crip theory and performance art at the intersection of media art and performing arts. Crip theory analyzes cultural phenomenas in specific contexts from the perspective of queer and disability studies, providing several good points for exploring the transformative impact potential that artistic processes and social media together have (McRuer 2006, Vaahtera 2019).

The Nakurampa project is a collaboration with photographer Tuisku Lehto.

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Viktor Wilhelmsen
Starting year: 2024
Bio: Viktor Wilhelmsen is an artistic research fellow and associate professor at the department of music at NTNU in Trondheim. He has been active in the jazz, rock, blues, and folk scene in Norway the last 18 years and has released three albums as a solo artist since 2015. The album “Knip igjen øyan” was nominated for the Norwegian grammy in 2019. His experience as a sideman and bandmember is extensive, working with younger singer-songwriters like Mathias Angelhus, the trio Varpet, yoiker Frode Fjellheim, former artistic research fellow Mattis Kleppen, jazz-rock drummer Stian Lundberg and many others. He completed his master’s at the performing jazz program at NTNU in 2021, focusing on the northern Sámi joik tradition, and explored the possibilities for performing joik on the guitar.

Research: This project explores the harmonic perspective of rhythm, as developed by percussionist Efrain Toro, and how it can be applied to better understand the rhythms in northern Sámi joik. The music institutions today usually teach rhythm from a linear perspective, which is the tradition of western classical music. One event happens after the last, which leads to another on a monodimensional grid. The tradition of linear thought in general is the tradition of western philosophy and science. One step leads to another, and a response to a step must be elicited before another is taken. The harmonic perspective of rhythm, however, suggests that much of the rhythms in traditional music worldwide can be experienced in a multidimensional and poly-metric way. I hope that this project will shed light on new ways of creating Sámi music that is rhythmically rooted in joik and not western/European music.

Due to the assimilation policy led by the Norwegian government, I grew up aware of my Sámi roots, but detached from them. Throughout this project, my search for a Sámi identity plays a significant role, and I accept that it will influence the process in many ways.

I aim to develop a method for understanding rhythm in joik as something non-linear, multi-dimensional, and to explore how this coincides with other aspects of Sámi culture.

Key research questions:

Can I create a basis for understanding northern Sámi joik rhythms by using the harmonic perspective of rhythm?

Using this basis, can new ways of playing guitar, composing, and improvising be created?

How does the multidimensional or non-linear way of thinking and being relate to other aspects of Sámi culture?

Libero Mureddu
Starting year: 2018
Bio: Libero Mureddu (IT/FI), a pianist, composer, improviser, and music technologist, has studied composition at the Conservatory “G. Verdi” of Milan and music technology at the Sibelius Academy. His diverse background includes experiences in a wide number of musical fields, from experimental, to contemporary, jazz, and pop music. Currently, he is pursuing an artistic doctorate at the Sibelius Academy, investigating the role of embodied knowledge in free improvisation. His doctorate is supported by the Kone Foundation. His research intersects free improvisation, composition, algorithms, and live multimedia. He manages the Sibelius Academy’s contemporary ensemble, and he is a part-time teacher in improvisation.

Research: My research, titled ‘Embodied Algorithms’, focuses on free improvisation, exploring how embodied knowledge is accessed by the improvisers during a performance, and how the awareness of this knowledge can be used to develop free improvisation languages. This investigation underscores the crucial role of embodied knowledge, including the performer’s body, emotions, and intuition, and how its observation can reveal and explain aspects of the artistic practice otherwise hidden.

Music technology is employed as the primary tool to create experimental settings for the performances and to generate material for the performers to respond to. This approach transforms technology into a meta-performer, that pushes the performers to interact with unpredictable, albeit programmable, virtual performers. By observing how the players navigate this unusual performative space, I gather information about how their embodied knowledge is used. The main source of data for this research comes from audiovisual recordings and performer interviews. These resources are analysed using annotation of audiovisual materials, autoethnography, and grounded theory. The findings can be then used to develop free improvisation languages.

The research extends to the audience’s experience, seeking to connect the audience and performers’ partially disembodied processes and knowledge through visualisation, projection of processes and performers’ virtual bodies, and concert distribution via video recordings and online platforms.

At this stage, I am deepening the relationship between the artistic and the academic sides of my research, by analysing the first two doctoral concerts to clarify and better define the conceptual framework of my research.

Second doctoral concert

First doctoral concert

Anne Hytta
Starting year: 2022
Bio: Anne Hytta (born 1974) is a composer and a performer of the Hardanger Fiddle, a fiddle with sympathetic strings and its own repertoire of traditional tunes. Her background is deeply founded in the highly distinctive playing style of the repertoire of traditional tunes for the Hardanger fiddle, and from this basis she composes and performs her own music solo and with various ensembles.

Research: Hytta is currently a Ph.D fellow at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, and her artistic research focuses on the motif structure of traditional music as a departure for solo and chamber music.

The horisontality of the motif structure with all its properties in between; in between well tempered tones, in between metric beats, in between the ornaments of a phrase, in between modality and harmonic structures. These fine tuned properties are the materials investigated in her work through methods of crystallization, densification, stretching, applying elements of motif properties to other musical entities, and also removing properties from motifs.

Key to traditional music is oral transmission, and the work is informed by practice, listening, reviewing and practice, in an continuous circle. The work also seeks new methods of including learning by ear and applying the metamorphic qualities of motifs in a written music score.

How can traditional fiddle music linked to informal dance contexts be transformed into music for a sitting down, listening audience today, and how can properties and variability of motifs from traditional music contribute to new music in various contexts of chamber musicians, jazz musicians, folk musicians?

Supervisors

Mika Elo
Bio: Since 2015 I work as professor of artistic research and as the head of the doctoral program in Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki. In 2019–2022 I worked as the PI of one of the research projects in the consortium Post-digital Epistemologies of the Photographic Image. In 2012–2013 I co-curated the Finnish exhibition Falling Trees at the Biennale Arte 2013 in Venice. During 2018–2019 I was working as co-convenor of the Research Pavilion #3 and I was part of the core organizing team of the Research Pavilion #5. I have also been a member of the editorial board of some journals, such as RUUKKU (2012– ) and JAR (2010–2019) over many years.

Research: My research interests include theory of photographic media, philosophical media theory, and epistemology of artistic research. I am participating in discussions in these areas in the capacity of curator, visual artist, researcher and educator. My most recent research focuses on expanded writing and ecology of practices.

Publications
“Encore”
“Towards Academic Publishing in Medias Res”

Solmund Nystabakk
Bio: From village churches in Norway to the baroque palaces of Venice, from Molde Jazz Festival to Wiener Musikverein and the Tampere Biennale, lutenist and guitarist Solmund Nystabakk has performed with a repertoire ranging from early music and classical, via pop and folk music to contemporary music and free improvisation. He has also composed music for several theatre projects and contributed on numerous recordings. He currently pursues a freelance career as a performer and researcher with support from the Arts Council Norway.

Research: Solmund holds a PhD in Artistic Research from The Norwegian Academy of Music and UiT The Arctic University of Norway. His main research interests lie within performance practice, artistic research and philosophy. Taking performance as a primary mode of enquiry, he has worked on problematics of historically informed performance and on the work concept of the classical music tradition in relation to historical practices. In a forthcoming publication, he proposes network models as an alternative to the habitual work-centered understanding of music in the classical field.

PhD exposition

Petra Bauer
Bio: Petra Bauer – artist, filmmaker, researcher and since 2024 Professor in Film and Media at Stockholm University of the Arts. Petra has worked for many years with questions around the politics of aesthetics, social reproduction, listening in filmmaking. She is part of the feminist platform k.ö.k which experiments with different forms of feminist knowledge, and she is the initiator of the international group F.A.M, (Feminism Art Maintenance group). She has formed long-term collaborations with several different feminist organisations including Southall Black Sisters in London, the sex worker led organisation SCOT-PEP in Edinburgh, and The Women’s Centre in Tensta-Hjulsta in Stockholm

As a filmmaker and artist, Petra works with long term research-based projects at the intersection of film, socially embedded art and community practice. Since 2010, she have dedicated her artistic practice to portraying groups and communities of womxn (historical as well as contemporary) anchored in social movements in Northern Europe mobilizing around their shared experience of precarious living conditions. The movements she collaborates with experiment with decolonial and anti-racist practices based on solidarity between groups and societies.

Research: Petra is currently working on the artistic research project Looking for Jeanne that explores, through practical film experiments, the relation between politics and aesthetics in moving images; specifically, how aesthetics conditions the political subject with regards to questions about work, value and resistance in a contemporary global order. These are again urgent questions raised by movements such as #metoo and female migrants’ increased resistance against the global exploitation of their labour. The project takes Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) as a point of departure, in which we follow a housewife’s chores for 3 days, with a radical ending. The project reflects Jeanne Dielman in its narrative structure and themes: when the full projected is completed 4 films will have been produced addressing contemporary forms and representations of feminized labour, sex-work, motherhood, and domestic work. The films are made in close collaboration with feminist organizations and networks, using a relational film method.

Linda Herfindal Lien
Bio: Linda Herfindal Lien is Senior Adviser at The Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills, where she is coordinating the Norwegian Artistic Research School (Ph.D. level). She has been an Associate Professor in Visual Communication and Vice-Dean of Education at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen. She has also been a research fellow in artistic research at the former Bergen National Academy of Art and Design.

Research: Through a three-year long artistic research fellowship project, completed in 2011, I explored identity design and branding of places. The project made me interested in the opposite of simplification. I started to look for all the different layers and the small and unstable fragments that makes a place, and to investigate the relationship between place and personal identity; between belonging and loss. The investigation has resulted in events, exhibitions, books, and objects.

More on Research Catalogue Looking for layers; finding fragments

More on The Fond Library

Pilvi Porkola
Bio: I am a performance artist, writer and pedagogue. I am Doctor of Arts (2014), currently working as University researcher at Uniarts’ Research Institute, Helsinki. Previously I have worked as Post doc researcher in a project “How to do things with performance?” (2016-2021) funded by Academy of Finland at Uniarts Helsinki. After that I was Senior researcher in a project “Political Imagination and Alternative Futures” (2020-2024) at University of Turku. 2017-2018 I was working as Professor in Artistic Research at Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki.

Research: My research areas are performance studies, performance art and feminist pedagogy. I am interested in autobiographical approaches in art making, exercises in art pedagogy and arts-based research in social science and artistic research. At the moment I am working on a research project “Performance pedagogy – politics of art pedagogy” in which I explore how performance art teachers understand politics as part of their teaching and develop a concept of utopian pedagogy.

See more about my artistic work

Otso Aavanranta
Bio: I work as a professor of artistic research at the University of the Arts Helsinki, with a background as a composer, guitarist, electronic musician and researcher in digital arts. I completed my doctorate in music at Paris VIII University in 2010, and since I have led a number of crossover research-creation projects over the past years. My line of work include musical ensembles, both acoustic and electronic, solo and group albums, multimedia projects, music-poetry, installation art and music for dance performances. I have lived and worked in Finland, Canada, Belgium and France. Lately, my focus has grown more towards discursive and conceptual terrains, as well as in efforts to bridge academic research and artistic research.

Research: My research approach is rooted in research–creation; combining exploratory artistic creation and academic enquiry into a mutually feeding loop. While the tools and methods of his research stem from music and technology, the themes of enquiry open up to larger, cross-disciplinary questions concerning, for example, human intersubjectivity and transindividual cognition, as well as the interplay between technology and society. I have led research projects on instrument augmentation, active acoustics, sound materialities, as well as intersubjectivity in music. I’m currently working on the concept of socio-material arrangements and an artistic practice of outdoor off-grid electronic musicianship. Collaborating with researchers from the humanities and sciences – as well as other artists – has a foundational role in my work. I have co-initiated the Nordic-Baltic Transdisciplinary Research-Creation Network as a forum for working across disciplines and research traditions.

More on Bandcamp

Martin Sonderkamp
Bio: I work through an interdisciplinary approach to dance and choreography since 1993. My work includes stage productions, participatory choreographies, audio guides, mixed-media installations, and performance scores. Since the past 15 years much of my artistic output evolves through co-creation, resulting from research and experimental collaborations with artists from sound art, dance, visual arts and music. In and outside academia, I have developed co-teaching formats and research-based educational approaches focusing on co-creation processes for diverse student bodies from media art, sound art, dance, choreography, film, music, craft, and design. Currently I am teaching as Professor of Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Research: With composer Hara Alonso, sound artist Jenny Sunesson, and dance artists Ulrika Berg and Jennifer Lacey I currently engage in an interdisciplinary and collaborative investigation of listening in the artistic research project’ Bodies as Ears-speculations in acoustosomatics’. We explore how listening can be transcended when it is not only understood as acoustic apprehension but conceptualized as listening to place, body, memory, and imagination. Based on this premise, we investigate how we can make the spatial, physical, mnemonic, and imaginative dimensions of listening tangible through choreographic, compositional, and somatic practices. To this end, we explore a range of possibilities where audiences are invited to immerse themselves in the experience of different listening practices. Within this interdisciplinary research, we explore the artistic potential of listening as a liminal space in which our different artistic methods can resonate, testing concepts such as hybridizing, appropriating, and translating as possibilities to articulate common concepts and co-authored artistic practices.

Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec
Bio: Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec (SI/NL) is artist and researcher with a particular focus in sound, new media, real-time interaction, and questions of contemporary mediation in relation to the sense of (bodily) presence. His recent work consists of spatial and sound installations, events and interventions, where (un)mediated sonic events act as central element that affectively evokes human bodily presence, while signaling its physical absence. Addressing the visitors through sound, tactility, kinetic movement and vibration, such experiential artistic works intend to question in what way human bodily presence can be felt and sensed beyond the directness of visuality and vicinity, and what kind of new poetics these re-articulations can form.

Research: Reading Reading

How much time does it take to think something?

How much time does it take to say something?

How much time does it take to write something?

How much time does it take to hear something?

How much time does it take to see something?

How much time does it take to read something?

Artistic research project Reading Reading engages with reading as bodily activity, and as a relation between spoken word as an event in time, and written word as an object in space. The research project is manifestation of various ways to capture, embody and unsettle the temporal relations that unfold between the written text, eye movement, the inner voice and phonic substance while reading by altering ocular desire, slowing down, reversing or stopping time between sensing and making sense.

A series of experiential installations, videos, images, texts and publications provide acoustic, poetic and critical openings to words that unfold before, after and besides meaning, creating possibilities for exploring non-interpretative relations to words.

Weblink

Palle Dahlstedt
Bio: Composer, sound artist, improviser and researcher from Sweden. Degrees in composition from Malmö and Gothenburg, a PhD in advanced AI algorithms for contemporary composers (Chalmers 2004). His music includes piano solos, orchestral music, interactive software and experimental instruments, music for contemporary dance and theatre. It’s been performed on six continents, and has been awarded several international prizes (e.g., Gaudeamus Prize 2001). He often includes other expressions such as photography, video, and text.

Composition lecturer, Academy of Music & Drama, Professor of Interaction Design, University of Gothenburg and Chalmers, Adjunct Professor in Art & Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark.

Research: Dahlstedt’s special interest is the deep entanglement of art and advanced technology. For his artistic practice and through his research, he develops new technologies for computer-aided improvisation, composition and art, for embodied performance on electronic sounds in the form of experimental instruments and mapping techniques, and technologies enabling new kinds of ensemble interactions, based on a systems view of emergence from human-technology interactions in non-hierarchical collaborations. He has contributed technologies and theories to the field of computational creativity and has published extensively within the field.

Since the late 1990s, Dahlstedt has also been active in the field of generative/creative AI within arts and music, doing practical and theoretical work within ethics and aesthetics of AI, and implications of integration of such tools into artistic creative processes, providing a critical artist’s perspective in a field largely steered by technological development.

Dahlstedt’s own PhD in 2004 was a mix of artistic research, complex systems studies and computer science, done in an experimental and interdisciplinary art-science-technology environment, providing experience from a wide range of research perspectives and paradigms, from hard natural science to artistic research. He has since then been active as both an artistic researcher and within the field of AI and computer science, leading a series of major state-funded research projects, including a number of international collaborations with researchers in, e.g., USA, Australia, Japan, Denmark.

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- Michaela Bränn
- Asiantuntija, Opintopalvelut Kuvataideakatemia, Kuvataideakatemia
- +358406313553
- michaela.brann@uniarts.fi

Time

17.8.2024 – 24.8.2024

Location

Hanaholmen - Kulturcentrum för Sverige och Finland

Hanasaaren ruotsalais-suomalainen kulttuurikeskus

Hanasaarenranta 5

02100 Espoo

SAAR

The Nordic SAAR network is coordinated by Uniarts Helsinki and governed by a Nordic Steering Group.

Practicalities

Travelling

Arrival time: Saturday 17th 2024 at 13:00 (Finnish time) in Helsinki
Departure time: Friday 23^rd 2024 afternoon or Saturday 24th 2024 morning

The institution of each participant will cover the travel costs. Please contact your own country’s contact person/institution for more details after you have been accepted to SAAR.
There is no fee for the participants.
The accommodation costs will be covered by the Nordic SAAR Network
Breakfast, lunch, coffee and dinner are included in the accommodation
Dietary restrictions will be taken into consideration
Sauna facilities and swimming pool will be available for participants during the week. You can also swim in the sea
Read more
The weeks program includes excursions outdoors – please note that regarding functional clothing! As much as possible also other parts of the week’s program will be held outdoors.

Accommodation

All participants will have individual hotel rooms. Accommodation is included in the network fee paid by the participating country.

Venue

Hanaholmen – the Swedish-Finnish Cultural Centre
Address: Hanasaarenranta 5, Espoo (city)
Tel: +358 (0)9 435 020

How to get there:

By taxi from airport: ca 40-minute ride.
By metro: under 10-minute metro ride to Koivusaari/Björkholmen station from city centre (Kamppi station) and a 1,1 km walk from Koivusaari/Björkholmen metro station to Hanaholmen/Hanasaari cultural centre.

Working methods

Willingness to share and engage in collegial dialogues is a key prerequisite for participating in SAAR.

This year’s theme: Sharing of methods / methods of sharing

Many of the sessions will take place outdoors. Please take proper outdoor clothing with you.

Session concepts

Introduction marathon:

Exploration on Pentala Island:

Optional morning session:

Sharing session:

Collecting session:

Focus conversations:

Toolbox:

Optional evening programme:

Programme

Saturday 17.8.2024

Note: times are given in Finnish time.

13:00 Lunch at Hanaholmen restaurant Plats

After lunch gathering in main meeting room Skiftnyckel.

14:00 Introduction marathon: all participants introduce themselves (max. 10 min. each)

16:00 Coffee

19:30 Dinner

20:30 Free socialising together

Sunday 18.8.2024 – Excursion day

9:30 Excursion to Pentala Island by boat

The boat from the shipping company FRS leaves at 9:30 from the Hanaholmen boat pier.

Task 1: Get to know at least one person not belonging to your own small group

12:00 Lunch at Café Pentala
The café is located beside the Pentala Archipelago Museum.

Task 2: Exploration. The island is a world. The task is to explore this world in small groups (2–4 people) and to make notes of the individual ways of doing it.

17:00 Boat leaves from Pentala back to Hanaholmen

19:00 Dinner at Hanaholmen

20:30 Free socialising together