Index of academic papers

Looking Down from Up Above: Analysing the Visuality of the Zandmotor in Ter Heijde (3 March 2022)

“This paper aimed to define the dominant characteristics of the visuality of the Zandmotor. Recognising the dominance of aerial photography, satellite images, maps, and models, it distilled a particular visual focus on the Zandmotor’s morphological development. […] The aerial perspective’s privileging of the morphology of the Zandmotor is entirely compatible with the project’s approach of Building with Nature; focusing on the power of the natural forces of sea currents and wind, the visuality of the project further illustrates the declared intentions of finding harmony between coastal management strategies and existing environmental contexts. ”

Tread Lightly: Aesthetics of the Uncanny in Photographs of Light Pollution (17 January 2022)

“The paper will argue that the evocation of the uncanny in the photographs carries a productive potential as it establishes ground for a viewer’s personal implication to come forward: the centring of a ‘defamiliarised familiar’ simultaneously incites attraction and repulsion that is rooted in the experience of recognition and subsequent estrangement. […] It poses that Tread Lightly projects the uncanny through the aesthetic interplay of familiarity and its subversion.”

Embracing Death: Empathy and Alliance in Jonathas de Andrade’s O Peixe (14 January 2022)

“O Peixe thus imbues the embrace, as a gesture of empathy, with a certain ambiguity that floats between compassion, love, domination, and violence. The atmosphere of a calm banality that the film’s audio-visual qualities establish provide the context in which this critical ambivalence towards the gesture is situated. The work highlights how an action that may conventionally represent an affectionate, comforting form of alliance and solidarity can simultaneously be entirely destructive or deceiving. The work thus reveals that a gesture of empathy is not the same as empathy itself; to empathise with someone or something, is to look into their lives, feelings, or experiences. But, as De Andrade examines, we must also consider whether the subject of our attempted empathy is able to look back, too.”

Of Hearing and Not Hearing: Judith Butler’s Alliance and Materiality in Sheng-Wen Lo’s Extendable Ears (23 December 2021)

“This paper aimed to examine Sheng-Wen Lo’s performance Extendable Ears in relation to Judith Butler’s concepts of precarity, alliance and materiality. The persistence and endurance that are inherent to Lo’s performance renders it a vessel for those ideas of recognition and allyship with nonhuman animals. […] Considering experience as a way of knowing, Extendable Ears calls for a more critical way of approaching noise as an anthropocentric construct to form more empathic relations with the world around us.”

Between Taking and Making: Manipulation and Materiality in Wang Juyan’s Photography (30 May 2021)

“This paper will argue that, in Wang Juyan’s Project 2085, a critique of (state) surveillance is iterated through the proactive utilisation of digital image manipulation. The processes of post-production that Juyan engages in render his photographs performative, as his supreme authority over the visual qualities of his work can be equated to the exercise of the very power that he investigates in his series. Underlying this claim, I aim to re-introduce the process of image manipulation as an intrinsic component of photography through a critique of the idea of ‘a photographic original’.”

On Art and Academia: A Reflection on the Recombination of Artistic Practice and Research (21 May 2021)

“Over the course of the last four months, I worked on two distinct photographic projects: a series titled Aglow for the group exhibition Outside Inn at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and another series titled Hide or Seek, included in and specifically produced for the book 1/1 - This Is Not a Copy, This Is an Exhibition. Reflecting on the process of creating these series, it appears that both projects were largely fuelled by academic research, discussion and contemplation. Over the course of the following written reflection, I will engage with the interactions between my artistic and academic work to contemplate how the two may be fruitfully recombined.”

Uncanny Cause, Uncanny Effect: Action, Consequence and Defamiliarization in Igor Tereshkov’s Oil and Moss (12 May 2021)

“Oil and Moss provides us with a depiction of an ecological catastrophe that, through its evocation and simultaneous projection of the uncanny, impels the viewer to seek the transcendence of mere knowledge or awareness of information, and instead form an informed, critical positioning towards the drastically deep, dark footprints of petrocapitalism left unsupervised.”

Affective Aesthetics and Artistic Journalism: Sound, Stillness and Distance in Lois Patiño’s Red Moon Tide (16 Apr 2021)

“This film further reinforces the claim that cinema is inherently a tactile, haptic medium that requires and demands similarly physical, kinaesthetic - and therefore affective - responses from the viewer. In the case of Red Moon Tide, this double tactility, from the medium to its receiver, and vice versa - takes shape through meticulous sound design, the utilisation of stillness and the construction and reservation of distance between the film’s scenes and their viewer.”

On Responsibility and Response-ability in Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia (28 Mar 2021)

“Throughout Facing Gaia, Bruno Latour argues for a necessary rethinking of the ways in which we, the human species, conceive of our relations with the world around us. This paper will argue that, underlying his call for the redistribution of agency between human and non-human actants, we can recognise a plea for a more implicit yet permeating shift; that which relates to the distinction between knowing and understanding. Finally, I suggest that we can turn to the practice and study of contemporary art to visualise and indeed promote these shifts in our thinking and being of this world.”

Us, You, Me: The Anthropocene and Human Self-Centredness in Spike Jonze’s Her (28 Mar 2021)

“To conclude, it thus appears that the proposal of an Anthropocene is characterised by a certain imagined and projected self-centredness of the human species. As Eileen Crist argues, its proposal signifies a wider project of centring the human and enforcing its supposed inherent supremacy over the rest of the world and thus extends beyond the uttered project of christening our contemporary epoch in terms of geological stratification. In Spike Jonze’s Her, we recognise certain similarities with Crist’s discussion of the Anthropocene as they are illustrated and performed by its main character’s interactions with various types of technological devices - especially the Operating System called Samantha. Her thus illustrates how Crist’s criticism provides us with fertile ground to critically consider the implications of titling our contemporary epoch as the ‘Age of Man’.”

Traces of Trauma: The Confrontation and Reclamation of Trauma in Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo’s Slaghuis II (5 Jan 2021)

“Although the series’ lack of iconic representation of this violence is striking, Slaghuis II can be understood to provide us with a narrative of the recognition and confrontation of the photographer’s trauma. Therefore, this study aims to answer the following research question: to what degree does Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo’s Slaghuis II confront and subvert traumatic memory? In answering this question, this paper will argue that the series presents a narrative of resistance, materialised through the photographer’s extended embodied engagement with his images, which renders him capable of laying claims and exerting agency over both his personal histories and the place he calls home.”

Materiality and Affect in Photography: The Specificity of Materiality and the Relationality of Affect in Douglas Mandry’s Monuments (16 Dec 2020)

“To both follow and adjust the scope of Feil and Haest’s question in the catalogue to the 2020 FOAM exhibition On Earth: if the material qualities of a photograph carry the potential to affect our experience and interpretation of the image, how may this materiality relate to the wider mobilisation of the photographic image “as an active agent and accomplice in a visually mediated world”? In response to this question, this research aims to outline how Douglas Mandry’s Monuments provokes us to investigate the ways in which the materiality of photography relates to the eliciting of affective responses to photographic images.”

The dread of the seemingly eternal routine in an indefinite culture of confusion

one printer, many typed letters, three video-calls, two light switches, one camera shutter

Dear listener,

I hope you have been coping with the situation.

I feel seduced to conceive of my past and present days as structured, routine-based, organised, categorised, classified, archived. To complete a task and know what the next step is. To be wary of the steps I take and have taken.

It is what I was advised to do, on the news, by the people, through the Internet.

And though I understand the routine’s purpose, I am starting to long for its disruption, a day that is an outlier, a night that does not fit the mould.

The establishment of a particular rigorous structure, when absent before we shut our doors and kept them closed, does not inherently offer pacifying comfort, as it has showcased to me.

The routine in a time so fluctuating in nature and in a culture so confused in its functioning, creates this intrinsic dynamic of contrast, and consequently, suspense.

I like structure as long as there is leeway. If we find ourselves in a so-called intelligent lockdown, why don’t we seek for a similar intelligent routine? A routine that, though offering us the comfort of a sense of structure, does not prohibit us from diverging from the patterns followed the days and weeks before.

So while today I might wake up, do work, take photos, do more work and call my friends, perhaps tomorrow I will wake up, then call my friends, and not do any work.

We’ll see how that works out, I guess.

Best regards,

Joris