From the Old Brewery

A conversation with Lise Olsen on her 12-month artist in residency with The Moray Way Association, a charity organisation established to promote a 100-mile long circular walking route called The Moray Way.   An essential part of her process is to walk and record sound as an opportunity to focus attention on liminal moments, for example, everyday feelings, memories, and atmospheres. These things are so fleeting and familiar they are often missed. The main aim of the residency is to walk, observe, record, and documents the journey along the paths that make up the Moray Way.  The walk allows Lise to connect with people along the route, collect stories from the community and capture the changing seasons of a dramatic Scottish landscape.  

The perception of in-between experiences is the main focus of her practice-based research. Lise believes the in-between has an ambiguous status. However, she considers it a dynamic space for creative possibilities. Towards the end of her residency, Lise aims to deliver soundwalk events and create a GPS sound-activated map using immersive 3-D sound technologies to explore the inter-relational relationship between the body and technology.  She questions, can in-between experiences enable a deeper level of engagement or even create a happening of truth within an immersive soundscape? 

The Moray Way Artist-in-Residency Website: https://www.morayways.org.uk/category/artistinresidence/

 
Bio
Lise Olsen is a Scottish-based artist who works in-between a sphere of space and the sonic. Her work aspires to uncover the traces of what is hidden and reveal ephemeral moments using stories, sounds, and images. Lise is a Ph.D. candidate in Sonic Arts at the University of Aberdeen. Since starting her research journey, she has presented her work at many events/broadcasts including, Gwaith Sŵn's Sonic Dart, Resonance FM, 2021. Radiophrenia, 2020. Mind the Gap: Trinity College, Dublin 2019 and XR at Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2019. In July 2021, she gained a one-year artist residency with The Moray Way Association. Her art practice involves facilitating community sound projects, soundwalking events, and creating immersive sound compositions. Lise is using her work to create a platform for social participation and shared experiences. She aims to explore new media development and immersive 3-D sound technologies to encourage people to think about our connection to place, nature, and society. 

Personal Website: https://liseolsengenerates.com/

Lauren’s research focuses on the films of GDR documentary filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, who made multiple documentaries opposing the Vietnam War during the 1960s and 1970s. Although they first worked under the umbrella of the GDR’s state-owned film production company, in 1969 Heynowski and Scheumann were given their own production company, named Studio H&S. This was quite a privilege in the functionally totalitarian GDR, as it gave them economic autonomy and greater control over the content of the films they made.
 
Studio H&S’s films opposing the Vietnam War were varied in scope. They produced short films of 3-5 minutes in length that were intended to generate anti-war feelings among the East German populace, and also significantly longer films including a four-part documentary entitled Pilots in Pyjamas (1968), which involved Heynowski and Scheumann travelling to Vietnam and interviewing ten US pilots who had been captured as prisoners of war by the North Vietnamese Army. 

Lauren’s research brings together Heynowski and Scheumann’s Vietnam films with the overarching theme of memory studies, specifically Michael Rothberg’s notion of ‘multidirectional memory’, in which he argues that a group’s memories of complex and painful histories can benefit from comparison with other similar memories belonging to different groups. 

YouTube Link to Pilots in Pyjamas (1968): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlzhtPD1q6G98ruJqmwAWZPZrhEc_3gRH 

Bio
Lauren is currently a PGR student at Aberdeen, specifically situated in the German department. Lauren received a BA in German from King’s College London, and an MA in Creative Writing from Newcastle University. Lauren is originally from Jarrow, a town in the North East of England famous for the 1936 Jarrow March, when 200 crusaders walked from Jarrow to London to protest unemployment and poverty in the area, following the closure of the shipyard which employed many workers in Jarrow. Outside of their research, Lauren’s interests lie in horror films, films about the Vietnam War, and crocheting and various other kinds of fibre arts, though Laurent can’t knit to save their life.   

Join Dr Suk-Jun Kim, Isabella Engberg, and Ines for a chat about her current research on conference-going polar bears and climate change in German-Japanese writer Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear. If the Anthropocene – our proposed geological epoch, where human activity has become a dominant influence on the planet – ruptures modern notions of agency, intentionality, and rational decision-making, is Man really the only political animal? And what are the potential value and limitations of anthropomorphism for imagining a more-than-human politics?

Ines holds a PGDE in English and History from Karl-Franzens-University Graz, Austria (2015), as well as an MLitt in English Literary Studies from the University of Aberdeen (2018). She has worked as a modern foreign language assistant and teacher in Austria, Spain, and the UK. Ines started her PhD in 2019 and is a recipient of the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture’s New Kings studentship. Her PhD project explores nature and wildlife conservation in twenty-first-century fiction, with a particular focus on multispecies projects of world-making. In 2020, she organised an event on storytelling and urban ecology for children and families as part of, and co-funded by, Explorathon and Being Human, the UK’s national festival of the humanities. She has been a teaching assistant on EL1009 Acts of Reading and attended COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference, as part of the University of Aberdeen’s delegation.

A transcript for this episode can be found online here.

In this episode, Libertad discusses her PhD research project, ‘Echoes of War: A creative Exploration in Fiction of Traumatic Memories in the Aftermath of the Spanish Civil War’. It focuses on Spanish literature in the context of Francoist Spain from a gender perspective. The research moves from women’s fiction in the 50s towards more contemporary female writers, illuminating the points of connection between generations. Among other topics, it touches upon transgenerational transmission of trauma, memory, and commemoration. The creative component of the project takes the form of short story narratives, Libertad’s personal contribution to memory and remembering as a member of the Spanish community.  

Libertad also discusses some of the short stories from Libertad’s MLitt thesis in the exhibition titled ‘What is Normal’. ‘What is Normal’ is a very special project that started off in 2020 in the showroom Sala Ruas, Laredo. It is a dialogue between a father and a daughter, Vicente Ansola and Libertad Ansola. In other words, a dialogue between photography and writing where suggestiveness plays a key role. The project, which combines photography and text, aims to explore the creative power of the combined arts and the ambiguity inherent in text and image. This combination invites the viewer to take part in the work and rediscover it. The narrative technique of the stories is based on the theory of showing, not telling and the power of omissions and empty spaces. The stories investigate the workings of the subconscious, and interpersonal relations. 

A transcript for this episode can be found online, here. 
In this episode, Sarinah O’Donoghue discusses her research project that explores representations of autism and place in twenty-first century transnational literature. This includes, but is not limited to, novels, plays, poetry, and life writing. Researching this topic, I hope to emphasise the impact of environments (built and natural) on autistic experience, diversify autism representation in mainstream narratives and popular discourses, and explore the link between literary representation and social inclusion.  

Autism is still mired in pathology paradigms, and narratives produced about the condition derive from deficit-based approaches and stereotypes, controlled and disseminated by the medical profession. However, autistic people are increasingly talking back, with writers including Joanne Limburg, Katherine May, Rhi Lloyd-Williams, Sarah Kapit, and Helen Hoang writing and publishing accounts centring on autistic experience. This is initiating a paradigm shift, as autism is increasingly being represented as a complex and heterogenous form of embodiment, rather than a rigid and prescribed set of traits. However, despite the increasing number of autistic self-advocates telling their stories through writing and performance, these are often not taken seriously (especially when considered alongside medical and psychological accounts of autism). Therefore, my research aims to amplify these narrative voices, which will diversify literary studies and contribute to a more inclusive society. 

A transcript for this episode can be found online, here.
The Scottish artist E.A. Hornel, who was part of the ‘Glasgow Boys’, is well-known for his work as a painter, and it is no secret that he used photographs as an aid to produce his paintings. However, his extensive collection of images, about 1,700 of them, has only recently been catalogued, and has never really been studied as a whole. This where my project comes in. 

My research focuses on three main aspects: working practice, gender, and otherness. Through this first aspect, I am hoping to bring about a better understanding of how the relatively new medium of photography informed Hornel’s own artistic practice. He created something akin to a database of re-usable poses and specific details, which he used in a way that could range from a sketchbook of sorts to a composition tool, although it is not sure to what extent. 

The collection, being mostly composed of photographs of women and girls with many of them non-European, depicts what would have been the ‘other’ for a white British man such as Hornel. By studying the many photographs he took (or had taken), and the few he chose to collect, my aim is to shed some light on his conceptions about gender and otherness, and to explore how they were expressed visually in his photographs and his paintings. 

In the context of my research, I put up the exhibition E. A. Hornel: A Painter Behind the Camera, to visually discuss some of the above point. It is visible in Drum Castle, Aberdeenshire, from the 1st of May to the 19th of December 2021. 

A transcript for this episode can be found online, here.
Dr Suk-Jun Kim, Director of Postgraduate Research at LLMVC, invites two PG Reps, Matthew Lee and Samuel Weaver to discuss the life of a PGR student at LLMVC.