Forty-two attendees gathered for the second AREA Lunch Talk on Artistic Research. The session, led by the Department of Film, continued the discussion initiated by the SAAB report on how Aalto ARTS might define shared terms and frameworks for artistic research while also acknowledging the diversity of its practices. 

The headline of the event was “Future”. Maarit Mäkelä opened the session by situating the discussion within the broader AREA Lunch Talks series and the task of strengthening artistic research at Aalto ARTS. She emphasized that the talks are a starting point for collective reflection and noted the need for shared platforms and visibility, including a forthcoming hub for gathering and communicating artistic research activities. 

Susanna Helke, documentary filmmaker, Associate Professor, Head of Research, and Director of the Critical Cinema Lab, opened the thematic discussion with a presentation titled “Artistic Research as Critical Praxis (with)in Film.” Helke invited participants to return to the question of why: what is the purpose of artistic research, what is its ultimate outcome, and whether its aim is solely the production of knowledge. Her presentation challenged the reduction of artistic practice to an “artistic component” within research. Instead, she argued that artistic practice may function as the context, method, subject, and outcome of artistic research. 

Helke’s presentation distinguished between propositional and non-propositional forms of knowledge, while also asking whether the most important aim of artistic research might lie beyond what can be conventionally defined as knowledge. Drawing on Henk Borgdorff’s formulation of artistic research as “thinking in, through, and with art,” she proposed that the core concerns of artistic research may often be situated in poetics and aesthetics rather than epistemology alone. In this sense, artistic research can produce performative knowledge embodied in artistic methods, processes, aesthetics, and works. 

The presentation also framed artistic research as critical praxis. In the context of film, this means that the researcher does not merely use artistic practice as material but questions the conventions, assumptions, and doxa of the practice itself. Helke connected this approach to longer traditions of artists’ theory, including film and political art movements, and emphasized that artistic research should not primarily serve institutional demands for result management or academic standardization. 

The second presentation was given by artistic researcher François Yazbeck, whose work explores visceral cinema as a form of counter-memory and political stance. His presentation, “Ruptured Memories,” focused on memory-scape cinema, fractured histories, and the aftermath of catastrophe, particularly in relation to Lebanon. Yazbeck described how colonial ruptures, war, silence, distortion, and geopolitical interference shape cultural memory, producing conditions where history may be present yet erased. 

Drawing from his ongoing doctoral research and the film Versets Sombres / Dark Verses, Yazbeck examined how familial archives, bodily traces, ruins, poetry, and mythic imagery can form a cinematic language that resists narrative coherence. The film was presented as an experimental documentary in which a spectral narrator moves through ruins, archival fragments, and intergenerational grief. Rather than restoring what has been lost, the work makes absence perceptible through fragmentation, decay, and sensory experience. 

Yazbeck introduced the concept of Mundus Imaginalis as a way to think about cinema as an intermediate world between the material and the imaginary. In his account, visceral cinema creates knowledge through embodied, tactile, sonic, and affective processes. It operates not only through representation or argumentation but through moods, temporalities, images, and sounds that make the unseen visible and the inaudible audible. His presentation raised the question of how artistic research can balance poetics, aesthetics, and politics. 

The discussion also addressed how artistic research is perceived outside its own community. Some participants noted that art can become instrumentalized within university structures, especially when rankings and evaluation systems fail to recognize the actual work being done. Others argued that the conversation should be opened to the whole university, not only to those already involved in AREA or artistic research. Suggestions included increasing visibility, using existing cross-school connections, and creating more public platforms for demonstrating the seriousness and relevance of artistic research. 

Audience and Presemo comments further expanded these concerns. Some participants noted that specialized terminology may create barriers and suggested introducing artistic research through concrete cases rather than only through philosophical concepts. Others asked how people working with artistic research outside AREA could participate in the discussions. A further comment cautioned against repeating narrow stereotypes of theoretical writing, reminding the group that feminist scholars and other critical traditions have long challenged positivist academic forms. 

The event concluded with an emphasis on artistic research as an ongoing collective process rather than a fixed definition. Its future at Aalto ARTS was framed not as the search for one unified term but as the cultivation of shared understanding, visibility, and confidence across diverse practices. The discussion suggested that artistic research can offer the university not only new knowledge, but also ways of working with uncertainty, failure, embodiment, critical practice, and multiple perspectives.