Editoriaal

Wachten en de werelden die we ons inbeelden

Golnesa Rezanezhad Pishkhani

I am writing this editorial in early July, a time when many in this part of the world pause for summer holidays, including students and academic colleagues. Yet my mind is elsewhere. I cannot plan for a holiday. I am waiting. Waiting for a moment of safety, for flights to cross Iran’s airspace again, for my mother to be able to travel on one of those planes so we can meet after two years. When Israel attacked Iran on 13 June and started two weeks of war, I experienced the mixed emotions of rage, sorrow and fear – a state that millions of Afghans, Syrians, Ukrainians, Palestinians, and others have been experiencing for years and years. At the end of June while many were waiting for the joy of holiday, my mum and I were not the only ones to be affected by the violence of borders and to experience waiting as racial-political control as well as a draining emotional state.

My mum and I, with the possibility of moving, are among the privileged ones in a world designed by borders – lines that do not just divide land, but fracture lives, deciding whose journeys may begin, who is forced into endless waiting, who can stay, and who must leave. This snapshot from my personal life is only a tiny grain of a vast landscape of waiting in this world – waiting for ceasefires, waiting for the end of forced famines, waiting for the right to move, waiting for boats to reach ‘safe’ land, waiting to belong, and many other forms of waiting filled with anxious emotions – fear, sorrow, anger, and hope. Such crossings of emotion create a state of in-between-ness, one that, in my mother tongue Farsi, is called Barzakh. In Farsi, Barzakh refers to an in-between state or liminal space, often used in Islamic and Persian cultural contexts to describe the realm between life and death, or more broadly, any transitional space between two conditions. In a time when each day begins with the devastating news of wars, conflicts, forced famine, and environmental collapse, it can feel as though we are collectively living in Barzakh on a global level.

In this Barzakh, art opens another dimension of this world – one that lets us imagine and think otherwise, creating a generous relationality with the world we inhabit, rather than the reality we live in. Reading the pieces that will be published in the October issue of FORUM+ has proven again to me how contemporary artistic research practices can bring a light to this dark moment and can open a door to imagine other worlds; or, as Pau Catà says, can help “bring the world together.” Pau Catà’s work reimagines the history of artist residencies through cross-cultural methodologies, drawing on early mediaeval Islamic approaches to creativity and travel to advocate for plural knowledge systems and hybrid intellectual heritages. In a world where borders restrict movement and reinforce systems of control and power, Catà’s research lets us imagine how today’s artist residencies with transnational inspiration, embracing exchange and hybridity, become acts of resistance and renewal.

Several contributions in this issue explore how artistic research navigates uncertainty, fosters openness, and generates new forms of knowledge through unexpected encounters. The work of Anke Coumans and Bibi Straatman in “De artistieke attitude” shows how artistic research embraces open, vulnerable connections with its environment, creating space for unexpected encounters where something new can emerge. The article by Veronica di Geronimo and Andrea Guidi reimagines ‘latent space’ from AI as a methodological condition for artistic research, showing how artists, like navigators of uncertain and indeterminate territories, work as dowsers of their own latent knowledge – moving intuitively and methodically across complex, unseen terrains to reassemble and reveal new forms of understanding. Leonardo Barbierato’s “Eco-tonality” investigates the overlapping zones between ecosystems and improvisational systems, showing how sound, touch, and light can open fleeting ‘brieftopias’ – moments where human, other-than-human, and extra-human worlds negotiate new ethical and aesthetic relations.

Other contributions turn their attention to the social fabric – showing how art can sustain communities and care practices over time. Danae Theodoridou shows us, through the collaboration between Fontys Academy of the Arts and the community centre Wij West, how long-term, body- and senses-based artistic practices can nurture community connections that outlast the projects themselves, offering a counterforce to the alienation of capitalist urbanization through shared vocabularies, shifting relationships, and spaces that value all bodies, stories, and experiences. Lies Vandeburie’s research demonstrates how participatory theatre in residential care centres can enhance older adults’ well-being, autonomy, and social connection, while advocating for sustainable integration of the arts into care practices and educational programmes to ensure a lasting impact.

Alongside the articles, this issue also presents two artistic contributions. In “The Photo-Phenomenon”, Yiling Hu and Xiaohuan Yu bring philosophy into dialogue with photography to explore the paradox of the image as both appearance and disappearance, a suspended moment that gestures toward presence while holding absence. In contrast, Andrea Cammarosano’s “Creativity and Collaboration in Fashion Education” foregrounds the dynamics of collective creativity, showing how ideas, skills, and materials circulate between students, teachers, and professionals. By tracing these “creative languages” across workshops and studios, Cammarosano demonstrates how collaboration generates unexpected possibilities that no individual could have imagined alone. Together, these contributions remind us that artistic research is as much about shared processes of becoming as it is about singular acts of expression, whether through the stillness of an image or the improvisation of collaborative making.

This issue concludes with Falk Hübner’s review of Lucy Cotter’s Reclaiming Artistic Research (expanded edition), exploring the diversity, singularity, and broader social relevance of artistic research.

Sitting here under a safe roof, writing these lines and waiting – hopefully – for a ‘ceasefire’ that will let my mother travel for us to meet is, sadly, a privilege in a world where coloniality starves individuals, including infants and children, in order to seize the lands where they built their homes, grew crops, and sent their children to school – people who cannot even move. Waiting, as Shahram Khosravi notes in his edited book Waiting: A Project in Conversation (2021), is never still time; it is a state infused with urgency, meaning, and potential. In this sense, waiting and in-betweenness can also be spaces where imagination and new forms of connection emerge. With this in mind, I warmly invite you to read this issue of FORUM+, which gathers artistic research practices that help us reimagine our worlds and cultivate spaces of possibility.

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Golnesa Rezanezhad Pishkhani

is a visual artist, researcher, and educator. She is affiliated with CARAM (Center for Anthropological Research on Affect and Materiality) at Ghent University and teaches as a guest lecturer at LUCA school of Arts, Ghent. She is a FORUM+ editorial board member.