ART+RESEARCH

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Investigative Commons

The Investigative Commons seeks to understand what constitutes evidence in our present day and age, as well as how and why certain data is g

The Investigative Commons is an expanded community of practice that includes investigative agencies and reporters, lawyers, activists, whistleblowers, scientists, artists, architects, filmmakers, software developers and cultural institutions. Amongst us are members of communities, organizations and individuals who are at the forefront of interconnected struggles.

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Forensic Architecture Initiative Athens (FAIĀ)

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Julian Hetzel - Stop being Poor

It has become a privilege to imagine a future. People who are occupied with (economic) survival in their everyday lives do not make grand plans. If you are caught up in the here and now, you can’t imagine a then and there. What if hopelessness is not the lack of hope, but a lack of space to imagine alternatives? We claim that the future belongs to those who can imagine it. And we invite you to speculate with us.

“Poverty isn’t a lack of character, it is a lack of cash!” (Rutger Bregmann)

This project will change your life. For Stop Being Poor Studio Julian Hetzel takes the equivalent of a basic income (from cultural funding) and gives it to one person for one year. In other words: someone will receive €15.000. This money is an invitation to escape the world of needs and to enter the world of desires.

Usually, it is the CEOs and technocrats running the governments who decide which futures are possible. In this project, established power structures are turned upside down. The decision is entrusted to an alternative expert committee consisting of a group of homeless people living on the streets of Stuttgart.

The audience is invited to follow and to (binge-)watch the selection process.

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Julian Hetzel - The Benefactor

The Benefactor is a project about success and hunger. It is a lecture- performance on gifts, investments, parasitism and the state of the arts – developed and performed by Julian Hetzel.

“First of all, I support this new cabinet. But I disagree with them on one account: we cannot cut arts funding. Rather, we should raise its budget. But to pay for the arts’ budget, we should first cut back on development aid!” — Frits Bolkestein

Inspired by this statement by Dutch politician Frits Bolkestein, which refers to the arts funding cuts in the Netherlands, Julian Hetzel developed a project about the radical alternative use of cultural money. He donated his entire project budget to a starving child in Africa, as a form of a child-sponsorship. Simultaneously he framed his donation, a daily transfer of one euro, as a piece of art, as a “durational intercontinental performance of 2000 days”. Though it is a transaction of unequal value, it is of great benefit to all parties involved. As such, Julian Hetzel explores the thin line between life and art and raises questions about the ethics of success in our society.

How to turn development aid into art? How to turn art into development aid? How to develop art? How to turn?

"Art is made out of circumstances and not out of pure imagination"

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"All knowledge must be considered as situated rather than absolute"

Donna Haraway

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New Materialism is a movement within contemporary philosophy that seeks to rework the conventional ontological understanding of the material world. While many philosophical tendencies are associated with new materialism, in such a way that the movement resists a single definition, its common characteristics include a rejection of essentialism, representationalism, and anthropocentrism as well as the dualistic boundaries between nature/culture; subject/object; and human/non-human. Instead, new materialists emphasize how fixed entities and apparently closed systems are produced through dynamic relations and processes, considering the distribution of agency through the interaction of heterogeneous forces.

An evolving movement seeking to comprehend the connections between humans and the material world.

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Futurist Cooking

Futurist cooking was directed at combining gastronomy and art, as well as the transformation of dining into a performance art. Futurism recognized that people "think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink". Futurist food is also considered a means to address political and social issues. Marinetti's Manifesto has been described as a satirical polemic more than a cooking manual and was published in response to the Italian economic needs during the Depression.

In futurist cooking, the knife and fork are also abolished, while perfumes are added to enhance the taste experience.

The Manifesto of Futurist Cooking also proposed that the way in which meals were served be fundamentally changed. For example: - Some food on the table would not be eaten, but only experienced by the eyes and nose - Food would arrive rapidly and contain many flavors, but only a few mouthfuls in size - All political discussion and speeches would be forbidden - Music and poetry would be forbidden except during certain intervals

Futurist cooking emphasized presentation and multisensory impression, revelling in transgression and shock value. As the historian Carol Helstosky demonstrates, "food sculptures and seemingly odd food pairings (meat and cologne or mussels and vanilla creme) heightened the tactile and sensory experience of the meal."

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Biopolitics is a concept referring to the intersection of political power and biological life, where the state regulates populations through management of health, bodies, and life processes. Developed by Michel Foucault, it represents a shift from sovereign power (right to kill) to biopower (fostering life) via public health, surveillance, and demographic management.

Biopower: This is the mechanism of power-knowledge that regulates populations by targeting the body, often treating individuals as part of a collective "population" that must be optimized, measured, and managed.

Biopolitics establishes norms of health and behavior, creating a distinction between "proper" and "deviant" bodies, which can lead to social exclusion, stigmatization (e.g., fat phobia), and state racism.

Biopolitics can be viewed as a "somatocracy," or ruling through the body, which can maximize wellbeing but also foster exclusionary politics by deciding which lives are worthy of protection and which are not.

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Stefanos Tsivopoulos - The Precarious Archive

The Precarious Archive (2016), an archive and a performance. The Precarious Archive is a long-term project centered around a collection of approximately 900 images, the result of a ten year research into various public and private archival institutions, press offices, and newspapers in Greece. The visual material chronologically covers a period of about forty years from 1963 to 2002. It reflects some of the major political events that took place in post-war Greece. This collection of images constitutes an idiosyncratic archive that touches upon atypical archival strategies, questions methods of representation, reflects on images as multidimensional, economy-driven hyper-commodities, and ultimately questions the notion of visibility in our mediated democracies. The Precarious Archive consists of two interlocking components: a) the archive as a physical and conceptual presentation, and b) the performer as a continuous live action that activates and interacts with the archive and the public.

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Circadian rhythms are natural, internal 24-hour cycles that regulate physical, mental, and behavioral changes, most notably the sleep-wake cycle. Driven by a master clock in the brain (suprachiasmatic nucleus) and influenced by light, they dictate hormone release, appetite, and body temperature.

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Édouard Glissant’s "right to opacity" within his Poetics of Relation asserts that individuals and cultures have the right to remain irreducible, complex, and partially incomprehensible to others. It rejects the Western demand for total transparency or "grasping" the Other, advocating instead for respectful, non-appropriating engagement that allows diversity to coexist without requiring homogenization

Édouard Glissant - Poetics of Relation

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The Mother Is Dead, Long Live (m)Othercare: Care as Alterity, an Introduction - Journal #153

iLiana Fokianaki critiques the dominant idea of “the Mother” and proposes alternative figures of care.

Iliana Fokianaki - The Mother is Dead, Long Live (m)Othercare

In mothercare transformed into othercare, multiple mothers can take care of you. It might be a cyborg or a mechanical womb that breeds and feeds you. You are the responsibility of many; you are a collective endeavor. Othercare builds on the societal structures of Indigenous and First Nations communities that have long understood kinship practices as collectivist performances of care, and that include humans and nonhumans alike.

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‘There is No Such Thing as Documentary’: An Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha

The radical filmmaker, teacher and writer talks essentialism in identity politics and why her films are neither documentary nor fiction

There is no such thing as documentary - Erika Balsom & Trinh T. Mihn-Ha

"It has always worked against me to have multiple areas of activity because people find it hard to classify.'

"I do not intend to speak about; just speak nearby." When you decide to speak nearby, rather than speak about, the first thing you need to do is to acknowledge the possible gap between you and those who populate your film: in other words, to leave the space of representation open so that, although you’re very close to your subject, you’re also committed to not speaking on their behalf, in their place or on top of them. You can only speak nearby, in proximity (whether the other is physically present or absent), which requires that you deliberately suspend meaning, preventing it from merely closing and hence leaving a gap in the formation process. This allows the other person to come in and fill that space as they wish. Such an approach gives freedom to both sides. By not trying to assume a position of authority in relation to the other, you are actually freeing yourself from the endless criteria generated with such an all-knowing claim and its hierarchies in knowledge. [...] When you do not want to speak as a ‘knower’, you talk with a lot of blanks and holes and question marks. Perhaps you have no desire to fix meaning, which may sometimes lead you to a place of nonsense. But, in language, even when you work with nonsense, people find meaning.

"the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house"- Audre Lorde

[...] Rather than a work of ethnographic cinema, Reassemblage is better understood as anti-ethnography – a film that reflexively dismantles the objectification and exoticization of otherness which mark the ethnographic and colonial projects alike. 

[...] Trinh insists on dislodging the illusory purity of inherited categories to make way for the hybrid and in-between. Crucially, this cross-disciplinary practice is not one of simple negation: Trinh breaks down dominant languages in order to imagine other forms of relation and expression.

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Analyzing Trinh T. Minh-ha's work

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'I' PRESUMED POSSESSION, MY LANGUAGE, MY LOSS — I DO ART

Her language starts with forgetting. There are reasons why she writes in English and cannot articulate herself in the language she was given

'I' PRESUMED POSSESSION, MY LANGUAGE, MY LOSS - Cecilie Fang

She understands language loss is not a loss but an exchange. A transaction conducted without consent. You gain fluency in the language of power at the cost of becoming inarticulate in the language of origin. She does not blame English – languages are not morally responsible for how they circulate. Language loss is never natural. It is engineered by the state and by linguistic assimilation concealed as opportunity.

As plurilingualism becomes a neoliberal norm, the ‘flexibility’ demanded of migrant or post-migrant speakers often comes at the cost of other languages, their languages, fading away.

Having lived across borders of nations and languages, my artistic practice very much delves around this experience, as I have come to see fluency not as mastery but partly as regime – a mode of governance that organizes who can speak without friction, who can cross without delay, and who can be recognized without interrogation. Fluency promises access, but it also demands assimilation into the language of power. To become fluent is often to become aligned and legible with the demands of the state.

The violence of standardization is not only in what it measures. It happens in what it makes you feel about the people you love. It happens in the shame it teaches you to carry. It happens in how it makes you complicit.

The work draws on Nüshu, a syllabic writing system created by women in the Jianyong County of China who were excluded from formal education in the nineteenth century. Nüshu was not illiteracy. With its two characters ⼥ (woman) (12) and 书 (literature) (13), Nüshu can be translated to women’s writing in English (14). It was a constructed language developed outside state mechanisms of education and linguistic governance. When reading about Nüshu, my thoughts went to how language always has contained a possibility of refusal. How those excluded from official systems have historically constructed their own.

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Ruslana Kliuchko - Feedback Loop

This project explores the ecological consequences of war in Ukraine, focusing on the forests of the Sumy region — the place where I was born and raised. In autumn 2024, massive fires broke out near my hometown of Khutir-Mykhailivskyi, on the border with Russia, spreading into the Desniansko-Starohutskyi National Nature Park, an area within the active combat zone. Nearly 3 million hectares of Ukrainian forests have been affected by military operations; around 170,000 hectares have burned, and tens of thousands more have been logged in the occupied territories for fortifications. Many forests are now inaccessible due to landmines or proximity to fighting. The destruction of forests has long-term impacts: loss of biodiversity, depletion of water resources, soil erosion, and worsening air quality. Forest fires release vast amounts of carbon dioxide, intensifying the greenhouse effect. This, in turn, accelerates climate change and increases the likelihood of new fires — creating a dangerous “feedback loop” between fire and climate.

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Taavi Suisalu - Arctic Embassy

The Arctic has long served as a symbol for uncharted territory and inspired countless travel journals and adventurous stories. It has been portrayed as endless white, a blank canvas of sorts, the last frontier of freedom awaiting a hero’s discovery. Mapping an unknown is always intertwined with power dynamics and challenges the cultures and well-being of its indigenous inhabitants. While often represented as grandiose, sublime resists on being captured whilst possibly overshadowing more nuanced perspectives. Today, a realm primarily accessible to scientists and polar bear cruises, with ongoing climate warming, new corridors for transportation and opportunities for resource extraction are emerging. The Arctic, so romanticized, sublime, and untouched on one hand, is also exceptionally fragile and vulnerable to climate change on the other.

The exhibition stems from fieldwork conducted around Svalbard and on Icelandic glaciers, engaging playfully with the methods of art and science, touching upon the challenges of climate change communication, and questioning the role of the sublime in the present day.