Supervisor HfK:
Prof. Dr. Mona Schieren
Supervisior École des Beaux-Arts de Marseille:
Vanessa Brito
Supervised by Mona Schieren, Art Historian and Professor of Transcultural Art Histories at the University of the Arts Bremen, and Vanessa Brito, Professor of Philosophy and Art Theory at the École des Beaux-Arts de Marseille and holder of a PhD from the University of Paris 8, the artistic PhD programme is jointly conducted by the Hochschule für Künste Bremen (Germany) and the École des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, INSEAMM (France).
This artistic research examines forms of discontinuity between cosmological time, the time of consciousness, and lived time, as experienced by the subject in the particular context of the environmental crisis, approached as a new anthropological turning point. In a context shaped by the accelerating pace of environmental transformations—understood as a crisis that is both climatic and cosmological—this research investigates the psychic, affective, and perceptual states that emerge from these upheavals.
Drawing upon theoretical frameworks from cognitive science and phenomenology, combined with anthropological contributions from European and non-European cosmologies, as well as analyses of contemporary affects linked to the loss of landscape (solastalgia, psycho-erratic and psychosomatic states), this project aims to deepen the understanding of contemporary experiences of disorientation and dissociation associated with the climate crisis.
What forms of misalignment do ecological affects generate? What kinds of perceptual and psychic states do they produce, and how might they shape representation, inform formal gestures, and intertwine with space?
As a practice-based research project, it investigates the possibilities opened by artistic displays and installations to render perceptible the dynamics of disarticulation and re-articulation of the world. It explores space as a cognitive and cosmological medium, drawing on theories of co-emergence, mental travel, and non-ocular visions to investigate how aesthetic experience unfolds between physical and mental space, and proposes a shift from an aesthetic of representation to an aesthetic of operation.