Symposium: a line drawn on water — adventures & exchanges at the art-academia interface  

Introduction

The art–academia interface is a porous and dynamic site of exchange, where epistemic practices increasingly overlap with aesthetic and experiential modes of inquiry. While the arts have embraced research as a method of knowledge production, academic traditions have likewise ventured into creative, multimodal, and performative domains. These encounters generate fertile terrain for experimentation but also raise questions around ethics, quality, and the risks of superficial appropriation or instrumentalisation.

As the culmination of TRACTS’ engagement with experimental methodologies, the symposium takes trace as a central concept—epistemological, methodological, and ethical. Thinking with traces opens pathways for innovative forms of scholarship attuned to urgent global concerns, from climate crisis and technological change to struggles for social justice.

Through participatory keynote lectures, interdisciplinary panels, creative workshops, collective discussions, and a curatorial experiment, participants are invited to map the art–academia interface, experiment with form, and reimagine what research can be when knowledge-making is both critical and creative.

Event programme

10 September: Inaugural pre-event talk and hands-on workshop

17.00-19.00 Facing traces / Tracing faces – Discovering imaginary heritage (Auditorium 1 in Kookos building and Myllytori in Mylly building)

• Tuula Närhinen and Nina Liebenberg

Tuula Närhinen’s recent work-in-progress Self-Portrait in Snow (2025) sets out to explore facial pareidolia, the tendency to see ‘hidden faces’ in the natural world. Snow is harnessed to work as a spiritual medium that provides access to a speculative pictorial heritage. Drawing on  methods of visual empiricism, Dr Närhinen’s playful project explores anthropometric survey techniques. The work introduces a collection of facial imprints, generated by pressing the visage tightly against snow cover.

Counterintuitively, instead of auto-portraits, these head dives into snow generated depictions of strangers surfacing from the bosom of the earth. In browsing this ghostly archive, Närhinen was surprised to find the spitting image of her bearded late father and, subsequently, she spotted more vivid likenesses to other family members as well. Starting with the images of her ancestors to portrayals of her unborn children, the speculative record yielded the phenotype of her entire clan. Among the blindly generated portrait she was also able to identify some serendipitous imprints, such as the portrait of one famous Finn, the former President of the Republic Urho Kekkonen (who may be related to Närhinen via maternal lineage of university students from the northern Ostrobothnia region). This ephemeral tribe emerging from the snow allows us to envision a cultural DNA reaching from totemic past towards future generations.

The talk is followed by an invitation to engage in a small introductory activity that will generate material that forms part of the larger show of portraits. The workshop is conducted in collaboration with curator Nina Liebenberg. 

During the Friday morning session, Dr. Nina Liebenberg will give a performative lecture using the ‘Self-Portrait in Snow’ as a prompt to weave together the traces left by Wednesday’s session and Thursday’s symposium discussions. Liebenberg explores how these traces relate and cross-relate, often in uncanny ways, to remnants collected from the fields of art history, literature, medicine, and biological sciences. This will be followed by a walkabout of the exhibition and group discussion of its resonance within the larger conference programme. 

11 September: Presentations, happenings and dialogue

9:00–9:30 Event Registration and Arrival, Auditorio 1

9:30-11:00 Block 1, Auditorio 1 and K218

• Acqua Ecologies & Inventive Explorations, Auditorio 1
  • Discussant: Magdalena Buchczyk, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
  • On Fluidity and Precarity: Tracing an Exhibition’s Journey Through Time, Space and Care
    • Pauline Münch, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 
  • Multispecies Justice Approach: Legal Personhood Simulations
    • Zerrin Savaşan, Selçuk University, Konya/Türkiye
  • Towards a Non-violent Research Practice: Exploring the Concept of Ahimsa in Artistic Research Ethics
    • Jan Georg Glöckner, NEB Research Centre Vilnius Art Academy, Lithuania
  • Embodied Waters: Storytelling Ecologies through Play 
    • Pietro Francesco Pingitore, Queen Mary, University of London) 

• Trace as Embodied Inquiry, K218
  • Discussant: Paulo Catrica
  • What the Tongue Remembers: Traces, Absence, and Embodied Archives 
    • Baptist Coelho, Visual Artist
  • Aesthetic Practices of Reflexive Co-involvement within Collective and Experimental Research Frameworks. Exploring Aesthetic Democracy in the Intersection of Enactivism, Phenomenology and Artistic Research
    • Alex Arteaga, University of the Arts Helsinki
• Diagrammatic Practice: Experimentation in Artistic Research as Writing 
  • Arnas Askaitis, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania / Klaipėda University, Lithuania 

11:00-11:30 Coffee

11:30-13:00 Block 2 Auditorio 1 and K218

• Aural Investigations: Field Recordings, Auditorio 1
  • Discussant: Ifor Duncan
  • Sound Cartographies: Reflections on Soundwalk Methodologies
    • José Luis Carles, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
    • Cristina Palmese, Paisaje Sensorial Office Lab
    • Ricardo Atienza, Aalto University, Finland and CRESSON, Laboratory Ambiances, Architectures & Urbanities, France
  • Silenzi in Quota: An Interface Connecting Performative Arts and Environmental Research to Communicate, Characterise and Protect Soundscapes
    • Tin Oberman, University College London
    • Simone Torresin, University of Trento

• Listening and Collaboration in Experimental Ethnographic Practice, K218
  • Discussant: Jasmina Husanović
  • Traces of Collaboration: Ethics of Creative Participatory Research
    • Angelos Theocharis, Newcastle University
  • Sounding Festive Ruins: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Sonic Traces
    • Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros, Institute of Heritage Sciences (INCIPIT, CSIC)
  • Tracing Decolonial Memory Through Footprints of Resistance in Bogotá’s Bronx 
    • Andrea García González, Universidad de Granada, Spain

13:00-14:00 Lunch at Kookos building’s Tori

14:00-15:30 Block 3 Auditorio 1 and K218

• Clay, Rope, Paper: Artistic Reinventions, K218
  • Discussant: Tiara Roxanne
  • The Intentional Trace: Conflict, Reciprocity, and Ethics in Collaborative Performance Drawing Through the Lens of the Reciprocal Drawing Practice 
    • Agnieszka Karasch, University of the Arts Helsinki, Research Institute  
  • Notes on Rope: Creative-Critical Research and the Methodologies of Co-Creation
    • Iris Ordean, Independent Artist & Scholar
  • Crafting Knowledge: Data, Craft, and the Aesthetics of Activism
    • Dorota Walentynowicz, Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk, Poland 
      
      
• Aural Investigations: Co-Sounding, Auditorio 1
  • Discussant: Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros
  • Polisfonia: Exploring the Politics of Sound
    • Matteo Pra Mio, University of Bolzano
  • Developing shared outdoor electronic music practices in Helsinki
    • ExoSound research group, University of the Arts Helsinki
  • Traces of Collaboration, Media, and Memory: Composing the Echoes of 2024 
    • Jaime Belmonte, University of the Arts Helsinki

15:30-16:00 Coffee 

16:00-17:30 Arts/ academia in Practice in Mylly building’s lobby and outdoor terrace

Resonance(s), Kookos building’s Tori
Please visit our symposium installation with works from Paulo Catrica, Lee Douglas, Ifor Duncan, Francisco Mondaca Molina, Sam Nightingale, Polly Stanton, and Tiara Roxanne

Indigenous Visualities of Climate Crisis: Film Screening and Discussion, Auditorio 1

• Angelos Theocharis, Newcastle University

The research project ‘Indigenous Visualities of Climate Crisis’ (IVCC) explores the impact of environmental degradation and the climate crisis on Indigenous cultural heritage through short films created by disenfranchised communities in South and Southeast Asia. Following a collaborative smartphone filmmaking process, IVCC participants freely choose their topics and develop, film, and edit their stories with support from workshop facilitators, fostering a decolonial research model centred on mutual learning, respect, and environmental justice. The collaborative development of an Indigenous film archive, featuring 48 short films from Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Cambodia, promotes Indigenous understandings of multispecies ecologies beyond the nature–culture divide.

Outdoor Electronic Music, Mylly building’s outdoor terrace 

• Exosound research group: Alejandro Montes de Oca, Dominik Schlienger, Oleksandra Nenko, Otso Aavanranta.

The ExoSound research group will be sounding the outdoors on the Mylly building’s rooftop terrace, exploring a situated approach to live electronic sound. Sonic relationality is at core of the group’s work, engaging in an electroacoustic improvisation with the site’s own sonic life.

Academy of Fine Arts BFA Exhibition 2025, KuvA/Tila Gallery, Mylly building

You are also invited to explore the Uniarts BFA exhibition, opening on 12 September 17.00-19.00.

The BFA Exhibition consists of works by 24 students of the Uniarts Academy of Fine Arts. The young artists’ works are playful, experimental and daring enough to tackle sensitive subjects. Paintings, prints, sound, words, sculptures, moving and still images, made of different materials, are installed in the space, and performances will also take place during the exhibition. The diversity of techniques and the distinctness of the works is the strength of the exhibition, allowing the works to engage in a dialogue with each other.

September 12: Presentations, workshops and debate

9:00-12:00 Arts/ academia in practice II, workshops

Augmented Soundwalk, K-350 and outdoors

• José Luis Carles, Cristina Palmese, & Ricardo Atienza Badel

Recording, editing, processing, creation, performance, and production of sound pieces are the main activities to be developed in the Augmented Soundwalk research method. We use the term ‘augmented’ soundwalk with a double meaning — on one hand, an amplified or augmented embodied experience of our surrounding environment through the help of technology; on the other, the possibility of inhabiting possible alternative imaginary worlds through attentive listening. The resulting data, as well as video and audio material, will be used by all participants to create collective installations and collaborative actions in public spaces with the participation of citizens. 

Polisfonía – Sonic Assembly, KO-403

• Matteo Pra Mio

Talking about political topics is often hard and demanding. Depending on our life context we might experience political dialogue much differently, but most likely many of us experience it as something formal and serious which happens strictly within a given social bubble. Furthermore we might not have the chance or the conditions to talk about topics that are close to our hearts even with people we share life with. What if we could generate the conditions for political dialogue to flourish even between people that do not know each other using sound/music? Sonic Assembly aims to do exactly that!
Duration: 90~120 minutes
Ideal number of participants: 10

Silenzi in Quota, Auditorio 1 and outdoors

• Tin Oberman & Simone Torresin

Soundwalk and a roundtable discussion, demonstrating the application of the soundwalking practice as an interface between performative arts and rigorous environmental research. The activity consists of Conducting a collective soundwalk in Helsinki, likely close to Uniarts Helsinki (around 60 min), with a group of up to 30 participants. Reflecting on and sharing the experience from the soundwalk during a roundtable in the pavilion space, with the soundwalk participants, revealing the mixed-methods research findings and comparing those with the results from the previous campaigns by Silenzi in Quota.

Self-Portrait in Snow, K-218

• Nina Liebenberg and Tuula Närhinen (performative lecture)

This workshop session constitutes a suite to Tuula Närhinen’s and Nina Liebenberg’s keynote on Wednesday evening. During the session, Dr. Nina Liebenberg will give a performative lecture using the ‘Self-Portrait in Snow’ as a prompt to weave together the traces left by Wednesday’s session and Thursday’s symposium discussions. Liebenberg explores how these traces relate and cross-relate, often in uncanny ways, to remnants collected from the fields of art history, literature, medicine, and biological sciences. This will be followed by a walkabout of the exhibition with the artist and curator, and a group discussion of its resonance within the larger conference programme. 

12:00-13:00 Lunch at Kookos building’s Tori

13:00-15:00 Block 4, Auditorio 1 and K218

• Anticolonial Methodologies, K218
  • Discussant: Andrea García-González
  • Anti-colonial Methodologies: On Attunement and Indigenous Feminist Perspectives
    • Tiara Roxanne, Independent Artist & Scholar
  • Kiosk Batakari: Practicing Anticolonial Methodologies Through Fabric, Sound, and Space
    • Carla Maier, Humboldt University Berlin
  • Tracing Colonial Violence in Artificial Ecologies. Objects, Semiotics, and Performance as Methodology
    • Francisco Mondaca Molina, Architect & Independent Researcher
      
      
• Between Remediation & Repair: Research on/of Ecological Violence, Auditorio 1
  • Discussant: Lee Douglas
  • “Soy el río Cauca y mis aguas podrían afectar tu salud” [“I am the River Cauca: my waters may be harmful to your health”]: Hydropower and the Victimization of Nature at the Hidroituango Megadam, Colombia
    • Ifor Duncan, Ecologies of Violence Research Project, Utrecht University
  • Fieldworking with Salt – A Crystal Image of Time
    • Sam Nightingale, Royal College of Arts
  • Foraging for Photo-chemistry: Tracing the Legacies of Kodak Contamination
    • Alice Cazenave, Goldsmiths, University of London
  • The Site in View. Landscape Uses and Climate Change in Algarve: Water, Fire and Coastal Erosion
    • Paulo Catrica, IHC-NOVA

15:00-15:30 Coffee 

15:30-17:30 Concluding roundtable, Auditorio 1

• A Line Drawn on Water: Reflections & Possible Futures, Auditorio 1
  • Otso Aavanranta, Tal Adler, Sara Bédard-Goulet, Lee Douglas, Alison Green, & Hanin Hannouch

19:00 Dinner

Chairs

Otso Aavaranta (Uniarts Helsinki), Lee Douglas (Centre for Visual Anthropology, Goldsmiths UoL), Magdalena Buchczyk (Humboldt University Berlin)  

TRACTS network

Read more about the TRACTS network.

The Research Pavilion

The symposium is part of Uniarts Helsinki Research Pavilion. Read more about Research Pavilion 2025.