Note: This was cancelled on Tuesday Oct 17 but rescheduled on Oct 19, starting at 16:30

Several SLARG research projects are coming to an end. Curious about their conclusions? Join our sharing session and learn more!

The PhD research 'Disarming Design' by Annelys de Vet centres around three self-initiated long-term participative design projects that engage with social and political struggles. They are the bottom-up cartographic publishing platform ’Subjective Editions’, the thought provoking design label ‘Disarming Design from Palestine’ and the temporary masters programme ‘Disarming Design’. With her research De Vet asks fundamental questions about these practices and contextualises the collaborations, aesthetics and methodologies. What is design’s potential to foster collaboration and change? How can design disarm the status quo?

We don’t make places from nothing. The way we, imperatively, unfix and elaborate the places in which we find ourselves, involves coming to terms with violent processes and oppressive infrastructures. How to wield a deep intervention precisely within scenes of injustice by reconfiguring what we understand as presence and visibility, as the sensible? Through various film processes and projects, Robin Vanbesien's PhD research 'Ciné Place-Making' traces different cinematic ways of making common cause with situated practices of place-making.

Marnie Slater's research project 'Sharing Tools and Strategies for Transformative Art Collaboration' addresses the methodologies used in queer, feminist and anti-racist art collaboration. The research emerged from challenges Marnie identified though her collective practice within the visual arts. Namely, that although there is an increasing interest in collaboration as a transformative practice, artists are under-tooled to work together. During this one-year research project, she asked: How are transformative art collaborations embedding their aims within their collective working methodologies and how can I share these tools and strategies with others?

Helen Dowling's research project Women versus the void - apocalyptic feelings and healings in custom everything is informed by science fiction literature. I investigated whether I can use the analogy of the apocalyptic within the mundane to carve out space for and frame expressions of female frustration and sexuality. I explored this within the sphere of custom pornography and was working with a professional pornographer from this field. In doing so, my aim was to produce content that derives representations of female sexuality from the particularities of custom porn, in visual, technical, and ethical terms