Tools for the hybrid making practice
The professorship investigated the various ways to get towards a form of co-creation that works across various domains and offers equality for all participants. The goal is to eventually use these research results for developing tools, methods, and approaches that benefit young artists and designers in their increasingly hybrid creative practice. By teaching them to collaborate with unexpected partners in diverse contexts, their art can make a meaningful contribution to tackling major societal challenges.
Transdisciplinary co-creation
Following on the conclusion of the professorship Performative Making Processes, Nirav Christophe launched a new research group that puts a sharper focus on transdisciplinary co-creation: Expanding Artistic Practices (In Dutch: Grensverleggende Artistieke Praktijken). Its purpose was to further explore the boundaries of transdisciplinary co-creation. Core principles of the professorship: multivocality and artistic research.
Collaborations are formed within thematic research groups – comprising around twenty lecturing researchers from various HKU academies. Five of them are conducting their practice-based research as part of a doctoral (PD/PhD) programme.
The professorship also established research internships for students from different academies. Moreover, research lounges are being organised, where students and lecturers not yet involved in the research group are explicitly invited to participate.
The professorship was open to everyone who studies or works at HKU. All their experiences have been used to better align arts education to the professional practice where HKU alumni will end up.
Project highlighted: In Search of Stories
In the project In Search of Stories, a partnership with UMC Amsterdam, investigated how making and experiencing art could offer support to the terminally ill in the last stages of their life. Nine artists/researchers were guided and trained to assist 23 terminally ill patients in making art, in cocreation with four mental health professionals. This proved to be very insightful for both the artists and the researchers, leading to new ways of offering support in case of an incurable disease, for the artistic impression of a difficult topic and the development of new training methods for transdisciplinary cocreation.
After the closing exhibition in the hospital, the work continued within the professorship to issue a publication that reported on the whole trajectory and its meaning for the healthcare profession and for art education: WELLICHT (A Dutch publication).
Three research groups
The professorship has three themed research group, each investigating how certain artistic fields and contexts can keep expanding their boundaries:
- the research group Expanding Scenography
- the research group Expanding Voices
- the research group Expanding Dissemination
