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- Bauer, Petra
(författare)
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Sisters! Making Films, Doing Politics : An Exploration in Artistic Research
- 2016
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- How does film become a political act? That is the question that the artistic research project Sisters! Making Films, Doing Politics revolves around. Taking Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the constitution of the political arena as its point of departure, this dissertation reflects on the aesthetic mechanisms that underlie contemporary strategies for collective and feminist filmmaking. Sisters! Making Films, Doing Politics draws on the particular historical archive of radical filmmaking and film theory that relates to the British film collectives of the 1970s: The Berwick Street Film Collective, Cinema Action and The London Women’s Film Group. Inspired by a Marxist-feminist tradition, these collectives explicitly sought to involve film in the political discussions and events that at that time took place in British society. In the dissertation’s first chapter, which deals with these film collectives, a theoretical, historical and artistic framework is established that is subsequently developed in four chapters that discuss the film productions that constitute the artistic core of the project: Sisters! (2011), Mutual Matters (2012), Choreography for the Giants (2013) and Conversation: Stina Lundberg Dabrowski Meets Petra Bauer (2010). As the dissertation argues, each of these films productions discloses specific aspects of the relation of politics and film aesthetics. It goes on to identify the precise relationships and the displacements that take place between the historical material, Arendt’s concept of the political act and the production of the films. A the centre of the investigation stands Sisters!, a film project carried out in collaboration with the London-based feminist organisation Southall Black Sisters.
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| 2. |
- Hjort, Elisabeth, 1975-
(författare)
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Förtvivlade läsningar : Litteratur som motstånd och läsning som etik
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study has two aims and addresses two areas of investigation. The first aim is to examine, in four novels and their textual worlds, what role is played by collective self-images and essentialist identities in maintaining power structures in regard to gender, class, norms for mental functions, and ethnicity. Whether, and if so, how, the novel’s deconstruction of language and images can function as resistance to hegemonic oppression? What does the encounter between the privileged collective and the marginalized look like in the novel, and what happens in this encounter?The project’s second aim is to probe what criticism of, and what strategies for resistance to, various power structures reading can provide. To what extent is it possible to speak of responsibility for, and in, the reading of fictional works? What role is played by the (un)expected and the conditionality in the poetical novel’s ethical demands on the reader? What might reading as an ethical practice mean and entail? The dual aim situates this dissertation in an interdisciplinary field between ethics, literary studies and aesthetics.In this study despair is the fundament on which the ethical reader stands to approach literature. Rather than discovering meanings, finding examples, or experiencing empathy, it is being engaged in the conditions determined by suffering and injustice that constitutes ethical reading.The novels Drömfakulteten (The Dream Faculty) by Sara Stridsberg, Hevonen häst (Hevonen Horse) by Annika Korpi, Montecore by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, and Personliga pronomen (Personal Pronouns) by Daniel Sjölin comprise the material for the study. They are analysed in terms of deconstructive hermeneutics. Theories brought to bear are primarily Gayatri Spivak’s post-colonial and Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenological thinking about ethics, together with ideas from, among others, Derek Attridge, Judith Butler, and Sara Ahmed.The readings of the novels are done via four points of entry: identity, the body, the human, and the post-political, as part of the project’s work process, with each reading leading to new questions and critical interventions.The analysis points to a responsibility in relation to identity, a practice where oneself is shifted and transformed. This responsibility also encompasses accountability for the normative orders that need to be changed. Literary projects per se cannot achieve this, but they can be read as a stab at resistance, material for the reader to elaborate upon. This responsibility is an ethical practice that is not completed, that has uncertainty inscribed in its very essence, and that is reinvigorated with each new reading.
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| 3. |
- Hållander, Frida
(författare)
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Vems hand är det som gör? : En systertext om konst/hantverk, klass, feminism och om viljan att ta strid
- 2019
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Whose hand is making? And how can we understand craft practices in dialogue with society through making and objects? How do we understand objects that manifest resistance? This dissertation in artistic research explores craft practices within the fields of ceramics and textile, through the method and form of autoethnography, and on the basis of an intersectional perspective. It understands making as embodied experience and knowledge, conditioned, but not always bounded, by societal structures, and it documents the resistance against, and the resilience of, repressive structures, in dialogues and struggles where objects gain agency.It is an examination that moves between the bookishness of libraries and historical trajectories on the one hand and making as collective practice on the other, the latter represented in what this study defines as case studies of making. The study creates the term “together-making” to describe and analyse collective craft practice as simultaneously a method of research and of making as a potentially political and socially-conscious act.Through two case studies of making the study assembles an archive of willfulness. In the first case study of making, ceramic practice and historical objects emanating from feminist and anti-slavery movements, are explored through a process of together-making, putting together the exhibition From Pottery to Politics in 2016. In the actual exhibition, further ceramic objects from Swedish twentieth century come into play to re-direct the shape of the exhibition, exemplifying the ways in which this study understands objects as manifest, material politics inciting response.The second case study of making, takes off from the geographical area known as »de sju häraderna«: a centre for Swedish textile manufacture and home-based industry since the seventeenth century. Focusing on a group of local seamstresses who organized Sweden’s first women’s football series in the 1960s – Öxabäck IF – the study investigates textile objects in dialogue with society reflected through the textile history of labour and feminist political movements in the nineteenth and twentieth century. This case study also documents the process of research through together-making, and the exhibition Öxabäck IF – Without You no Tomorrow, 2016.
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| 5. |
- Medbo, Mårten, 1964
(författare)
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Lerbaserad erfarenhet och språklighet
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During the course of the twentieth century, a doubt emerged – first within visual arts, and later also within crafts – where the relevance of the traditional way of making art was addressed, as were thoughts on what was termed ‘empty shape’. The notion that shape in itself was no longer artistically valid is closely linked to notions of materiality as hindrance, and immateriality as freedom – all of which have had a major influence on contemporary visual arts and crafts, in general, and, more specifically, on what I term ‘theory-practice’ within the field of crafts. During the past few decades, increasing proof of this influence on the field of crafts as a whole has also been experienced. As a ceramist expressing myself through clay, form has never been empty, and clay never a hindrance, and my dissertation is an attempt to put materiality as hindrance, and immateriality as freedom, in context, as well as to reflect upon questions related to their emergence and what impact they have within the field of crafts. My point of departure here is my own experience as an artist and ceramist, where inquiring and exploring takes places through practical knowledge. I argue that there is no such thing as immateriality in art and that all artistic expression requires bodily-situated craft skill of some kind in order to be materialised and communicated, as well as to take place in the world. I also argue that art should be seen as what I term ‘language-practice’. Through this practice I craft the concept of ‘clay-based language-ness’ and ‘language- like-ness’ in order to come as close as possible to describing, in words, the kind of communication I wish to create as a ceramist, as well as what art-making (‘art-crafting’) constitutes when conceptual artists create their art. Regarding crafts as a language-practice, however, conflicts with the theory that is setting the tone as well as leading the field of crafts today. I therefore wish, and propose, to find a way out of this conflict-ridden situation. As part of this endeavour, I present the text-based part of the dissertation and the clay-based part of the dissertation – side by side.
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| 6. |
- Orrù, Anna Maria, 1976
(författare)
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Wild Poethics - Exploring relational and embodied practices in urban-making
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Nature is not something separated from the city. With this in mind, this research emerges from the act of urban gardening, staging space for naturecultures that reinforce a direct relation to an urban nature. Alternate agencies can motivate ecological mindsets in urban approaches, bypass the hegemonic and paralysing attitude of the Anthropocene and render a more profound relation with the spatial environment. This catalyses a potential in embodied methodologies to generate vibrant materialist relations in urban-making. The research is positioned with a two-fold challenge; urban-making and naturecultures. The aim is to reorientate methodologies in urban-making to approach relational space matters, and promote ecological poethics relevant for practice, research and education. Three thresholds of engagement structure the exploration: the embodied, the relational and the situated. Alongside explorative practices are built up cartographies of theoretical neighbourhoods that provide alternate knowledge generation on individual, shared and collective levels. Experimental embodied interventions are grounded in artistic research through choreographical approaches using Butoh, Body Weather and swarm-behaviour practices. These approaches are set in a voyage-metaphor to a fictional Island of Encounters reaching four destinations. Each encounter unravels a particular perspective into relational and embodied practice: Alba (body/curiosity), Agora (fiction/performance), Clinamen (atmosphere/imagination), and Plūris (metaphor/swarming). A methodological choreography which corresponds with the theoretical cartographies, reveals and opens up for an urban-making founded in situated knowledges to generate a corporeal poethics – poetic, politic, and ethical. As the activated practice unfolds, interventions are supported by their theoretical neighbourhoods nested in feminist spatial practice, vibrant relationscapes, worlding, affective atmospheres, imagination, spatial-temporal in-betweeness and assemblage-thinking. Accompanying each destination are five film essay(s), each pertaining to the particular artistic interventions in the research.Using corporeal imagination and re-enactment modes of enquiry such as thinking with paper modelled texts, creating fictocriticisms with clouds, using dynamic biomimesis, and mimicking swarms, generates an enlivened relation with naturecultures that gestures the body into becoming a reflective and profound membrane with space. By encountering and immersing the body in a space/time construct, a critical materiality practice emerges that can infuse urban-making, render the body a more refined medium and reactivate architectural thinking and making.
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| 7. |
- von Schantz, Miriam, 1973-
(författare)
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The Doc, the Mock and the What? : Events of Realing, Mockumentalities and the Becoming-Political of the Viewing Subject
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study aims at making inquiry into what happens when a viewing subject encounters a film where it proves difficult to recognize if it is factual or fictional. In order to meet this aim the dissertation offers an experimental approach of both theoretical and methodological nature. Drawing on materialist-affective theory and Deleuzian philosophy a method assemblage for mediamateriality is suggested. This offers a set of conceptual keys that makes it possible to trace the unfolding of actual encounters with blurred boundaries between the factual and the fictional. By performing a reception study whereby six data-producers engage with Exit Through the Giftshop, (Banksy 2010), I’m Still Here (Affleck 2010) and Catfish (Joost and Schulman 2010), a three-fold data is produced. Making this resonate through the method assemblage, the series of events of spectating is seen to have functioned as an event of destabilization of the relationship between the viewing subject and the discourse of factuality, what is called an event of realing. This functions as a challenge to the existential territory of the viewing subject-asspectator, bringing forth a certain mockumentality that can give cause to practices of a becoming-political of the viewing subject, notably by serving as a reconfiguration of the regime of truth. However, as will be guarded against, mockumentality may potentially bring about practices that both flatten as well as hierarchize relations of power. Following this, the dissertation will end with a suggestion that the method assemblage for mediamateriality, besides as a tool for the analytic endeavour and an ethical practice for the viewing subject (inside or outside of academia), can also be put to work in a pedagogical aim, as a moving-image-pedagogics.
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