In the Making #10: Sensing Otherwise; in the absence of land(scape)

Our fascination with landscape led to a series of conversations about this subject in our individual work and research. Since then, we have come to observe the varied conditions of landscape as a multiplicity of non-constants – or a polyphony of harmonious dissonance – that burrows itself into our practices as artistic researchers. We understand it as something that isn’t a static image, but rather something like a portal into seemingly infinite and dynamic ‘elsewheres’ which are always maintained in relation to very immediate ‘being-heres.’

We would like to invite you as we continue to investigate these ‘elsewheres’ by guiding you to, and through, three different landscapes, each transporting you to dimensions specific to our research; the ideal landscape and its impossibility, the sonic landscape of intimate immensity, and the landscape caught within bureaucratic maelstrom. What processes occur when we interact with them? What do they give us access to, if at all? What sorts of knowledges are summoned in their unfolding?

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Presenters: Ilaria Biotti, Alexander Cromer and Donald Weber, with guest Alice Lagaay

Artist and researcher Ilaria Biotti is a PhD candidate at PhDArts, Leiden University and the Royal Academy The Hague. Biotti's practice explores possible relationships between imagination and landscape through and in the spatial montage of moving images. Biotti has participated in international exhibitions and residencies including the 5th Athens Biennial OMONOIA, Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Goethe Institut Bogota, Istituto di Cultura Italiano Cape Town, NSK State Pavilion - 57th Venice Biennale, Tate Exchange London and Transmediale CAPTURE ALL Berlin.

Alexander Cromer is a spoken word performance artist currently pursuing his PhD in artistic research at the PhDArts program at Leiden University x KABK. Together with his long time collaborator, Darius, he centers his research on voice within the contexts of performance theory, ancestral healing, and radical imagination. Using a combination of poetry/fiction, sonic acts, and performance, his work attempts to intimate a performance space with speculative pasts, presents, and futures as a means of investigating the nonlinearity of Blackness. By doing so, he aims to establish new relationships between human bodies which exist here and elsewhere in time and space in order to produce energies which disrupt and transform colonial systems.

Prior to photography, Donald Weber was originally educated as an architect and worked with Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Much of Weber’s work is concerned with making visible the technological, spatial, legal and political systems that shape our current condition – the infrastructures of power. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lange-Taylor Prize, the Duke and Duchess of York Prize, and shortlisted for the Scotiabank Photography Prize, amongst other citations. His diverse photography projects have been exhibited as installations, exhibitions and screenings at festivals and galleries worldwide including the United Nations, Museum of the Army at Les Invalides in Paris, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum. He is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Photography at Aalto University, Finland, and co-founded the Master Photography & Society at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. His practice-based PhD is on the logistical landscape and how this particular land formation structures vision as bureaucratic.

Alice Lagaay, professor of theory in the Design Department of HAW Hamburg (University of Applied Sciences Hamburg), is a founding member and core convener of the international performance philosophy network (www.performancephilosophy.org). Her research focuses on “negative performance” (not doing, passivity, silence…), the philosophy of creative indifference (Friedlaender/Mynona), and on practices of speculative design (with a focus on “magical expertise”). She seeks to explore non-standard formats for the generation and communication of philosophical content - often in collaboration with artists and designers, and increasingly inspired by the lessons of horses. Co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy (2020) and of the Performance Philosophy book series at Rowman & Littlefield International.

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IN THE MAKING

The Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA) of Leiden University and Art Institute West Den Haag are pleased to announce their close collaboration in the second season of the public series In the Making. This series, dedicated to the practice of research in the arts, will consist of seven public sessions taking place on a monthly basis.

The articulation of art and research has a long and rich tradition that has grown in scope and relevance in the past few decades. ACPA has played a significant role in this process, as it is an internationally pioneering institution that enables artists to conduct research through their own practice in a University context. In the Making is meant to both present to the public the research carried out within ACPA as well as to foster a dialogue with a number of international actors from a variety of disciplines.

Artistic research makes the relationship between art and society permeable. Rather than bracketed in the private realm of the lone artist or the sometimes-isolated circuits of the art market, artistic research opens up its practice to the public domain. Its methods become part of collective process of exploration and re-imagining. In the Making aims to deepen a perspective which conceives of artistic practice not as the sole product of individual visionaries but as a collective endeavor embedded in society. It addresses the role of art in the construction of the present and the creation of possible futures.