Ines Kooli's Research Blog

I am Ines Kooli, 2nd year MA scenography student at HKU, and this blog will be my support to share a bit more about my research.

You will find on the left side of the screen the important topics or research methods and tools that will help you better understand my work.

I am writing what I call my first “article”. Every article will relate to a finding, a discovery, a question, an experiment that will help me go forward with my research. There will be keywords at the end of each article, that will lead you to the category it belongs to. There, you can read and find all articles that are part of the same category.

Now, let’s dig into the research.

Today, I will explain where I come from, my research question, what is my path, what I would like to do, and how I would like to achieve it.

First and foremost, who am I?

I was born and raised in Tunisia, until I was 17 years old. I grew up in a quite Westernized family, where we spoke French and Tunisian to each other, watched French television, went to a French school, and had a mostly French-speaking environment. Furthermore, I spent most of my childhood under dictatorship. And while I was only 11 years old when the “Jasmin Revolution” happened, I am part of the (young) generations who are witnessing the consequences of post-colonialism and post-revolution eras upon our society, our economy, our culture, and our politics.

On a more musical note, I was one of those lucky children who were able to attend extracurricular activities. I had many years of ballet classes, modern dance, contemporary dance, horse riding, and music conservatory. With that, I must say that I not only developed a certain sensitivity to rhythm, but I also began to see the world as a choreography.

I moved to the Netherlands 7 years ago, and joined the Design Academy Eindhoven. There, I learned story-telling, product design, and social design.

When the second wave of Covid-19 hit and everyone was home again, new collectives have emerged in Tunisia, promoting art, electronic music, the underground, the frown-upon, and the do-it-yourself. In 2021, I was invited to join the Tunisia-based art and music collective, B-Saad. While it is currently no longer active, I am still in contact with most of its former members, and the community that was shaped during the wave. What I would say strikes me the most is the resilience of those people, who are still fighting to develop a cultural -to a certain extent underground- scene, while trying to survive in a difficult societal, economical, and political setting.

It is also through B-Saad, that I met the co-founder of Uncloud, a Utrecht-based art and music festival that focuses on innovation, interdisciplinary art, and installation. I became a member of the festival in 2021 and still am until today.

Thanks to B-Saad and Uncloud, I took a leap in 2022 to work with digital media, mixing it with my knowledge in social and product design. They have besides that, until now, a great influence on the aesthetics of my work, how I approach certain situations in life, and some decisions that I take.

For instance, because working with Uncloud always required working with space, it was natural for me to join the Masters in Scenography to strengthen my knowledge.

After one year in the programme, I ended up with a (not-so-final) research question/topic:

Seeking the meaning of home while navigating the interplay between the tangible and the intangible.

Under that umbrella, I have explored the themes of grief, loss, the in-between, tiles, symbols, Palestine, Tunisia, the Netherlands, hyper-connectivity, post-colonialism, and many others.

Quite broad, right?

Besides that, I have experimented with multiple scenographic and research tools, such as projection mapping, 4 speakers sound installation, lights, writing, performing, collecting, reading, attending performances, field recording, filming, etc.

You can find more about it in my Research Catalogue, that was created during the second semester, as a means of documenting the collection and supporting my research. I will probably use it in my upcoming articles as a reference.

While I believe that all the explored themes are equally important, and are intertwined with each other in a complex manner, I need, for this fall, to find a research methodology that would help me define my artistic framework in the context of (expanded) scenography.

And because last year, I got lost in the overload of topics and ended up creating a scattered and blurry (noisy) outcome, I am focusing myself this time on 4 key-words-topics

Cultural identity — Decay — Post-colonialism — Immersive

It can be debatable that some of these terms are as broad as the topic of “home”, and I am conscious of it. But I would like to believe that by limiting them to 4, they will act as a frame to each other (and to me, as an artist-researcher).

How will I research these topics?

1. Cultural identity: “Cultural identity refers to the sense of belonging to a particular group culture, shaped by various factors such as ancestry, ethnicity, religion, and social class. It encompasses the beliefs, norms, and practices that connect individuals to their heritage and to each other, often expressed through traditions, clothing, and behaviours” I aim to research this term by conducting interviews with young adults (20-35 years old) from different backgrounds. I would like to know how do they define and express their cultural identity. It will be documented in a series of videos, where we can see the person’s appearance, their living space, and the elements it contains. On a less intimate level, I will read articles on cultural identity, and will collect quotes and thoughts that might help me with my research.
2. Decay: I have already started exploring this word in my Research Catalogue. For me, decay isn’t just an end, it’s a form of witnessing. It holds traces of the past, bears the weight of the present, and gestures toward the future. To decay is to endure, to resist erasure, but also to accept its eventual outcome. To decay is not to fail, but to embrace. I would like to continue looking for more concepts related to decay, whether they are presented as articles, books, movies, performances or other. I will analyse the different definitions and try to represent them through experiments. I will record videos, and will ask my audience to write down what they felt, saw, experienced, missed, etc.
3. Post-colonialism: It is our current era, and diving into this concept without any safety will be like jumping into an endless pit. Coming from a colonised country, and living in a coloniser one, I almost feel obliged to set this concept as my spatio-temporal framework. Not because someone is telling me to do so, but because of this mixed feeling of injustice and somehow luck that I have been feeling. It might be complicated to explain, and I might end up removing it from my keywords. But I will for now on one hand conduct a quantitative research upon this topic, where numbers and statistics can help me understand our era, and on the other hand start a photo-diary that can help me express those feelings.
4. Immersive: This term comes hand in hand with the scenographic concept. For that, I will read books on immersive scenography, theatre (e.g.: Jason Warren, How to Make Immersive Theatre, 2017), and other arts, that will hopefully give me new aspects and tools that I can use for my own experiments. The same way as I described for “Decay”, I will record videos, and will ask my audience to write down what they felt, saw, experienced, or missed. But beyond that, I will use different tools to observe and map the engagement of the audience with the space; where and how do they walk, what are their movements, where do they look at, etc.

Like Barabara Bolt explained in her essay “Artistic Research: A Performative Paradigm?”, “the performative paradigm operates according to repetition with difference” — p. 132. My intent for this semester is to discover through repetition. By experimenting, receiving feedback (in any form), slightly changing the experience, and trying again, I will be able to enhance the performativity of my work of art, and narrow down my research path.

The way I see these keywords is like a “mix & match” game. For instance, what comes out when I combine Decay with Immersive? What book, article, performance, or movie can I find to define this combination? How can I experiment with space to bring these two concepts together? What can I learn from it? What is the impact of (post)-colonialism on immersive theatre?

A last tool that I am introducing to this research is the Commonplace Book.

Based on John Locke’s new Method of Making Common-Place-Books, first published in 1685, the book is dedicated to organise any extract of knowledge that I deem worthy for my research. It could be definitions, quotes, facts, etc.

Users typically create an index or table of contents to easily find and reference information later. Content is often organised by themes or topics, creating a personalised anthology. 

In the « Advice about the use of this commonplace book », developed by Commonplace Studio with Jesse Howard & Tim Knapen, they explain that « every Commonplace Book should include an expandable index with every letter of the alphabet subdivided by every vowel (a, e, i, o, u). When you come across any thing worthy to inscribe in your book, you must number your page and think of an appropriate header to write clearly above your passage.»

For example, if the topic is Decay. In the index, under the first letter (D), and the first vowel (e), I will mark the page numbers where all Decay topics are to be found. 

As an echo to the book, I have created the Commonplace Page on my blog. It has, on one hand, the purpose of disseminating my research, and on the other hand, to add moving media that cannot be incorporated to the physical object, such as videos, movies, sounds, links to articles or websites, and so on.

In general, this blog will be my curated digital diary, where I will regularly update my research, and share with you what is relevant to the development of my work.

So, stay tuned!