Each issue of RUUKKU has one or several editors-in-chief. All activities are supervised by an editorial board comprising representatives of institutions interested in the development of artistic research as well as experts in various fields of artistic research. The subeditor can be reached at: ruukku-journal@uniarts.fi
Tämä ekspositio asetettaa yksittäisen taiteellisen teon laajempaan julkiseen keskusteluun yliopistopolitiikan rakenteellisen kehittämisen synnyttämien ajatuksien liepeiltä. Eksposition keskeinen elementti on videoperformanssi ”Internalizing The Strategy”, joka tapahtuu kaikille avoimessa julkisessa paikassa - Eduskuntatalon edessä. Strategia tulee vastaan mitä moninaisimmissa yhteyksissä. Tuntuu siltä, että kaikilla pitää olla oma strategiansa. Kunnat, yritykset, urheiluseurat, päiväkodit, korkeakoulut esittävät kilvan omia strategioitaan, mutta miten on strategian sisäistämisen laita? Yliopistojen strategioissa painotetaan maailman muutoksen mukanaan tuomiin vaatimuksiin reagoimista, johon yliopistoilla on korkeatasoista osaamista tuottavina instituutioina mahdollisuus ja suoranainen velvollisuus. Muutoksesta tuotetaan mielikuvia, jotka esitetään sekä pelottavina uhkakuvina, että mahdollisuuksia tarjoavina positiivisina kehityskulkuina. Asiantuntijakielen tarkoituksena on saada tietyt valinnat tuntumaan tarpeellisilta ja hyödyllisiltä. Tähän kieleen on upotettu tietty edistymisen vaatimus ja lupaus, jota on vaikea vastustaa. Ekspositio pyrkii havainnollistamaan ja koettelemaan strategian sisäistämista taiteellisin keinoin, joka on suhteessa vaatimusten absurdiin luonteeseen. Menetelmänä käytetään tekijän itse kehittelemää "poismaalaamisen" tekniikkaa, jonka lähtökohtana on digitaalisen valokuvan tai tekstin siirtäminen painomenetelmillä maalauspohjalle. Valittu kuva tai teksti liittyy olemassa oleviin rakenteisiin, formaatteihin ja vakiintuneisiin ajattelu- ja menettelytapoihin. Poismaalaamisessa tehdään näkyväksi merkityksen häilyvyys - teksti/kuva on ihmisen mielikuvien rakentama. Se on purettavissa ja uudelleen tulkittavissa. Kuvan rakentaminen tapahtuu strategiatekstin poistamisen kautta. Poistamisen on määrä virittää useita rinnakkaisia tulkintamahdollisuuksia, jotka liittyvät esimerkiksi tekstin/kuvan pysyvyyteen, kirjoittamisen, poispyyhkimisen ja päällekirjoittamisen suhteeseen sekä Taideyliopiston strategian osalta säädösten valta-asemaan.
performance; re-enactment; public places
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Configuring the artist residency as a thinking, making, showing space
This exposition presents the format of an artist residency as a temporary, intense period of development that can exist between a studio and a gallery with the potential to be a semi-private/semi-public alternative to making creative research public. In this sense, the residency becomes a space for thinking, making, and showing art. In my practice-led doctoral research I identified the importance of this alternative site of engagement for focussing on the process (more so than outcomes) of artistic research.
The Communication Intent in ’matéria disponível’
This article is based on the personal work 'matéria disponível’ (2020) by Rosinda Casais and proposes to analyse the importance of communication-driven art in its different stages. This work emerged from the objective to explore the outdoor space as a space to communicate, during the period of the first lock-down (social distancing) due to CoVID-19, from march to june 2020. Crossing this period, she and her 5 years old daughter used the debris that remained in the courtyard of the building, where both live, and started communicating through objects with the neighbours. From the intention to interact with the other, this artwork fulfils itself, broadens and questions the communicative nature of the objects and the artistic practice as well. Concepts, along with the capacity of the objects to change the atmosphere of a place and the common/individual memories, were developed during this work towards a sense of communication from/to it and is discussed here.
The article describes, with a self-ethnographic position, the limit and potentiality of an "art of subjectivity" carried out by an a-modal "stranger" thrown into a foreigner country with abstract rationalist features that obstacle the immanent becoming(s) and repress the excess of a practice of interventions that is necessary to shape an uncoded "ethico-aesthetic territory". In this context of extinction the writer of the article, who is also the protagonist of the described art practice, presents the necessity of a new clandestine media for his art research publishing. After a brief outline of a Deleuzian theory of the media, he reveals and presents his project that consists of a "graphic novel clandestine journal". This "graphic novel style form" suits well to his practice of disruptive interventions in public space and the character-avatar "Anartist", which is the mask performed by the writer in its critical urban interventions. The "author" writes that our hyper-capitalist reality is already a form of dystopian graphic novel. For this reason the portrait of his action as a "graphic novel" is a form of realism and an aesthetic strategy to deal with it.
The exposition shares the collaborative multispecies journey and addresses the issue of art, art-based research and of art-based research publishing. The three processes are seeing as intra-activity between multiple species, materials, media. It does not have a goal as destination but is driven by curiosity and care for and with each other. This ever-expanding becoming creates ever new world and possibilities and so the new knowing-being. The exposition is a map that combines different tracing and it is up to the reader to follow any direction they prefer at the moment.
The Public Platforms of Artistic Research
Making something public is intrinsic to both art making and artistic research. This issue of RUUKKU focuses on the variety of ways artistic research is made public and on the effect of published artworks and research on their immediate surroundings, neighborhoods or environments. The issue discusses the relevance of changes and traces that published artworks and artistic research leave in public space and vice versa. The call was opened for researchers and artists to ponder artistic research's relation to its publicity in its diversity.
This exposition introduces the Lectio presented by Priska Falin at Aalto University on 21.10.2022 at the beginning of her public defence, where she defended her doctoral thesis; Relating to Clay: Tuning in to the Workings of the Aesthetic Dimension in Ceramic Practice. Lectio is based on the doctoral dissertation and can be found here: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/117020
The Unbody of Construction and the Memory of Placeness
The study explores the connectedness of the narrative of the artwork to the sociopolitical contexts of the public space in change. Through the reflexive artistic research within the project “Construction” I aim to discuss how Memory is bound to the Body. I investigate how Constructs of the public space embody the Memory and how demolishing of those constructs impact the narrative of the presence within absence.
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Terrania is a gothic eco-drama podcast project exploring gender-queer and disability themes in the face of climate catastrophe. This project draws on contemporary environmental realities to explore how (dis)abled, genderqueer bodies might be reimagined in dystopian and utopian futurity narratives.
Challenging animal-based food systems: Citizen Surgery on vegan body simulators
This article discusses the voices of resistance emerging in the work of the Citizen Surgery Collective, an interdisciplinary practice-based research group I initiated in 2020. The collective consists of artists, critical posthumanists, anthropologists, and activists in the UK and the Netherlands. The collaborative work included in this exposition concerns the relationship between (non)human animal bodies and food, specifically through surgical simulation and sensory skills acquisition. These practices are geared toward multispecies justice, and they form a serial inquiry into ways of challenging animal-based food systems and meat-related cognitive dissonance. Reversely, they investigate ways to train surgical skills with food and by eating instead of using live or dead animal models. Our collective practices re-enact surgical choreographies and dialogue to analyze both the materiality and connotations of the food/body intersection and the process of dissolving interspecies boundaries by eating.
Critical Playground as Play-ce Utopia (Manifesto for a Difference in Itself.)
City of Panic is an urban intervention, which has been realized by The Anartist (Gian Luigi Biagini and John Dunn). It happened in 2019 in the central train-station square of Helsinki. The installation-performance is a "caged mini-golf", which catches and elicits many disruptive resonances. The intervention challenges, contests and makes visible the "iron cage of rationality" that organizes the capitalist urban space through an ordoliberal trans-institutional consensus that does not leave space for the expression of Difference. The intervention puts in "play-ce" a critical and mystic playground of Difference in Itself that breaks the cage of assimilation to a functional hierarchical identity. The article describes this complex experience of rupture and cata-comic rapture by a phenomenology of the process in becoming. A phenomenology and an ethnography of difference, with theory references "in flight", that cannot be completely grasped by a homogenous and unified signifier, narrative, representation. Even the style of the graphic tries to evoke this "virtual heterogeneity of intertwined planes and becomings" that are sutured and re-composed by creative writing.
Stitching for Material Sensitivity: From Traditional to Activist Embroidery
Cochineal is an insect that has been used for textile dyeing since pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico. This exposition discusses the use of the cochineal insect as a natural dye for wool and the bridge between ancient indigenous knowledge and contemporary artistic research. A transatlantic connection is created between the Mexican plateau and the Arctic region, merging traditional knowledge, contemporary art, crafting and conceptualisation through an artistic embroidery initiative involving researchers, craft artists and human rights activists living in the province of Lapland in Finland. Documentary photos of artistic practice and research diaries enhance discussion on sustainability, tradition, craftivism, decolonisation and indigenous knowledge. This exposition embraces collaborative craftivism through a group initiative called Embroidered Stances, discussions about material interconnectedness in a web-of-life conceptual structure that includes sheep wool, cactus, cochineal and ancestral knowledge. The endorsement of material sensitivity is narrated into embroideries by the first author Cervantes and discussed, acknowledging complexities within issues of cultural and ecological sustainability.
Our Artivism issue is inspired by dismantling the contemporary conception of art and by a space where working methods, contents, and ideals produced by art have changed. This also enables negotiations and struggles between various concep-tions of art. The art-historical contexts of activist art are rooted in 20th century avant-garde, German expressionism, and feminist art and in the anti-war and anti-racist civil rights movements of the 1960s.
Three gardens as places of performative resistance and resilience
This research paper focuses on three different gardens located far away from one another. The common nominator of these gardens is to bring the community together for sharing vegetables, herbs, and discussions. Two of them are united by a new innovation, combination of sand and water in lieu of traditional soil. These are the Sahrawi sandoponic garden in the refugee camps in southwestern Algeria and a Helsinki Sandoponic Garden in Helsinki Biennial 2023. The Helsinki Sandoponic Garden is a project by an artistic research group called PHOSfate formed by Pekka Niskanen and Mohamed Sleiman Labat in 2018. Our PHOSfate garden emphasizes the injustices the Sahrawi population and the Baltic Sea have faced. Becoming a refugee is the utmost injustice that can happen to an individual. Eutrophication is causing a trauma for the Baltic Sea and for the inhabitants living on its shores. Sahrawis are refugees because of phosphate mining, and phosphate fertilizers are the reason for the eutrophication in the Baltic Sea. Coping with the trauma and healing from it is an aspect shared by the community garden in Paris and the Helsinki PHOSfate Garden. The community garden of Jardin Truillot in Paris was created after the Bataclan terrorist attack 2015 to help those living near the theater to heal from trauma. When focusing on the importance of gardens, I will engage with some of the discourses around environmental justice and ecological justice. In my text, I will show that the recognition of injustice is the central activism in these three gardens and in my garden practices.
Artist-researchers Heidi Pietarinen and Amna Qureshi from the University of Lapland have conducted in-depth work on the innovative BioARTech laboratory environment and utilisation of available resources for a bioart project called Life Between Art and (Reindeer) Blood. The aim and focus of the project were to utilise reindeer blood as a reindeer herding by-material instead of treating it as waste material. Both artist-researchers were curious to see how nature as a living design medium becomes perceptible to humans. In this study, a living design medium refers to material production that incorporates simple living organisms such as reindeer blood, material-driven design and co-designing, with an entity having its own agency. Bioart can be used to develop innovative design and art practice to work with nature (biology) and the non-human, such as live tissues (i.e. materials engineered by nature itself), microbes or living organisms (birds, insects, trees and blood), to bring about new design solutions and life processes. Through the arts-based research (ABR) approach, this ground-breaking research aims to develop activities that integrate environmental biotechnology, bioart, surface pattern design, and science.
Tämän eksposition aineisto on Leena Raappana-Luiron Lectio praecursoria, joka esitettiin hänen väitöstilaisuudessaan 29.10.2021. Väitöstutkimus Kuvan henki - Fiktiivisen kuvan visuaalinen tyyli multimodaalisuuden kehyksessä etsii vastausta kysymykseen, mistä kuvittajan visuaalinen tyyli juontuu ja miten tyyli adaptoituu ja varioituu eri konteksteihin. Väitöskirjaan sisältyy kaksi tieteellisissä julkaisuissa julkaistua artikkelia ja taidenäyttely sekä graafisen suunnittelun tilaajalle tehty toimeksianto, ystävänpäivän postimerkkisarja. Tutkimuksessa taiteellinen - ja suunnittelutoiminta toimivat metodisesti – tuottaen tietoa taiteen ja designin kautta (research through design). Väitöstutkimus löytyy digitaalisena tallenteena Lapin yliopiston tietokannasta: https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-337-284-9
Teacher as a Ghost or Who is Afraid of Teaching?
“Art cannot be taught.” The saying is often heard in discussions about arts education and the path to life as an artist. Is the teacher therefore useless and teaching unnecessary within the arts? What, in fact, is meant by teaching and learning in the context of art? In this text, I aim to distinguish between teaching and learning, and to explore possible ways of perceiving a teacher within the arts and artist education. Through this lens, I seek to illuminate the interrelation between arts pedagogy and artist pedagogy, particularly from the perspective of higher arts education.
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Queer-identiteetti ja -tunteet lavalla, sen takana ja opetustyössä
Kuvataiteen tohtorin opinnäytetyössäni tutkin queer-kuuntelemisen merkitystä taiteellisena käytäntönä ja tutkimusmenetelmänä. Tässä ekspositiossa haastattelen drag alter egoani Maimu Brushwoodia, jonka kanssa keskustelen sukupuolesta, tunteista ja pedagogiikasta. Haastattelu perustuu tutkimukseni toiseen taiteelliseen osuuten, mikä oli drag-esitys, jonka esitin kahtena iltana Club Kiihko: Uuden toivon illassa Kulttuurikeskus Caisassa Helsingissä 27. ja 28.6.2024. Ekspositiossa on haastattelun lisäksi drag-esityksen videotallenne ja kirjoitustehtävä, jonka tarkoitus on syventää esitykseni teemoja.
"On Becoming Sensitized - Practices and Orientations for Writing-with-water as Artist Pedagogy" In this exposition, we explore what we call 'writing-with-water', a practice of artistic research in writing, a "poetic search". While writing-with-water, we have explored our relationship(s) with water – including the waters within us – both individually and together, producing different texts. Here, we share our artistic explorations and reflect on the poetic, political, and pedagogical directions our artistic practice and research opens up. Our theoretical starting points are feminist posthumanism and new materialism, but we also discuss our method in the context of hydrofeminism (as part of the aforementioned theoretical frameworks), feminist pedagogy, artist pedagogy, and environmental pedagogy, as well as the literary meanings and uses of water. It is our belief that through poetic practices and explorations, it is possible to express experiences that are otherwise difficult to put into words. We claim that these experiences, and the ways they are expressed in poetic language, can lead to better understandings of human relationships with the more-than-human; including how to make art ethically with the more-than-human in our rapidly changing world.
The exposition aims to meet the need for the aspiration of regenerative education from an artist pedagogical practice. The exposition is based on a place-specific intervention and outlines the artist pedagogical learning process. The exposition explores the relationship of artist pedagogy to ecological issues. Exploration happens at the intersection of artist practice committed to sustainability thinking and art pedagogy. Reflecting the concept of strong sustainability, the author assesses what kind of contradictions between sustainability thinking and one’s own practice emerge, and what kind of circumstances lead to conflicts. The exposition takes place with “innate” method, combining artistic, agroecological and posthumanist research in an interdisciplinary manner. The main finding is that the goals of regenerative education are entangled with the expectations, goals and moral concepts of society. This accompanies a negotiation of the values of artist practice committed to sustainability thinking. Negotiation takes place in relation to artist pedagogical activity. The author argues that there is no waiver to act in an ecologically unsustainable manner in art practice, because art is as dependent on ecological relationships as any other concept of life. She argues that by committing to a concept of strong sustainability, it is possible to establish new places of appreciation and develop innovative pedagogies.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sara Ilveskorpi (Kirjoittaja) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
You, Me, the Lakes and the Storm Water Drain
This exposition charts a creative collaboration between two humans, two lakes and a stormwater drain. By thinking with water as archive and unknowability, making art with the water-bodies of significance to them, and drawing upon the thoughts of key scholars and Indigenous artists, the authors explore questions of ancestry, memory, belonging, and ecological recuperation. Throughout this process, they reflect upon and dialogue about the pedagogical implications of their creative collaboration, undertaken at the intersection of new-materialist arts and common worlds environmental education.
Drawing as a journey, nonhumans as teachers, learning as creation
The presentation focuses on inclusive sensory drawing as a way to observe, notice and interact with non-human species in local nature, imagine their perspectives and reflect on the experience. It is known that many people today feel alienated from nature while on the other hand connection to nature is linked to pro-environmental behaviour. As an artist and art educator I have been wondering how participatory artistic and educational practices can reinforce the emotional and physical connection with nature, how to create conditions for perceiving the intertwinedness and mutual dependence, moreover, what could be the role of art and art education in the post-growth conditions. Drawing is not a new method for observing nature, but I find the inclusive drawing activities to be relevant to facilitate creative nature experience in contemporary context. As an artist, I have been using sensory drawing and realised how using the pencil and brush as facilitators help me to concentrate, slow down, notice interactions and sense myself as a part of the ecosystem. I have used the embodied and situated artistic thinking as a source for drawing walks and workshops in gardens, forests and parks and introduce some of the simple exercises in this presentation, asking how and which drawing and painting approaches facilitate active engagement with the environment and what is the intersection between artistic practice, environmental and artist pedagogy. I describe the specifics of four methods. These kind of curated nature experiences offer possibilities to recognise other beings, their relationships and ourselves as related to them through actions and reflections.
This exposition aims to examine the found and experienced environments as an impulse for artistic and pedagogical potentials in performance design. The writer asks, what kind of performance design could be created through scenographic worlding? The exposition presents a research approach to the urban, built environment, which is seen as an impulse, a constant and ongoing potential for performances and performance designers’ work. The topic is contributed with photographs from the writer’s site-sensitive memos. This approach offers perspectives on contemporary scenography and its theories. It is situated in the field of art-based action research, and the intention is to combine performing arts, performance design, visual arts, and pedagogy. The exposition highlights that an observational, experiential, and environmentally oriented way of working may prove more useful in the future; designers encounter applied and nomadic forms of performance design in their careers. How can we create more sustainable performance design, encourage ecocreativity and work towards more sustainable pedagogy?
Duodji refers to Sámi handicrafts and design. I reflect on the knowledge base of duodji thinking, how duodji is learned within the community, and how I have developed the teaching and research of duodji according to the principles of duodji and art. I also contemplate the essence and presentation of duodji in public spaces through the pedagogical-artistic practice, LaavuStudio."
Sharing (in) the Lab: Artistic research in Higher Music Education
This exposition takes as its departure the systemic inertia identified within Western Higher Music Education (HME), where education is driven by skill acquisition in a master–pupil format. Such approaches may hinder the growth of adaptable and reflective musicians. We propose an alternative: student-centred learning inspired by artistic research methods. To explicate this, we draw on findings through our own artistic research practices. Our hypothesis is that the model of the artistic, embodied research laboratory, as developed within the field of artistic research, may serve as a potent tool for renewal. By analysing our work as artist-researchers and educators, this exposition offers insights that support rethinking both institutional structures and pedagogical approaches in HME. Our aim is to strengthen student agency in learning situations and set them off on a path of lifelong learning. This research demonstrates that artistic research laboratories can provide practical frameworks for transforming HME pedagogy, offering educators concrete methods for fostering playful, inclusive, and sustainable learning environments whilst empowering students as active agents in their musical development.
Accompanying Public Amateurs and Ignorant Generalists
Based on our experience conducting our own independent artistic-scientific and practice-based research projects and the experiences made over the last years leading the Doctoral Programme for Artistic Research at the University of Applied Arts and now working at ARC Artistic Research Center and their Doctor Artium programme, at mdw University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, we propose new and unconventional approaches to supervising and supporting doctoral artistic research work, whether their focus is more practice-based, theory-oriented or artistic-scientific. Design approaches, such as the pooling of supervision and strategically introducing moments of epistemic decompression, can support projects as well as candidates in a more sustainable and pluri-vocal manner, ultimately leading to the artist-researchers’ long-term independence, transcultural versatility and well-being. Reflexivity, methodology, and (somatic) learning theory are key points, as well as defining and conceptualising possibilities for supporting and supervising a line of work, which is directed into the unknown, unknowable, and uncertain, or located within limit-experiences.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ruth Anderwald, Leonhard Grond (Kirjoittaja) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Artist Pedagogy is a Reparatory Practice
Artist pedagogy is composed of minor gestures, inexistent, almost nothing, operating as momentary fragments through which a collective memory can become present and, thus, be subjected and sustained through others. This pedagogy is being crafted and based on a collective memory transmitted throughout embodied practices, parallel to practices of, for example, meditation and skateboarding.
Artistic Thinking as a cornerstone in teaching art
Artistic thinking is the cornerstone of the artist-researcher's activities when considering pedagogical issues. Thinking takes place through artistic activity, in the form of paths that tend in different directions. They criss-cross, alternate and occasionally form a meeting place for an insight, a point from which a thought breaks out into something new. In teaching art, there is no use in theories that are not based on experiential knowledge, the artist's ability to think visibly and invisibly, in sounds and silences, through movement and bodily experiences.
Artistic Thinking and Pedagogical Practice
How does an artist teach and do research? How does artistic thinking work as a starting point for pedagogy, and how is it realized in practice? How does making art feed into teaching, and correspondingly, how does pedagogical philosophy serve as inspiration for teaching practices? How is artist pedagogy related to social and ecological issues?
Copyright (c) 2025 Pilvi Porkola, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, Luis Guerra (Kirjoittaja) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Artist pedagogy, broadly speaking, is both the ways in which artists teach artists and research into this. Those artists being taught might be understood as aspiring artists and so most often, but not exclusively, artist pedagogies take place in post compulsory education: in academies, schools, and departments of art in universities, as well as in alternative art schools. But artist pedagogy might also take place in less formal settings in which artists interact including in studios or during residencies, and they have been adapted and adopted for use in other situations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Magnus Quaife (Kirjoittaja) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0