Ingvill Ragni Fossheim

The short film "Everything is Right Before" received Best Dance Film Award - Nordic Competition at the 2026 Multiplié Dance Festival - Minimalen Short Film Festival. Fossheim is costume designer and set designer on this production. https://www.zodiakvisions.com/eirb

https://www.taike.fi/en/awarded-support/artist-grants-theatre-2025

At the Saari Residence, I will focus on the written component of my article-based doctoral thesis "BioCostume: Experimental Costume Design with Biobased Co-Actants" (2020-) at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Material knowledge is a fundamental part of a costume designer ́s practice, yet artistic practice that incorporates systems knowledge and interrogates biobased material development as part of the performance-making is rare. My doctoral research addresses this gap in artistic practice and academic research. A key interest of the artistic research project "BioCostume: Experimental Costume Design with Biobased Co-Actants" is to explore how ecologically informed material practice in costume design can contribute with new perceptions and understandings of material agency, where ecologically responsible and accountable praxis is considered a value with implications beyond the performance event. As such, it resides at the overlapping area of aesthetics and ethics. The main research question is: How can the costume designer ́s development and application of biobased materials have agency and enable the emergence of new modes of artistic expression? The main method of this multi-modal inquiry is my artistic practice as costume designer and maker, developed in relation with a theoretical framework where Costume Thinking (Pantouvaki 2020) and the concepts Intra-Action (Barad 2007) and Extramaterial (Grosz 2017) are central. Costume holds the agency to offer alternative perspectives, entrancepoints, from which we may engage in dialogues, discussions and reflections on issues and topics relevant beyond the context of performance and art. This research project aims to develop new insights to the academic field of costume research, and to our understanding of what the agency of costume material and the praxis of the costume designer can be in the 21st Century.

This Home Residency project explores how I can orientate my practice as costume designer towards a more regenerative biobased materiality and develop a deeper understanding of biobased colourants in costume.<br/><br/>Material knowledge is a fundamental part of a costume designer´s practice, yet artistic practice that incorporates systems knowledge and interrogates biobased materials as part of the performance-making is rare in this field at the moment. Biobased materialties offer valuable access to critical discourses and conversations through the costume thinking and praxis. It challenges established practices where fast, reliable, and familiar materials are employed to realise a design idea onstage, proving that slower processes and lateral material thinking can offer unique qualities to the artistic work. However, it demands resources: time, material 'ingredients' and facilities dedicated specifically to this purpose - requirements that are rarely, if ever, fully available within the conventional frames of a contemporary dance production.<br/><br/>I propose to expand my current understanding of biobased colours in costume design by exploring the whole life cycle of the materials I use in my work: from cultivation to costume material - and beyond. This means learning and developing my skills and material knowledge through open-ended material research, and through practical and theoretical speculations/dreamings for future applications and practice.<br/><br/>As an inspiration and driving force is my hypothesis that biobased costume praxis enables the emergence of new aesthetics and methods; through that, new modes of artistic expression and stage narratives emerge.<br/>

Covid-19 grant for artists, personal working grant towards facilitating for and executing biobased material explorations in contemporary costume design.

Personal grant towards the design and make of costumes and scenography for the contemporary dance performance A Prologue.