Earlier this year SGSAH funded three very special residency opportunities for PhD doctoral researchers working in the arts and humanities. Three students got to spend time with the selected partner organisations, focusing on their own research and development and simultaneously considering how the place, site, environment or experience linked to their PhD project. This week on the SGSAH blog we will be sharing blogposts from each of the three students, reflecting on the experience of their residencies.

Reporting from Deveron Residency in Huntly

Our residency blog comes from Katerina Talianni, a PhD candidate in Music at the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD research, entitled “Walking-with-sound: sound, space and movement” explores soundwalking practices and their impact on audiences’ creative engagement with space and sound through walking. In her research she explores how mediated listening practices, collaborative and participatory music making, contributes to “urban commoning”. She explores the role of locative media, mobile audio and geo-location in the experience of public space and the opportunities they afford to audiences to co-produce culture and knowledge by forming ‘acoustic communities’. 

From 15-22 May I visited Deveron Projects in Huntly as part of the SGSAH Doctoral Thinker in Residence programme. In my PhD research I explore soundwalking and soundmaps and their impact on audiences’ creative engagement with space and sound through walking and listening. I am interested in how creative processes, with a focus on sound, open up opportunities for participants to co-produce culture and knowledge.

All photos by Katerina Talianni

My focus during this residency was to engage with and immerse in the Deveron Projects’ philosophy that ‘the town is the venue’ in order to explore how collaborative and participatory artistic practices connect connects artists, communities and places through creative and critical work.

For this, I participated in the various events hosted by Deveron Projects during that period; I was particularly interested in the walking practices that this community undertakes, that bring together walking with arts and other cultural disciplines. Walking is a common theme with my own research and I approach it both as an artistic practice and a research tool. I also had the opportunity to engage in fruitful discussions with the Deveron Projects team, interns and the artist in residency, Manaf Halbouni. His artistic approach to cartography inspired me into rethinking soundmaps as tools to investigate the ways in which we experience, construct and share our relationship with place. The outcome was that our Friday Lunch talk had the form of a listening walk inviting participants to use their senses, with a focus on listening, in order to map the route. The discussion that followed was robust and vibrant.

Overall, my experience during this residency has proved fascinating, insightful and a timely addition at this stage of my PhD Research. I am grateful to SGSAH and the Deveron Projects team for the opportunity!

If you are interested in undertaking a residency or internship during your PhD, keep an eye on the opportunities page of the SGSAH website. You can also sign up to their mailing list here, to have all the latest news and opportunities sent straight to your inbox!