Research Projects

Can group life develop in infancy? What does it look and sound like? Can artistic research produce a new understanding of infancy through a sensory, observational image?

The research project The Social Infant will address such questions, re-evaluating film’s observational mode to produce a new image of early childhood. This three-year research project is based on a longitudinal film study of a group of six infants. The research method will draw on and complicate methods from an international field of infant research. But where existing work prioritises the mother-child relation, I will create a child peer group to illuminate a less researched subject: infant group relations. The project is done at the University of East London, Baby Development Lab, and in collaboration with LUX, London.

The Postdoctoral project is financed by the Swedish Research Council (2023-2026)

Myriam Amroun and Natasha Marie Llorens propose curatorial practice as a form of artistic research that goes beyond “metaphorizing decolonization.” The project has four principle aims: to centre the knowledge produced by the practice of curating (rather than that which it simply presents in the exhibition); to experiment with infrastructures that support “minor transnational” relationality; to experiment with institutional scale in relation to the exhibition; to work from and between two important margins of the European project—the Nordic region and North Africa—in an embodied manner that nevertheless acknowledges our distance from both.

“Decoloniality and Minor Transnationalism in Curatorial Practice: Notes on a Framework,” published on Contemporary Art Stavanger in July 2024, gives detailed background and the theoretical framework for the project. The first reference group includes Murtaza Vali, Lara Khaldi, Lisa Rosendahl, and Aude Christel. The first of several exhibitions will take place at Tromsø Kunstforening in 2026.

Funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2024–2026)

Öland’s Midland is a cultural heritage of nature types and species that have evolved together with human small-scale farming through millennia. Some parts of this mosaic are still spared of industrialised agriculture, and allow intricate ecosystems to be active. This project wants to use artistic process to explore ways of thinking and acting for animal and plant self-determination (co-creation) within an existing farm geography. The work proposes a material-aesthetic dialogue with post-anthropocene theory, and wants to reach and engage with the possibilities and challenges that living eating bodies, manure, soil, and inherited landscape present in that discourse. The landscape of Öland makes it possible for the project to utilize the historical experience of a continuous multi-species farming community, which still to some extent is alive.

The aim of the research is to think, act and imagine ways to foster our capacity to operate together with the many – domesticated, wild and in-betweens – that live on the field with us now, in a different way. The project hopes to establish a new habitat, a farm of sorts, which suggests and imagines a new order inside our age-old agricultural landscape.

Funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2025–2027)

Will democracy survive the 21st century? Through artistic practice and theoretical dialogue this project explores how collective protests, migration and authoritarian populism shape today’s politics while also being modelled by digital regimes and automated systems that apparently forecloses the political agency of collectives as well as individuals.

Our aims:

• To understand the impact on today’s democracy of collective protest, authoritarianism, migration and computational modeling.
• To investigate the ways in which collective behaviour generated by digital technologies align crowd behaviour with political programmes and market strategies that defy democratic values.
• To investigate how embodied subjective agency and collective assembly interrupts such processes of collective automation.
• To show how artworks can spark conceptual development, innovative methodologies and theoretical insights into the relation of aesthetic expression and democracy.

Speculating over future scenarios – including the deployment of digital tools and quantum computing – we seek to make abstract processes concrete. The project is articulated through installation, performance, sculpture, drawing, film, and writing; it will organize workshops, performances and theoretical debates, gradually shaping a theoretical investigation and artistic montage of the 21st-century crowd and its algorithmic modelling.

Collective Agency, funded by the Swedish Research Council, is a Linköping University/REMESO project run in collaboration with the Royal Institute of Art. (2022-2025)

It starts with a tree. We have identified an “autoimmune tree” at a biotechnology lab in Florida; a pine with genetically increased resin production (the pine’s main immune defense) to the point of drowning in its own resin. We call it a “crying pine tree”. Crying Pine Tree will result in a novel, and it’s the process of producing this novel that constitutes the research. The novel begins with one of the crying pines from the laboratory in Florida moving into the home of New York based fiction writer Katie Kitamura and her family. Over the next three years, the process evolves in an interplay between genetic modification of plants (like said pine tree), bodily experiences of an autoimmune disease, and the writing of a fictional narrative.

The research asks how the figure of the autoimmune can structure the unfolding narrative. That process will be made public through living sculptures and installations, bio-hacking workshops and public readings. Crying Pine Tree enters the emerging field of “synthetic biology”, in which all forms of life become programmable and therefore possible to reprogram – rewrite on the level of genetics. In contrast to the dominant fantasy of enhancing forms of life – improving longevity, efficiency and immunity – we want to explore “autoimmune writing” as a form of over-enhancement, an inscription so effective that it turns on itself. Thus, the research draws on bodily experiences of disease in order to rewrite biological imaginaries of our time. (2019–2022)

Funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2019-2022)

In our contemporary society, the operations of transport logistics and intelligent automation technology heavily rely on ghost work – forms of human labour concealed from public view. The circulation of goods and information to our homes and workplaces is aesthetically misrepresented as a clean and frictionless system. It is an inconvenient (and often costly) truth that a system sold on reliability has so many pockets of conflict and uncertainty, which is why these tales of labour conditions are relegated to the ghostly. They are drowned out, underwater echoes of a system usually only seen from above surface, with the sea represented as a network upon which goods and information glide in smooth coordination. Despite the consumer aesthetic, software operations and global logistics industries together represent primary engines for capital accumulation and exertion of state power today. Here artistic research poses a unique opportunity to engage with these conditions of visuality by offering a counter-aesthetic. This project convenes a study circle of logistics workers and artistic researchers to co-design a software tool: a ghost platform. It pursues a complex image combining sound, image, text and virtual elements with discussion of these obscured perspectives. This research co-produces new visions for more sustainable and fair uses of these tools: a counter-logistics. The artistic outcomes will offer collated material for public analysis of ecology, economy and politics.

Read more here.

Funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2022-2025)
From January 1, the Institute for Future Studies is the host organization.