Fontys Artistic Research Days

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Fontys Artistic Research Days

Artistic research festival organized by the Master programmes of Fontys Academy of the Arts.

29/06/2026

As we wrap up the year, we look back at the Artistic Research Festival!

We were honored to welcome inspiring contributors from the broad international professional field, who shared their practices through keynotes, performances, presentations, and workshops:

- Welcome and intro by Falk Hübner
- Keynote by Annelys de Vet
- Professorship session by David Limaverde, Saskia van de Wiel, Tom Loois & Ellen Wolfrat - Van der Aart
- Performance by Joren Van der Veken
- Workshops by Hilde Jonkers & Emile Tournier, Jacqueline Hamelink, and Nazlı Meriç Çukurova

The festival created space for encounters and exchange across disciplines, backgrounds and perspectives. A space to collectively question what artistic research can be, how it can connect people, and how artistic processes can help us understand the world and each other differently.

At Fontys Academy of the Arts, these Artistic Research Days are an annual part of the Master curriculum, and we are already looking forward to continuing these encounters and explorations again in the coming academic year.
Thank you to all students, lecturers, workshop facilitators, performers, organizers, and contributors who made this day so meaningful.

Pictures by Adelaide Ouwerkerk

20/05/2026

🟪Artistic Research Festival - March 22 - Fontys Academy of the Arts

This annual festival brings together experts in the broad field of arts & research with students, faculty, researchers from the diverse Master’s programmes of Fontys Academy of the Arts to share and explore artistic research in all its forms. A program full of exchange, co-creation, and reflection.

The festival highlights artistic research, the richness of the research process, cross-disciplinary practices and strengthens connections within an international network of artist-researchers and educators.

🔸Public keynote by Annelys de Vet, Gentle Power and Radical Imagination: Design as Collective Practice. 🔸
This keynote is open to the public, registration required: https://fontys.artsevents.nl/artistic-research-festival-2/

There is much more to experience! Such as the Professorship Session about current research, a performance My Unique Sound by Joren Van der Veken and a series of interactive workshops led by students and guest artists.

10/03/2026

Artistic Research Day | Sounding – March 14 at Fontys Academy of the Arts

🔸Keynote presentation by Chiara Percivati 🔸

Whether through material hacking or digital augmentation, the practice of Chiara Percivati unfolds as a continuous process of designing, making, and becoming with a multitude of clarinet variants. During this keynote presentation we will explore together the sonic landscape of bass clarinet. A journey grounded on her work and recent research project ‘Future Shock Orchestra’. In this research project she aims to reflect on and challenge our understanding of instrumentality, from technological and aesthetic perspectives rooted in the present day.

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Chiara Percivati is a clarinettist, performer, and sound researcher. Her artistic and research work focuses on exploring, questioning, and expanding the symbiotic relationship between performer and instrument.
She conducts research in clarinet preparation and augmentation as a PhD candidate at the Orpheus Institute and the University of Antwerp. She works as a researcher at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, where she is currently developing a project on digitally driven approaches to clarinet and bass clarinet preparation. She has performed across Europe and North America as a regular guest of new music collectives such as Ensemble Modern, Schallfeld Ensemble, mdi ensemble, and Ensemble for New Music Tallinn.

(picture by Wannes Cré)

https://www.chiarapercivati.net/

recent publications:

https://echo.orpheusinstituut.be/article/peaks-valleys-and-throughs-2

https://forum-online.be/en/issues/april-2025/future-shock-orchestra

15/01/2026

Artistic Research Day | Sensing - January 17 at Fontys Academy of the Arts

🟢Muze Open Office x Kollomenzaal project | Emily Huurdeman, Gerrie Fiers & Ivana Lovrincevic 🟢

Muze Open Office is an initiative of the Artistic Connective Practices research group at the Fontys Academy of the Arts, led by Professor Falk Hubner: ‘The professorship Artistic Connective Practices aims to investigate how artists and their artistic (research) practices can contribute to the transformation towards a sustainable and resilient society.’ Our idea of an Open Office in the Muze Garden is to share our artistic research practices in an accessible way within public space. With this open office initiative, we seek to connect with locals, students, and staff who pass through the Muze Garden. The idea is that anyone can join us to work in the public space and engage in conversations about research in general, as well as about their own and our research.

Emily Huurdeman and Gerrie Fiers are present in the Muze Garden with their research objects, making it a form of stationed and practice-based research. Professional Doctorate candidate Emily Huurdeman will be there with the Research Open Office Mobile, something she has already successfully done several times last year. In Emily’s research project, her two dogs and an old car are the subjects of investigation. Researcher Gerrie Fiers will be working on preparations for the Art Meets West project, which will take place this year in Tilburg West, as well as on setting up a new research project focused on green connections.

https://www.fontys.nl/Onderzoek/Artistic-connective-practices.htm

Imagine the kollomenzaal at the FAA as a creative research environment, dedicated to fostering a diverse artistic and research community on an interdisciplinary and interdepartmental common ground. The exchange session will discuss the kollomenzaal as a space for facilitating, curating, and making accessible the discussions, strategies, and experiences of artistic research, practice-based research, and/or research through design.

Ivana Lovrinčević is an architect, lecturer, and researcher whose work explores the social, cultural, philosophical and spatial dimensions of hybridity in architecture. She is a tutor and researcher at the Fontys Academy of Architecture and Urbanism in Tilburg, and previously taught at the University of Belgrade – Faculty of Architecture. As an architect within architecture studio Ured, she received several national and international awards. She holds a PhD in Architecture and Urbanism with the dissertation Interpretation of Hybridity in Architecture. Her research operates within a transdisciplinary framework, positioning hybridity as both a theoretical lens and a design strategy. Currently, she focuses on developing methodologies for architectural inquiry that integrate scientific, artistic and co-creative approaches.

14/01/2026

Artistic Research Day | Sensing - January 17 at Fontys Academy of the Arts

🔹Workshop: Other-than-human perspectives through tactile clay exploration by Kamila Elżbieta Wolszczak🔹

In this one-hour workshop, students will engage in an artistic research process that explores other-than-human perspectives through direct, tactile interaction with clay. Drawing from my ongoing research into eccentric artistic practices and speculative artefacts, the workshop invites participants to step outside the human centre and enter unfamiliar modes of sensing and imagining.

Clay will act as both an active collaborator and a mediating body. A material that connects, translates, or negotiates between the human and the other-than-human. Through guided tactile exercises, students will explore clay’s agency, textures, resistance, and responsiveness, recognising how materials, objects, or other bodies can serve as intermediaries in building relationships beyond the human realm. This approach encourages embodied reflection, intuitive making, and awareness of ecological and material entanglements, while opening space for speculative thinking and imaginative world-building.

Kamila Wolszczak is a Netherlands-based Polish visual artist, educator, and researcher. She works with materials that are socially perceived as dirt. She creates installations, text-based performances, and walkshops exploring the relations between urban spaces, artefacts, and human traces. She enjoys collaborative projects and co-creation, blending fact with speculation. Kamila studied for a MA in Art Education in Poland, and for a MA Performing Public Space in the Netherlands.

📷Ani Kehayova

13/01/2026

Artistic Research Day | Sensing - January 17 at Fontys Academy of the Arts

🔸keynote presentation: Material Mnemonics: Spectral Sensing
or Matter as Archive by Zuzanna Zgierska🔸

In the presentation Material Mnemonics: Spectral Sensing/Matter as Archive, Zuzanna Zgierska explores how matter—from magnetic iron-nickel meteorites to lightning- and human-touched basalts—may carry and forge (hi)stories that escape hegemonic forms of knowledge. Questioning the Western regime of visuality and representation, especially as staged in ethnographic museums that house looted colonial objects, her research asks: can matter itself, when approached through alternative sensoria, resist epistemic violence? And how might image-makers critically attend to what Ariella Azoulay called the “imperial shutter”—photography’s reinforcement of power through its ocularcentric bias? During the presentation, Zgierska will share her custom camera prosthetics designed to sense beyond visible light, revealing spectral presences held in the “archive of matter.” Drawing on fieldwork and participatory cinema in Inugguit Nunaat (Northern Greenland), Monte Alto (Guatemala), and across Europe, she will introduce speculative geophysics as an art-scientific and facilitatory method for rehearsing new epistemological openings.

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Zuzanna Zgierska (she/her) is an artist-researcher, experimental filmmaker, and creative technologist working at the intersection of ArtScience, Digital Culture, and Social Practice. She leads courses on artistic and design research at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (BA Fine Arts), and the Design Academy Eindhoven (MA Critical Inquiry Lab).

What drives her artistic approach is the need for critical narratives in the age of “ex-” (extraction, exclusion, extinction). She engages in planetary thought through embodied fieldwork, participatory cinema, spectral ethnography, speculative geophysics, and interdisciplinary exchange. From the Earth Simulation Lab to the North Pole, she creates data- and landscape-imaginaries that bridge artistic, Indigenous, scientific, and technological knowledge systems, challenging established paradigms. Since 2020, she has collaborated with palaeomagnetic physicists in Europe and with nomadic communities in Inugguit Nunaat (Northern Greenland) on Out of Focus, a body of work in which artificially shifting the magnetic values of iron meteorites becomes an anti-colonial gesture to restitute looted geo-matter and rekindle Indigenous stories. Her current research explores photography beyond vision, using custom camera prosthetics to register spectral presences locked within the archive of matter, thereby bridging the gaps in art-historical representation.

https://www.instagram.com/zznn.zgierska/
www.linkedin.com/in/zznn-zgierska
https://www.politics-of-knowledge.net/mattertheater/

06/01/2026

The first Artistic Research Day for 2026 – Sensing - is happening January 17 at Fontys Academy of the Arts!

The Artistic Research Days are a joint initiative between the Master programs of Fontys Academy of the Arts to celebrate Artistic Research as a fundamental methodology enhancing artistic and educational processes.

This edition titled ‘Sensing’ looks into archives of matter, shifting and rewriting narratives and positioning in research.

*The keynote presentation is open to the public.

More information and archive: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1580642/1580643

Organized by:
Fontys Master Kunsteducatie
Master Performing Public Space of Fontys Academy of the Arts
Fontys Master of Music
MA+U Master of Architecture // Master of Urbanism

Adres

Zwijsenplein 1
Tilburg
5038TZ

Website

https://www.fontys.nl/en/About-Fontys/Fontys-Academy-of-the-Arts/Events/Artistic-Research-Days.htm

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