Tuire Colliander, Performing Arts Research Centre Tutke, Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki
One of the most challenging problems for me at this point is the articulating and focusing my research questions. I recently had my first artistic part pre-examined and in the pre-examination report it was stated that my questions are too abstract, wide and general and it would be fruitful to state more specific questions and tie them more clearly to the theoretical frame of reference.
Articulating my research questions has been difficult for me from the very beginning of my research because I have aimed at open-ended ways of working. My purpose has been to design the research in such a manner, that there would be space for the emergent ideas and elements to guide my thinking and research, instead of me becoming too involved in completing pre-set guidelines. Partly the challenge in articulating my research questions has also been simply the difficulty of making the decision of the most important and interesting questions. My plan has been to start with very open-ended and wide questions and become more focused as I gain more new knowledge through my research practice. I have now reached this point in my research and I should proceed towards more specific questions, yet still with a certain level of openness within them. I believe that there exists a balanced way of articulating my questions: to formulate more specific research questions and still not become too fixed by them.
Introduction I am Tuire Colliander, a dance pedagogue and dancer. I am conducting my artistic doctoral research “Dance at Play - Bringing together Children, Adults, Movement and Play in the Context of Artistic Research and Intra-Active Dance Pedagogy” at Performing Arts Research Centre Tutke, in Uniarts Helsinki. The purpose of my research is to investigate early years dance pedagogy in the context of early childhood education and focus on questions of ethical and respectful means of encounter through dance. I am searching for ways of working together with children in a meaningful and inclusive way through dance and creative movement, inspired and guided by play.
My pedagogical thinking is based on the dialogical philosophy (Freire, Buber) and expanded by the concept of intra-activity, stemming from the post-human and new materialist philosophies (Barad, Deleuze and Guattari, Lenz Taguchi) within which I consider the art practice as research and a way of knowing and thinking.
Timewise I am approximately halfways through my research process: I started part-timely with my research in September 2017 and have been working full-time since September 2019. My aim to finish by May 2025. My first artistic part “Käännöksiä – Transpositions”, which is also the only one according to my current plan, was pre-examined in May this spring. I consider the artistic part as a turning point for the research both timewise and mentally. From the beginning of my research, the work has felt like absorbing, collecting, and preserving knowledge, theories and research data in all possible forms to be left freely floating and intra-acting (Barad 2007) in the body-mind reservoir of the artist-pedagogue-researcher assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari 1987) of mine. I consider concluding the artistic part as an end of one era and the beginning of new one, focusing on studying the entanglements (Barad 2007) which the floating materials have become and still will be becoming. I aim at focused, yet fluid process of assembling the doctoral thesis towards the final version in the format of a digital exposition, accompanied by a version compiled with and for children and complemented with an artistic event for all ages.
Kersti Grunditz Brennan,Stockholm University of the Arts, Department of Film and Media
What should I do at my 80% PhD-seminar? So far in my PhD research I have written essays of different types – memoirs and case studies. The sub-project BLOD (in collaboration with Annika Boholm) has resulted in a number of manifestations, films, workshops, performative research presentations. The research is linked to both program curriculum development underway at the department, and to my teaching of editing e.g. a recurring MA - course in Physical Editing. My two previous seminars had different performative components and were tightly linked to BLOD.
So what format for the seminar would benefit me the most going into the final stretch of my PhD-research? I want to learn and discover through preparing, spark dialogue within department, procure interest from outside university, provide conditions for useful feed-back from opponent. The five formats considered and/or discarded so far:
- BLOD in treatment – therapy session with me on the couch reciting from my essays and Annika listening and nodding behind me. My subconscious present via film material from BLOD playing on a screen above us.
- The sewing circle – a group of friends and family crocheting while we all take turns reading from my essays. With or without film screening…
- Master class in editing – me verbally guiding one of my students as she edits BLOD film material. Editing session screened in real-time.
- Film screening – recently edited short films from the BLOD material screened uncommented.
- The “crazy” scientist – me presenting the project, its subprojects, manifestations and potential extrapolations while tracing its interconnected parts on a giant digital whiteboard with Venn-diagrams and color-coded associative links on speed.
Supervisors: Juliette Mapp (main), Stockholm University of the Arts and Dr. Karen Pearlman, Macquarie University, Sydney
Research timeline: Started January 2017 at 50% pace, planned finish April 2023.
Beyond Cut and Join – Expanding the creative role of film editing in cinematic storytelling
Background
Decades of professional experience in film editing across multiple forms has repeatedly demonstrated how much of its potential is untapped in filmmaking and how often editors’ skills, influence and authorial participation are misunderstood and undervalued.
Research Questions
To address this problem this research asks
- How can I describe my creative process when I edit?
- Specifically, what are my (implicit or articulated) creative strategies for shaping characters in documentary, drama and experimental film?
- How can I complicate standard assignments of roles with insight into distribution of creative thinking and generation of ideas amongst professions, practices and contexts?
- What expanded description of film editing can be articulated and explored with the intention of explicating it (for students) and further expanding understanding and practice (for practitioners)?
Method
This research will identify and explore possibilities for expanding the creative role of film editing ́through experimentation and analysis of the compositional role of editing in various genres and formats. The research will be conducted through a series of creatively designed projects that place characters and relationships at their center. The method involves creating examples (of practice); using feminist approaches to dramaturgy; sharing, refining and adding to vocabulary for teaching and collaboration; developing collaborative structures and artistic methods that benefit creative processes in the edit room; pointing out what makes the editor’s handprint felt.
Aims
This project aims to
Aim 1: Challenge notions of authorship in cinema by using compositional strategies that favor physical & kinesthetic editing principles over psychological or narrative logic; elevating the status of editing.
Aim 2: Develop collaborative structures and creative methods that benefit story creation that takes place in the editing process.
Aim 3: Encourage filmmaking where editing is in the forefront of the aesthetic; with extensive cutting and fractured narratives.
Introduction to research project:
https://www.uniarts.se/english/research-and-development-work/phd-project/beyond-cut-and-join
Charlotte Østergaard, Malmö Theatre Academy (THM), Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, Sweden
A central concept in my research is co-creation – in the sense of being creative with others.
My ambitions are to develop and transform costume design processes into polyphonic co-creative performative workshops and/or events, called Costume Salons, that favor the multi-layered encounters of touch between human participants and non-human materials or said in other words between agents, positions, disciplines, perspectives, epistemologies, methodologies, and other.
In the frame of the Costume Salons, I invite different numbers of participants to engage with me and others actively. In the process, the participants respond to me, the others, the Salon frame, and reflect on the setup, the interaction, and the specific salon theme. My ambition is that the participants become actual co-creators in co-creative processes.
As researcher and host (and leader) of co-creative processes requires an ethically stance to authorship and ownership – to what extend are the content and output of the Costume Salons co-shared, co-authored, and co-owned?
In context of co-creation, authorship and ownership might be the basis for an ‘informed consent’ agreement but somehow seems to go ‘beyond’ since 1) my position varies between initiator, facilitator, and participant and 2) I invite the participants/co-creators to engage, respond, disturb, reflect, and change my design process and artistic practice in the Costume Salons.
I know we were only to write one challenge. However, I hope there will be time to discuss the following issue as well: I am reflecting on ways of conveying my research. At my 25% seminar (February 2021) I handed in a ‘quite classical’ text and produced a ‘more playful’ video as a presentation of my research. At the moment I am considering different formats of presenting my research outputs in writing, in video/audio, in drawing or other, for example by writing articles, combining video, audio and text on research catalogue, conferences or other. I have an ambition that I at my 50% seminar (presumably in beginning of 2022) will find a format that might fit also for the final dissertation. However, I am still wondering which format fit my research. I am very interested in discussing varieties and ways of presenting research and to challenge a ‘classical dissertation’ format.
Basic information I am 1,5 years into my research ‘Crafting material bodies –– radial co-creation in the field of costume design’ at Malmö Theatre Academy (THM), Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, Sweden (funded period is 4-5year). I am educated fashion designer from The Design School in Kolding, Denmark. The past 25 years, my artistic practice has been between costume-, textile-, and fashion design, and between conceptualizing, sketching, making, fitting, wearing, and performing. A focal point in my design practice is that I consider anything has the potential to become a costume material and that bodies –my own and others’– are an essential part of my design process. An example is that a design process always involves numerous circles of sketching in different materials and that bodies always are involved in the process.
I have designed costumes more than 65 contemporary dance performances for numerous contemporary dance companies and independent choreographers. What characterizes my work as a costume designer is that I have both designed and produced the costumes for most of the performances in which I have been involved. For me, this means that the borders between the processes of designing and making often is blurred.
Independently initiated artistic projects have been an important part of my artistic practice. These projects have allowed me to experiment with ideas, such as combining techniques, materials and bodies in new ways. Some projects have been collaborations, many of the projects have been funded by art grants, and most of the projects have been exhibited nationally or internationally, at performance festivals and been presented at conferences.
For the last twenty years, I have been teaching fashion and costume design processes, for example, conceptualizing, sketching, making and wearing costumes. At the Danish National School of Arts, I had the privileged to perform two artistic costume research projects (in Danish called kunstnerisk udviklingsvirksomhed): In Dialogue with Material - on Physicality in a Design process (2018) and Textile Techniques as Potential for Developing Costume Design (2016/2017). Both projects studied aspects of design processes and in both projects’ participants (colleagues and students) with other discipliner perspectives were invited to participate actively and thereby inform the process. The general response from all participants was that our different perspectives and positions were valuable for the process and that it challenged and expanded their (as well as my) biased assumptions.
More information about my research at THM: https://portal.research.lu.se/portal/en/persons/charlotte-oestergaard(13019283-6f0d-4516-acb1-1dc4071b1292).html
Liv Kristin Holmberg Norwegian Academy of Music / Norges musikkhøgskole. Department: Conducting, Voice and Church Music Department
The Art Liturgy – on the limits of art / Kunstliturgien – om kunstens grenser
An artistic research project on the performative potential of the church musician. It is a multi-year performative practice for the stage, founded on my background as a church musician and performance artist, where I explore the role of the organist as a ritual master. The Art Liturgy could be described as a ritualistic musical theatre based on utopian philosophy, wherein I develop new liturgical elements for existential events and life transitions: A sort of metaphysical theatre of the real.
Starting year: Autumn 2019
More information here
Abstract My artistic background as a church musician and performance artist is the core of a long-standing stage art-, and performative practice, in which I investigate the cantor’s role as a ritual master. Kunstliturgien can be described as a ritualistic music theatre based on utopian philosophy, in which I develop self-made liturgical elements aiming at life’s existential questions and transitions, creating a fundament for a metaphysical reality-theatre.
The Boundaries of Art. This project is both performative and discursive: as well as an examination of the potential of the church room as an artistic arena, it will also test its capability as a transformative and powerful public space.
The performative potential of church musicians. The project is an examination of church musicians and their performative potential. I have an ambition to develop and extend the role of the organ player, and hence lay down the general outlines for a performative aesthetics, based on my own and others experiences regarding varying interpretations of liturgical organ music and artistic experiments of ritualistic musical drama.
The development of liturgical music. As part of the artistic research, a collaboration with two to three composers is initiated, where we mutually (jointly) will develop a concept and the musical material, specially composed for the project with me as a performer.
Art and religion. The church was once the natural venue for music and art. Is this still the case or does the church operate in an aesthetic vacuum? In the light of the Reformation Jubilee 2017, and as an overarching idea, the project will reflect over existing as well as non-existing parallels between church art and contemporary art since the reformation, in a Norwegian context. Kunstliturgien is an artistic research on the relation between belief and art, religion and aesthetics, with an spiritual and existential ambition to discover possible, transformative dimensions in art.
Gnothi Seautun A challenge that occupies my mind in my process right now is how to limit my research project – how to find meaningful and fruitful borders for my research? And this aspect is interesting, since my research is actually about borders – the limits of art. Perhaps it should also be included – the limits of the artist. This has followed me as a problem or challenging aspect, both in my life and in my praxis as an artist. A problem to set boundaries. This aspect it not only a problem, it is also a dimension of an aesthetic view: a view where art is somehow a room or way to expand life and create glimpses of the impossible. But when the artproject in itself, even though it is caused by this logical reasons, floats out, there is a danger here to lose the essence (and myself) and that the project becomes contourless – this is what worries me now where I am in my process: I am half way in my research period: I am working on 12 different stageartprojects / music theater performances, I have dialogue and written exchange with 10 different priests and theologians, I am working with 8 different composers (develop commissioned work / develop new liturgical music), I am working with curator, set designer, costumedesigner, actors, performers, musicians, I spend a lot of time to be able to establish contact / negotiate / find possibility for cooperation with 20 different churches and congregations, and to find money to realize the projects / writing applications - in my artprojects I often have the role as director, musician (organplayer), church servant, priest, ticketseller, performanceartist, set designer, producer, cleaner, press contact etc. This is also intentional, as mentioned, but I see, at the same time, that it would be fruitful to find a method and conceptions for how to be able to narrow / innsirkle my project. We are, as human beings, limited creatures. The end or being-toward-death is for Heidegger the very condition that creates truth and authenticity. Inspired of Heideggers view, in my praxis I look upon boundaries as artistic material. I would like to find a method to do so, also when it comes to my own boundaries.
Mia Seppälä, University of the Arts Helsinki at the Academy of Fine Arts
I am Mia Seppälä, an artist based in Helsinki and currently engaged in doctoral research with the University of the Arts Helsinki at the Academy of Fine Arts, also holding an MFA from the same institution. My artistic work mainly includes photography, painting, the moving image, sound, and inclusive exercises. I have completed the second year of the doctoral studies. The name of my artistic research is The Spatial Dimension of Digital Photograph During Removal and Reconstruction. It is addressing the image physical and mental side, when the image is presented at the very same place it has been taken. Research includes demonstrations and inclusive exercises in public and semi-public spaces and environments. Selected places represent different dimensions of public space, thus bringing up features characteristic of them that combine with pictorial observation. These places and the exercises and heterogeneous setups contained in research methods make visible weakly discernible contradictions and tensions between the structures of knowledge and power. On the other hand, they also allow for a transversal approach, within which it is possible to dismantle public and private, excluding and closed models of thinking. I am also developing a method for exploring the materiality of the digital photograph and the circumstances of surrounding space and time in its context. Off-painting (poismaalaaminen) is a method where a digital photograph is printed on a canvas base as a picture resembling a painting. The work is done by hand using water and brush as the idea of painting reversed. The method is practised in the place where the picture was taken. As a result of this act, the space of the picture and public space are mixed at a given moment. The goal of exercises with the method is to draw attention to what is in the picture space, how it is present and what is removed from it, and on the other hand what will become instead.
Challence/problem: My research focus is a photograph, as a print image resembling a painting, in the conditions revealed by its mechanical removal. Through pictorial exercises, I explore issues that occur in memory and perception, particularly when the presentation of the photograph is physically modified in the same place where the image was taken. Removing the colour pigment of the picture occurs in the same place where the image was taken, and thus the space between the picture and the surrounding space mix, creating space to explore. The question I am considering has to do with time and duration: When is the mixing of the state of the picture with the surrounding space considered beginning? Is it before or after removing the colour? At what point does the current situation replace the pre-existing situation? My underlying question eventually relates to the moment of birth of a work of art, that is, at what point does presence ignore absence, in this case the picture, to the extent that one can talk about the emergence of a new work? The challenge/problem for me is using the word “space”, or spatial in the context of the photograph. I find it problematic although in my research I speak mixing the space between the picture and the public space and finding new space through it. The space of the picture re-arranges in different contexts; however, can we really talk about the formation of space in the picture if it is dependent on the context in which it is. Does the space arise rather outside the framing of the picture and as a mental one?
Heini Kiamiri, Department of Film, Television and Scenography at Aalto ARTS Finland
I have just concluded the last artistic work for my thesis this May 2021. My main challenge now is finding a way to compose the whole monograph text and create the artwork's atmosphere in the text. I wonder what style I should use to write about the artistic works within my thesis, how to apply the feeling of my artworks into the text and intertwine it with academic text style.
I am a freelance scenographer and a doctoral candidate at the Department of Film, Television and Scenography at Aalto ARTS Finland.
My artistic research "Experiential Space. Creating Scenographic Interpretations Through Children's World of Experience" explores a child-centred way to design scenography in the field of Theatre for Young Audiences. The study utilises sensory ethnography and a child-focused approach. It seeks fresh insight into co-creating performance scenography with young children and engaging young children in performance art with scenographic media.
My study includes two practice-based phases. The first phase is a series of art-based workshops with 4–5-year-old children held in Helsinki City Kindergarten, and the second phase is the two artworks addressed for 4–5-year-old children. These artworks are immersive, performative installation events in which child participants actively create the story world of performance.
I am more advanced in my research; I have completed the practice-based parts of my study, aiming to have the dissertation in Spring 2023.
Fernanda Branco, Oslo National Academy of the Arts - Theatre Department
Environment embodiment – towards enchanted narratives seeks to develop embodied artistic practices, vocabularies, narrations in corelation with movement, voice, and environment from perceptive perspectives. Proposing to explore these correlations by sewing performative and writing acts, practices, site-specific-based embodied experiences, through poetic narratives.
Combining autodidact artistic practices with somatic approaches and inspirations from Micro-phenomenology to possibly initiate dialogues with Eco-phenomenology, Post-humanist and Global South epistemologies - so far.
Challenging questions related to authorship, exploring possible ways of co-authorship while looking also for other wordings, it rises ethical considerations such of ownership, commitment.
Considering ethics as cosmological diplomacy to be practiced. How inquiries of belonging to a place can go beyond territoriality, ancestralities and one’s lived experience or heritage? Pondering about ancestralities as a cosmological dance, vocally awaken by breath, while dialoguing with landscapes and other bodies. How those inquires can continue into the depths of cosmological embodiment, memory, existence of being a body that is part of a bigger constellations of bodies forming a vivid organism of organisms that is the planet we belong in. How to dialogue with ethical considerations while being in the middle of those inquires?
Another aspect I consider is related to referencing. While being affected and influenced by so many interesting people, every exclusion positions us. How to be attentive to keep in coherency to own principles? How not fall into politically correct morals? How to embrace that referencing can become a wide water to navigate in?
During Covid restrictions, the plans turned from working to other people – performers – to working with my own body. How can privacy or individual aspects can feed the research but not stay in one’s own bubble or egocentric views to an outside eye.
And lastly, dealing with de-colonization in the discourses of art and academy, how to give spaces for other epistemologies without appropriations, acts of speaking for others or emptying the word itself.
Steinunn Knúts-Önnudóttir, Malmö Theatre Academy
How little is enough? Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters.
The research strives to produce, through minimal means, transformative experiences that counteract consumerism and a society of hyper mediation. The project is concerned with values such as sustainability, personal responsibility and appreciation of personal experiences, vulnerability, tenderness, uncertainty, genuine exchange, and imperfection. The research aims to stimulate the important discourse on sustainability within performing arts practices and open up new perspectives to the role the arts have in a possible solution to current global challenges. The research furthermore aims at bringing pre-existing participatory practices into conversation with UN sustainability Goals with a particular focus on personal values and their affect on quality of life.
The project is rooted in my artistic practice of more than 20 years, my degree in theology and most recently in my practice as a life coach. Throughout my practice I have been interested in creating a dialogue with my audience, acknowledging that what they bring to the performance is a part of the actual content of the artwork.
Theoretically I place the research within the discourse of affect, a cross disciplinary field of theory that is rapidly expanding. In regard to the artistic methodology, the work makes use of relational and porous dramaturgy strategies especially when it comes to site specificity and spectator´s participation and imbedded in the artistic method is a sustainable ethos transcending the different aspect of the work.
Within the project I envision four artistic works. To date, I have made two artistic works within my research:
NoShow, a series of five immersive participatory performances, solitary experiences performed in five private homes in different neighbourhoods of Reykjavík in June – August 2020.
Island, participatory immersive performance in a vulnerable settlement of Hrísey, a small island on the north coast of Iceland in August and October 2020.
Current challenges: I started my PhD in january 2020 and in March I completed my first intermediate seminar where I disseminated the work NoShow. Currently I am preparing my second intermediate seminar that will take place in December, were I intend to disseminate the project Island and focus on aesthetics, dramaturgies and atmosphere. I will focus on the collaboration with the community on the island and the affect of the work on the islanders.
My main challenge at the moment is finding appropriate mediation formats that reflect my artistic practice and a language that can articulate my specific concerns and communicate clearly to my collegues in the field aswell as scholars within the academia. I am struggling to merge theory and practice, the academia and the arts. How can I use terms without getting hailed by its doctrines?
How can I use regular language in academic context without loosing credibility?
I want to place my self at the midst of the artmaking, where things are complicated, messy and real. I want to speak from the heart of creating. I insist on staying with the trouble, using Donna Haraways term and I am seeking the language to express the affective knowledge that is revealed to one if one stays in the lived experience long enough.
Nanni Vapaavuori works with light and space, the circumstances, the surrounding relationships and in direct hands-on collaboration with the tactile material/ity of the light. In her research she asks what kind of forms lighting design can take if the visual is not in the focus as its primary register? How are the characteristics of seeing changed when it´s based on touch? In what terms and in what measures light should then be considered?
As a lighting designer Nanni has worked with installation and in the wide field of performing arts, in particular with contemporary dance both in Finland and abroad. Her work initiates from spatial basis. In addition to works for the stage it has also led to several collaborations bringing different forms of dance and theatre performances in museums and galleries. She has graduated as an Interior Architect and received her Master of Arts in Lighting Design at Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. Since 2019 she is a PhD candidate at the Performing Arts Research Centre, at the University of the Arts Helsinki.
Out [ ] of Focus - working with attention
At the moment I have taken the concepts of focus and attention into closer consideration to examine them as central means in the practice of lighting design. This interest is a continuum from exploring the intertwined notions of focus and surround and the tension of hierarchy between them.
The dictionary definitions of focus are very much related to directed intention, to concentration and convergence, aiming for qualities like clarity, sharpness, and visibility. A common metaphor equates attention with a spotlight which brings to light what already waits for our gaze in the dark. On stage, a beam of light is a usual mean to direct attention and to offer the gaze a focus, already preselected for it.
In my research I´m addressing the concept of attention in the reverse direction to question both the intentionality and the subjectivity as inherent or determining qualities of it. Philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels has related attention to an old term of ´pathos´. Thus, considered as a pathic event, attention is not directed towards something, but rather is an event which happens to us and attacks us. It´s not following a causal or chronological logic but something ´comes to our attention´. That ´something´ is not waiting to be pointed out. It comes towards us.
What it is, then, to work with attention? What could be the form of pathic spotlight and how to focus light(ing design) in this kind of reversed direction?
Mareike Dobewall, PhD candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts
I am Mareike Dobewall, PhD candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts. My artistic research project explores the scenographic potential of acoustic sound in site-sensitive performance. In the past four years I have created several projects involving local musicians at dedicated spaces. Through workshops the musicians learn an embodied practice of listening and sounding that is in dialogue with the space. I have also conducted basic research into how spaces effect vocality for example with my individual study Spaces as Voice Teachers. My disputation is planned for October 2021. At the moment, I wonder what my collaboration with non-human entities (sound, space, architecture and environment) will lead to. I am curious about what an engagement with the field of ecology could give to the constitution of new kinds of shared sound-spaces. Complex inter- and intra- relations ask questions around agency, togetherness, audibility and how/if a shift in attention may change behaviors.
Eliot Moleba, Theatre department, Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo
Titled: Alternative Histori[es]: A Place Where Something Happened Year: 2nd year
Research description:
The project is aimed at exploring narrative accounts of Norwegians who self-identify with a multicultural/immigration background(s). I have collected stories of their lived experiences, with special interest in an event that happened in a public space and has been experienced as a life changing moment. The stories will be used to produce monuments that will be installed on the sites where the narrated events took place. The monuments will take over the public spaces and infuse them with gripping personal narratives to shift how we read those places and (re)negotiate their past/meaning, generating a ‘capital’ that will demand a ‘new’ way of relating to, and/or understanding the place, its people and history. This is to create an ‘alternative history’, dedicated to writing and inscribing these voices into public spaces and our broader collective imagination.
The last part of the project, which is the core artistic practice, will use both the gathered stories and monuments as source material to devise a performance in collaboration with the cast.
What is the challenge/problem right now in my research?
So far, the political/social dimension(s) of the project seems clear. However, due to covid restrictions, it has not been possible to begin the core artistic work, and now it’s time to focus on what I want to explore artistically. The challenge is to develop the link(s) between the social/political research and the artistical research.
Ingvill Fossheim, Department of Film, Television and Scenography at Aalto ARTS Finland
Challenge/Problem:
As my doctoral research transitions into its second year it is timely to revise the research questions and I would like to utilise the SAAR community to help me in this process. How can my research questions be develped further, especially considering their articulation and focus?
Description of research project
BioCostume: Experimental Costume Design with Biobased Co-Actants
Material knowledge is a fundamental part of a costume designer´s practice, yet artistic practice that incorporates systems knowledge and interrogates biobased materials as part of the performance making is rare in this field at the moment. My doctoral research project "BioCostume: Experimental Costume Design with Biobased Co-Actants" investigates how the costume designer´s development and application of natural colourants and biofabricated matter have agency and enable the emergence of new modes of artistic expression in the context of contemporary live performance. The research aims to demonstrate that through costume thinking and praxis biobased materialties can offer novel and unique qualities to the artistic work, as well as induce meaning and value beyond the scope of the live performative event.
I am doctoral candidate at Aalto ARTS since autumn 2020. I am affiliated with the research groups Costume in Focus (Department of Film, Television and Scenography) and Fashion/Textile Futures (Department of Design), and I work in the research project BioColour - Biobased Dyes and Pigments for Colour Palette.
Short bio
Ingvill Fossheim is a costume designer, scenographer and researcher. She designs for live performance and mediated works, including contemporary dance, opera, live- & performance art, theatre, and audio plays; in purpose built as well as adapted and/or reclaimed performance spaces. By exploring and embedding biobased materials and systems thinking into the complex processes of performance-making she seeks to orient her design praxis towards a more responsible, resilient, and regenerative material approach.
Researcher profile at ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5146-8664
Researcher profile at Aalto: https://research.aalto.fi/en/persons/ingvill-fossheim
Artist website: https://ingvillfossheim.no/