PhD in the Arts

„Tuesday I Became Clouds” explores the relationship between artistic and scientific representation of clouds through the ubiquitous ‘weather app’. How can a weather app spark our imagination? 

The focus of this artistic research project is on the reconstruction - copying, imitating, and replicating - of visual material used to display the weather forecast in the Apple Weather app. The replicated visual material forms the basis for a series of artworks: visual essays, prints, moving image works, and installations. Thus, it continues my artistic practice of working on existing material - a practice that involves a sensitive and detailed approach to creating differences and insights, ultimately generating new narratives through repetition and recombination.

Further exploration takes place in a series of transdisciplinary workshops, where artists and non-artists are brought into recursive interactions with the same task, I set for myself: the reproduction of an existing artwork or scientific artifact.

To capture the imaginary world behind the replicated artworks and artifacts, I use techniques including auto-ethnography, narrative, and visual observation methods to observe, document, and reflect on the creation processes - making them transparent and contestable. Together, we investigate whether the uncertainty of clouds can become a site of negotiation between scientific and artistic ideas.

“Tuesday I Became Clouds” starts a conversation in-between two fields: interdisciplinary cloud studies and the investigation of the intertwining of scientific and artistic image-making. It discusses the potential of observation as methodological action and reproduction as an experimental approach to making within a cross-disciplinary practice. 

"Tracing Belonging" investigates how language—understood as a dynamic, relational ecosystem—shapes experiences of dwelling, belonging, and coexistence amid ecological crisis and sociopolitical instability. The project addresses the disarticulation of meaning resulting from environmental and cultural breakdowns, examining how vocabularies, semantic structures, and linguistic practices influence mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, as well as how communities relate to territories and ecosystems.

The research employs participatory artistic methodologies—including archiving, mapping, storytelling, collaborative publishing, dialogical workshops, and glossary creation—to critically interrogate institutional discourses, foster collective reflection, and co-create shared vocabularies. Through these practices, the project explores language as a site of negotiation and a tool for worlding, where meanings are constructed, contested, and re-signified, and where communities actively participate in shaping social, cultural, and ecological realities.

Drawing on ecolinguistic perspectives alongside co-learning and collaborative artistic inquiry, the project frames belonging as a dialogical and situated process—an act of “making-with” that enables new modes of coexistence, collective meaning-making, and inclusive, place-based forms of dwelling, while challenging institutionalised narratives of exclusion and marginalisation.

After the End is an artistic research project exploring future imaginaries of humanity through a post-naturalist lens, unfolding across sound, performance, and text. Responding to current socio-political crises, the project is situated within the soundscapes of public squares in Mexico and investigates the performative intersections between the human voice and suburban birds—specifically the great-tailed grackle (Zanate or Quiscalus mexicanus)—using speculative thinking to imagine alternative modes of existence.

Drawing on concepts such as speculative fabulation and liminality—key tools for expanding binary divisions such as human and nature—the project also explores the triad of soundscape, gesture, and context as a means of shaping diverse modes of listening and meaning-making within the performing arts. It aims to develop an experimental sound-based performance and a theoretical framework that illustrate how liminality can reshape the boundaries between body, sound, language, and territory. The process includes field recordings, local interviews, sound analysis, participatory and collaborative workshops, creation laboratories, and various forms of textual publication.

Adopting a future-oriented approach, After the End cultivates radical imagination, positioning listening and sound practices as political statements in an interconnected world. The project engages with the intersections of philosophy, critical theory, post-naturalism, sound ecology, sound art, contemporary performance, and experimental sound practices.

“Energy. Burnout artist in a World on Fire” is an artistic research project by Ada Mukhina that includes a practice-based PhD at the Institute for Open Arts (Mozarteum University) accompanied by a trilogy of theatre performances. It will explore the notion of energy as a source of political and economical power, its material presence in the arts spaces and performing bodies, and search for the new aesthetics of the future energy culture. Each of the performances will explore the topic through different mediums: text-based, movement-based and sound-based practices.

I would like to explore artistic strategies on the intersection of performing arts and energy humanities, an emerging study that tries to understand how energy shapes culture and society. One of its ideas, expressed for example by Carret Dugget, is that changing one energy source to another - fossil fuel to renewable energy - is not enough to achieve an energy transition. We have to reimagine the whole energy paradigm, which we live in, or as Imre Szeman calls it “energy culture”, a whole “set of social practices and frameworks always already entangled with energy systems”. 

As an artist, I also feel entangled in the current energy culture. My energy - the same as energy resources of the Earth - is getting exhausted through constant extraction: to create work, survive at the art market and address current political challenges. So what could be the new transformative strategies and practices of an artist, whose energy is at risk of being exhausted, in response to anthropogenic climate change?

This research explores and seeks to build a consistent conceptualization of transversality in contemporary artistic practice, examining how self-determined artistic devices can generate new forms of collective creation and organization. Through analytical philosophy, South American epistemologies, public management, and artistic fieldwork, the project investigates how the work of art itself can function as a generative principle for transversal relations—aiming to develop a determined framework differentiated from both verticality and horizontality, while reconfiguring the aesthetic, social, and political dimensions of art-making.

Structured around three perspectives—critical analysis of transversal practices, experimentation with the materiality of art mediums, and the creation of an artwork that enacts transversal self-determination—the project aims to construct a framework that explores the limits of art as a mode of collective production. It seeks to articulate how artistic processes may operate beyond disciplinary boundaries, opening spaces for interdependence and new systems of production within contemporary collective structures.

The artistic research is planned to be carried out in Salzburg, working closely with local communities, residents, and artists to explore how transversal self‑determined practices can be developed and enacted in a concrete, situated context. This engagement will allow the project to test and refine its conceptual framework on transversality while observing how collective creation and organization emerge through situated, collaborative artistic practices.

This artistic research explores the transformative and ecological potential of monstrosity within expanded choreographic and choreophonic practices. Drawing on feminist, queer, posthuman, and ecological discourses, it investigates the monstrous as a hybrid, subversive category of (human) thought that destabilizes anthropocentric worldviews and hierarchical divisions between human and non-human entities. Understanding monstrosity as a process rather than a figure, the research examines the concept of the monstrous body as an artistic method for engaging endangered ecosystems—such as wetlands, forests, and glaciers—as co-creative agents in choreography and sound.
Through movement-based, somatic, vocal, and ethnographic methods, the project develops and reflects on strategies to move and sound “as one body” with specific ecosystems, embodying hybrid, relational forms that blur ecological and corporeal boundaries. The concept of choreophony, following Julia Ostwald, frames the interweaving of body and voice as an expanded choreographic practice.
The research includes performative working processes with both public and internal showings. A key focus lies on pedagogical implementation through workshops with children and adolescents (ages 7–16), exploring monstering as a participatory, empowering and ecological practice that fosters sensitivity to diversity and interdependence. Insights from these workshops will inform at least one performance for all ages, translating the project’s theoretical and ecological concerns into embodied, performative forms.

Drawing on agential realism and posthuman knowledge, my research builds a cartography of the implicit axioms and normative-perceptual structures embedded within aesthetic capitalism. As legal governance increasingly yields to AI infrastructures and market dynamics, regulation no longer operates primarily through law or democratic processes. Instead, it unfolds through algorithms, economic self-regulation, and affective economies, transforming perception itself into a site of governance—modulated by circulation, visibility, and emotional resonance.
My focus lies on the aesthetic and perceptible dimensions of these emergent assemblages, attending to how power and normativity are felt, embodied, and materialized—both in physical spaces and dematerialized domains such as institutions, data infrastructures, and entertainment ecosystems. In this context, I position myself as both observer and observed, tracing how such mechanisms inscribe themselves onto my body, thoughts, and emotions—shaping not only my actions and decisions, but my very becoming. Enmeshed in consumerism, I embody the ideal subject of aesthetic capitalism: too sensitive to remain untouched, too immersed to resist.
My practice centers on capturing what I call “patterns trouvés” through molding, casting, and other inscription techniques. Through experimental mapping and trace-oriented processes, I construct a situated cartography of these formations by identifying perceptible residues—cracks where latent structures surface. This cartography is unstable, contingent, and often born of fortuitous encounters. In these cracks, I trace the silence where power has passed—always ready to return and remap the same spot anew.
What forms of cartography are needed to critically engage with the dispersed mechanisms of control? How might these operations be made traceable?

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I am Francesco Pizzocchero, a multidisciplinary artist living and working between Padua, Venice, Milan, and Salzburg. My practice involves a wide range of materials such as wax, iron, wood, ceramic, and plaster, as well as sound and natural elements. I work across various techniques, including sculpture, casting, drawing, coding, performance, and sound installation.
My academic background began with a degree in law, followed by several years of work as a legal professional. However, it soon became clear that I needed to dedicate myself fully to artistic research and practice. I therefore attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where I graduated with honours in Decoration. Since 2024, I have been admitted to the practice-based PhD in the Arts programme at the Institute for Open Arts - Mozarteum University in Salzburg, where I continue to refine my artistic practice and deepen my research.

EXCESS comprises a series of interdisciplinary collaborations and a dissertation text that focuses on the relation between excess and intractability. I do not consider this body of work to be a PhD project that is autonomous from the rest of my artistic practice; EXCESS and my practice are integrated. Rather, the defining contours of this PhD process have been shaped by navigating the meaning of artistic research within an academic institution, wherein the program that I applied for has shifted so drastically that it is unrecognisable from where it began. The rigorous education of this process has been through questioning how artistic practices conform to the legitimisation of this context, and whether this legitimisation allows for the radically undefinable and unknowable things that become art. 

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Rebecca Kressley is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sound. She lives and works in Amsterdam. 

This research aims to explore the potential of sound as a tool within design process, understood as a structured system of values, principles, knowledge, and methodologies. It reconsiders the role of the musician as a possible interlocutor and mediator in interdisciplinary processes that operate beyond the boundaries of musical performance. Positioned between historical memory and contemporary perspectives, the project draws on a range of experiences - from the Venetian coro spezzato to contemporary sound installations - that demonstrate how sound does not merely occupy space, but actively contributes to its intelligibility, its experiential dimension, and its design methodology. From this standpoint, the research seeks to investigate a project culture that recognizes sound and musical knowledge and practice as generative dimensions, capable of opening new operational and imaginative possibilities. The project seeks to create a platform for reflection and experimentation through dialogue, documentation, collaborative practices, and case studies - allowing sound and musical culture to emerge as modes of thought, communication, and critical engagement. It aims to reconsider the role of musicians in the design of auditory spatial concepts, while simultaneously exploring the interrelation between aesthetics and design strategies, between space and sound.

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Valeria Zane is a musician currently pursuing a PhD at the Mozarteum University. She holds degrees in harp from the Conservatories of Venice and Padua, and a specialization at the Norwegian Academy of Music. She earned an MSc in Management from Ca’ Foscari University and ESCP Business School. Co-founder of studio Pase, her work explores music and creative research projects and processes. She collaborates with the Ugo and Olga Levi Foundation, is a board member of the UIA – Università Internazionale dell'Arte, and has worked with institutions such as La Biennale di Venezia, Oslo Opera House, and Opéra National de Paris.

The PhD project explores how generative real-time media can evoke a felt sense of connection between human and non-human entities by staging ecological and temporal transformation as immersive, perceptual experience. It aims to create a performative “media-organism” that reflects the interdependence of living systems and challenges the separation between nature and human subjectivity. Through a series of audiovisual experiments, the research investigates how motion, rhythm, and real-time image-sound processes can generate somatic resonance—a bodily response to temporal and geological forces. The project intertwines generative animation, motion tracking, and code-based image production with fieldwork-based physical movement practices as methods of sensory data collection and embodied reflection. By emphasizing perception beyond language and linear narrative, the work seeks to reconstruct a sense of presence and ecological kinship. It reflects on how audiovisual media can move beyond representation to activate an awareness of vitality and interconnection within a shared biosphere.

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Claudia Rohrmoser is a video artist working at the intersection of visual music, expanded cinema, and media scenography. Her practice explores the fusion of animation, live cinema, and immersive media, often in collaboration with composers and theatrical set designers. Her work includes audiovisual performances, and large-scale video installations for opera, concerts, and contemporary music. Her installations and performances have been showcased internationally at venues such as Stanford University’s CCRMA (Palo Alto, CA), the Eastman School of Music (Rochester, NY), and Teatro Real (Madrid), as well as at major music and arts festivals like MUTEK Festival Tokio, Salzburger Osterfestspiele, Ars Electronica, and Inventionen Festival Berlin. She is the founder of Cinema Vertigo, a platform for artistic research in media spaces. She has been awarded multiple prestigious grants and scholarships in the field of multimedia composition, including the Salzburg State Prize for Media Art, the Bourges Electroacoustic Music Award, and a scholarship-supported Banff Leighton Artist Residency. Claudia studied Computer Animation at FH Salzburg and Experimental Film and Media Arts at UdK Berlin. Currently, she is a Professor of Motion Design and Media Scenography at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSBI). Born in Austria, Claudia lives and works in Berlin and Bielefeld.

“Artistic Practice as a mode for Secular Ethics of Late Capitalism” is an interdisciplinary project that consist of the exhibition series, a musical and written thesis. The general aim of the proposed project is to research how—by implementing Marxist Critique and Lacanian Psychoanalyses onto the category of contemporary art—the notion of artistic practice could be considered as an emancipatory strategy that might generate new notions of freedom of subjectivity within late capitalist society. The practice that leads to production of the visual outcome of this project; the art-labor, which I’m forced to undertake simultaneously to my unpaid studies; as well as the enjoyment, which comes from the illusion of “freedom” of such a lifestyle—constitute of the case study for my theoretical thesis. What is important, the exhibition series and a musical are related to each other, too: The final installation of this series will become the movie set for the musical written by myself, which will be developed as a movie. 

I build space around and inside shelters—which form an architecture of the uprooted—in which I place objects of a symbolic nature. The installation is inhabited by variety of organisms, such as plants, mycelium, or ants, which are captured without their permission. The idea of a shelter constitutes a narrative of the project and carries its impact, as well as it is utilitarian. The exhibition is foldable, can be displayed anywhere in similar form, and doesn’t take much storage space. The process of making the first half of the whole exhibition-set is the subject of my theoretical research, where every different hut becomes a representative of different chapter of the thesis: such as 'labor, beliefs and “nature”, enjoyment, materialism, history / immediacy.' The notion of a secular ethics understood both in the universal and individual context is the defining characteristic of this research.

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Agata Cieślak – visual artist, researcher, author, curator. She works in various techniques and means of expression to try to deconstruct common tactics and strategies of artistic production, at the same simultaneously searching for the limits of agency in contemporary art. She graduated from the Dutch Art Institute (MA Art Praxis) and then studied philosophy at the Graduate School of Social Research in Warsaw (2021). She is the curator and producer of the first edition of the secondaryarchive.org project – Platform of Artists from Central and Eastern Europe. She has collaborated with many institutions in Poland and abroad, including the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation, Ashkal Alwan (Beirut), the Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan Studio.
Since 2025, she has been a board member of the artists' association in Poland, the Civil Forum for Contemporary Art (OFSW). Despite many doubts, she still believes in the necessity of art today.

This research project will develop an artistic methodology that engages with organisational structures and planning processes within the built environment. The built world can be considered a material record of human affairs, as 'built documents' which are physical manifestations of the policies, economic incentives, displays of power and technologies of their time. Planning processes reflect material, real-world issues that simulateously carry an ideological and representational weight. By turning to fiction, mimicry and conjecture, the aim is to reveal underlying structures within these processes that would otherwise be inaccessible.

A fictional enterprise, 'Public Programme GmbH', will serve as the site through which these forces and processes are accessed. Rather than identifying a pre-existing site and tracing its entanglements, this project uses a fictional framework as the site itself. This is an attempt to distort or invert the notion of site-specificity by moving away from particular site conditions towards an echo or reflection of the underlying issues. Within this invented context, the service phases of the building industry — the 'Leistungsphasen' or 'Plan of Work' — will be used to trace these world-making processes. These standardised guidelines, which are intended to organise outcomes and define the flow of information, will be reimagined as tools for speculative enquiry. The languages of planning will serve as an offbeat script from which to consider the built environment as man-made, not something that simply exists, but as an act of creation. Using artistic methods and processes that mimic or attach to the structured systems in place in the built environment, this research project seeks to models the conditions that shape our physical world.

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Sunette L. Viljoen, (b. South Africa) is a visual artist living and working in Berlin. Her sculptural installations are frequently site-specific and informed by literature and architecture references. She earned her MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2012. Viljoen was a participant at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, (2014-2015); a fellowship recipient at Braunschweig University of Art (2012-2013); and at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (2020-2021). She has exhibited at Sonsbeek 20→24 in Arnhem, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Goodman Gallery Cape Town, Die Raum, Berlin, and the 13th Dakar Biennale in Senegal.

This study rests on two premises. First, the conditions of contemporary composition are intrinsically post-human. This claim holds both from the “classical” post-human perspective—where digitality, embodied in code, networks and algorithms, challenges anthropocentric notions of subjectivity—and from the earlier media-philosophical stance of McLuhan, Clark and Chalmers, who regarded even inorganic tools such as notebooks or pencils as extensions of the human mind. 

The second premise is that the post-human predicament created by these conditions foregrounds memory within the specific artistic practice of contemporary composition. Music still depends on memory and expectation of temporal structures, and post-conceptual composition, in which reflection on mediality is internalised, will continue, perhaps for a long time, to treat memory not as a problem to be dispensed with but as the primary locus where mediality is negotiated. Under post-human circumstances the question of memory is posed in forms such as: What shall we call memory? Who remembers? How is remembering enacted?

Grounded in these premises, this artistic research asks how musical temporal structures—how music exists as form in time—can engage the memory-related questions that arise in contemporary composition. Through the artefacts themselves and an autoethnographic
record of the working process, the project makes visible the tacit, practice-based knowledge it produces, aiming to contribute to both compositional practice and scholarly discourse.

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Noh Seung Ju, born in Seoul, South Korea in 1997, is a composer currently based in Austria. His work has earned the International Stiftung Mozarteum’s Paumgartner Medal, selection for the Lucerne Festival Composer Seminar (leading to a performance in Ensemble Modern’s Happy New Ears series), and second prize at the Bartók World Competition. Among all musical parameters he is especially drawn to rhythm; influenced by 'pungmul-nori', he explores rhythmic textures and contrapuntal interplay. This focus has led him to the broader architecture of temporal form, a subject he is now pursuing in a doctoral artistic-research programme at the Mozarteum.

Re-enacting a Collection: On Art Brut, Sanism, and Mad Storytelling critically examines the persistent marginalization of artists associated with "Art Brut" who are labeled as mentally ill. Despite widespread recognition that art is embedded within societal contexts, works associated with this term are still portrayed as apolitical, isolated, and mystical—an outlook deeply rooted in sanism. The project seeks to challenge these contextualizations by developing counter-narratives grounded in Mad, situated perspectives that reclaim cultural and social memory of (ex-)patients. 

Within the scope of the project, I will engage with historical artworks and archival material from the Prinzhorn Collection (established in 1919)—a key foundation for the collection and study of pathologized art in the European context. At the same time, I will critically examine the collection itself. The project employs strategies such as speculative storytelling, re-enactment, and exhibition-making. A central research question guiding the inquiry is: In what ways can engaging with the socio-political dimensions of historical artworks and archival materials enable the construction of (ex-)patient-led narratives that challenge the authority of archival and psychiatric power?

Rather than interpreting the artworks—and “mental illness” more broadly—as expressions of inner worlds detached from reality, they are explored as forms of artistic knowledge shaped by social, political, and institutional conditions. Influences from (ex-)patient movements inform the project’s aesthetic strategies, emphasizing collective storytelling, fragmentation, and deconstruction—proposing a Mad perspective as both critique and method.

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Elina Saalfeld is an artist-researcher. Her interdisciplinary, lens-based practice explores power structures in image and narrative production. After completing her B.F.A. at HFBK Hamburg in 2020 (class of Broomberg & Chanarin), she receivedearned her Master’s degree in Art in Context at the UdK Berlin in 2023. Since 2018, Saalfeld has been a member of the Young Valley Soil artist collective.
Her individual and collaborative works have been exhibited at, among others, M.1 of the Arthur Boskamp Foundation (2024), CCA Berlin (2023), the Triennial of Photography Hamburg (2022 and 2018), and the Museum of Photography Berlin (2021).

Johanna Binder: 

Natur aus zweiter Hand deals with the displacement of plants and the power-political systems and entanglements that are archived and reflected in the flora. With the arrival of Columbus in the Americas in 1492, transoceanic plants became protagonists, alongside humans, of European exploration and investigation, of conquest and cupidity, of (literal) uprooting and long sea voyages on which only the most resilient survived. Today, the descendants of these well-travelled plants live among us, and most of us have a piece of "exotic paradise" in our homes, or: a piece of colonial history. 

But the fate of some plants has changed: they have gone from being displaced to becoming invasive themselves, transforming ecosystems and endangering endemic plants. With these plants—invasive neophytes— hegemonic power relations, at least in nature, seem to be renegotiated, as they propose a different distribution of habitat, land use and resources other than (neo)colonial politics and economy might pretend.

Natur aus zweiter Hand aims to reveal what different narratives of world-making and history might be told by the (invading) plants themselves, and to scrutinize the anthropocentric gaze and interests on established and emerging ecosystems. In doing so, a particular focus is placed on the political and economic aspects of these interests. The world-making narratives unfold in a series of exhibitions and writings in which the neophytes are acknowledged to have agency and are both the main protagonists and narrators.

Aline Braun:

What is commonly seen as a "choreography" is very often a final performed production: "the piece." How can one perceive a choreographer's true labor by seeing only its finished product? As only the end of the process is shared, the entire chronology of the real choreographic praxis is erased and its true labor remains invisible to the audience. From a solo research and conceptualisation, to bodily collaborations in a dance microcosm, to a product shared with the public, the complete labor of choreography remains invisible while being essential to the creative work and its comprehension.

"The invisible path of choreographic creation" challenges the view of the choreographer as reduced to the creator of set or improvised movement phrases transmitted to the dancers, and reveals the constant choices he/she/they must navigate in order to create a movement piece as well as his/her/their invisible labor and responsibilities. Contrasting a monolithic identity, the project tries to create a hybrid figure where the tasks of the choreographer, artistic director, curator or performer are intertwined. Navigating the artistic creation and the industry affecting it, how can one unveil the invisible labor of the choreographer in its artistic process? What does the unfolding path of creation encompass in its unseen labor? By showing the invisible, "The invisible path of choreographic creation" exposes the dynamics of the notion of ethics from the point of view of the creation and questions the intertwined responsibilities and constraints linked to the creation of a choreographic process.

From conceptualisation and the first ideas of a work in progress, to the research phase and the production of the piece that will be documented through different artistic methods, "The invisible path of choreographic creation" explores the chronology of the making of several pieces made alongside the research project. In this exploration it might perhaps emerge that the piece itself is not the most important element of a choreographic process. Perhaps the choices made and all the elements that happen around its production process are the real piece. The piece seen as a process allows for a redefinition of the word "choreography" and puts into perspective the choices made during the creation that may be more significant than any artistic product. Which methods of documentation are relevant to unveil the choreographer’s labor? In an alternation of methods and materials, the broader documentation of choreography and the accessibility of invisible labour question the limits of the notion of a "piece" and suggest a redefinition of the work of the choreographer and its figure as an entity. The piece thus becomes a space for physical, systemic, industrial and artistic negotiations from the point of view of the creation.

Renato Grieco:

While the socio-technical alliance enshrined between industry and users is geared exclusively toward a market model adhering to a very stereotypical audience, Audio Erotica represents an unreleased and under-explored platform for implementing adult content in an inclusive and fluid domain, constructed with permeable languages.

Renato Grieco is focusing on a mediarchaeological compositional praxis that can be put at the service of all scholars, producers, activists, and consumers oriented toward the ontological exploration of the format of Audio Porn, Audio Erotica, and ASMR as a poietic and political medium.

At the same time, from the speculative point of view, Renato is documenting with scientific rigor the research with the aim of sharing the artistic perspective of those who actively employ and rethink media and technologies for a scientific community of researchers in interdisciplinary fields such as Porn and Media Studies, Organizational Studies, Media Archaeology, Radio Art, and Poetry. 

Francois Lemieux:

My phd research and project at Salzburg's Mozarteum University explores the intricate relationship between Haiti and Québec (Canada); language and the open geographical, political and cultural imaginaries that connect the Caribbeans and the valley of the Saint-Laurence river. This process, in general terms, asks how can solo and multiply authored artistic projects be envisaged such that they register, in their ways of making and enacting, the legacies and effects of colonialism. Currently, my research engages the colonial, migratory and cultural ties between Haiti and Québec as a general starting point for writing, exhibition and film making. 

I am interested in the fluid boundaries between fiction and reality, probing the past and present ramifications between space, language and power. Often resisting classification, my work uses the fugitive vocabulary of art to experiment with the ambiguous relationship between documentary observation, modes of address and representation, emphasizing the plasticity of narration. This process develops in a post-disciplinary perspective, informed by collective study, publishing, conversation, image making, text, performance, exhibition and film making. With my artwork, my work and research, I ask how stories and images may be told, collectively processed, re/composed and shared today.

Rebecca Kressley:

'The Excess of Cacophonies (E)' is studying how the modalities of excess arrive in and as art and life, via desire, survival, ecstasy, uselessness and disorder. The project works with text, sound and interdisciplinary art work through a series of collaborations, wherein aesthetic practices are combined with what is otherwise unfigured, and unpredictability is used as a technique for staying with intractability. The collaborations have public presentations and a continuum between them. E is proposing an outcome that flexes with the work itself.

The project's discursive work is interested in where and how 'excess' is used as a device in writing that holds a place for what is otherwise intractable, in a way that differs from the use of the term that applies directly to 'excess' or 'surplus' as philosophical categories. E is asking how this use began as a writing technique and is tracing its development through the present. From this questioning, the project is exploring whether this development can provide some insight into the project's broader study of ecstatic surplus as a simultaneous relation and reaction between art and the quotidian, as it is generated by and becomes within them. The art created throughout 'The Excess of Cacophonies' is in dialogue with but not determined by the project’s discursive framework; space is kept for the art work to move past it. Throughout, E engages with the relations between intractability, excess and possibility, and the paradoxical connections between art, the accidental and ecstatic surplus.

Agata Cieślak:

“Artistic Practice as a mode for Secular Ethics of Late Capitalism” is an interdisciplinary project that consist of the exhibition series, a musical and written thesis. The general aim of the proposed project is to research how—by implementing Marxist Critique and Lacanian Psychoanalyses onto the category of contemporary art—the notion of artistic practice could be considered as an emancipatory strategy that might generate new notions of freedom of subjectivity within late capitalist society. The practice that leads to production of the visual outcome of this project; the art-labor, which I’m forced to undertake simultaneously to my unpaid studies; as well as the enjoyment, which comes from the illusion of “freedom” of such a lifestyle—constitute of the case study for my theoretical thesis. What is important, the exhibition series and a musical are related to each other, too: The final installation of this series will become the movie set for the musical written by myself, which will be developed as a movie. 

I build space around and inside shelters—which form an architecture of the uprooted—in which I place objects of a symbolic nature. The installation is inhabited by variety of organisms, such as plants, mycelium, or ants, which are captured without their permission. The idea of a shelter constitutes a narrative of the project and carries its impact, as well as it is utilitarian. The exhibition is foldable, can be displayed anywhere in similar form, and doesn’t take much storage space. The process of making the first half of the whole exhibition-set is the subject of my theoretical research, where every different hut becomes a representative of different chapter of the thesis: such as 'labor, beliefs and “nature”, enjoyment, materialism, history / immediacy.' The notion of a secular ethics understood both in the universal and individual context is the defining characteristic of this research.