Roosmarijn Hompe: What is your research focused on and how does it feed into your teaching in the BA Graphic Design department or into your IST [elective] coaching?

Alexander Cromer: In my research I’m interested in the ways that our histories and our futures can be conjured through performance and through voice. Sometimes I share with the students things that I’m researching. But mostly, it’s about talking about how we research and how we talk about research. So, it’s like the foundations of research methodology.

For instance, we look at their research questions, their research intentions. We also discuss how you can get lost in research, or how this oscillation occurs when at one point everything seems really clear and then all of a sudden everything explodes and collapses into the ether and then you’re absolutely lost. In fact, in art or design research these moments of vulnerability and of feeling lost can be really productive.

RH: How is research integrated in the curriculum of BA Graphic Design?

AC: In general, research is heavily integrated into the program. There is also an emphasis on researching through form, which I find really beautiful. You can really see how making and theory interconnect. For example, Katrin Korfmann, a photographer and artist, and Maarten Cornel, a philosopher, co-teach a project together and you can see the research extending itself into both branches, which is really nice.

RH: And as a tutor, in teaching research to students, on what foundations can you build? Do you see there’s already sufficient attention to research methods within the curriculum, within the KABK?

AC: I love research and I feel like there could be more research in KABK in general. But also at the same time, I have some students that are like, “I just want to be a graphic designer and work for this company”. And that should also be allowed. So, I want this institution to be more research focused. But then I also feel tension. Because with research come the spectres of academia and quite a few of us have a hard time with those.

RH: What are the spectres of academia?

AC: I feel that academia is such an artefact of coloniality. I love the rigour of academia, but I hate it as a system and how old white males define its terms of engagement. How queer people and people of colour have been treated. And now sometimes in my PhD program at ACPA, I feel like I’m just like the diversity element. When they ask me to do stuff, sometimes, I’m like “are you asking me because you’re interested in my research or is it because I’m like the black dude that’s in the program?”.

In the Graphic Design department we are talking about the importance of what sources we are giving students. How do we make sure that we’re getting a mix of research, not only research methodologies, but different types of research from across the world?

RH: And the research you are conducting within the PhDArts program at ACPA: How is this related to what you’re doing in the KABK Design Lectorate Research Group?

AC: When I started the PhD, I applied with a project that I call “The Black Arctic”, about an alternate reality and blackness and black ontology and black ecologies and radical imagination and storytelling. And then it became overwhelming; there were so many things to look at or analyse or research or to consider or problematize, that I was getting extremely lost — and not in a productive way.

When I joined the Design Lectorate Research Group, I started to focus on voice as a manifestation of a body archive, of a living archive. Then I realised through our discussions and through my reading and thinking and writing about it, that that’s really the core of my PhD. So then I changed my PhD research to fit what I was doing in the Research Group.

RH: That’s a lot of credit for the Design Lectorate Research Group.

AC: The Research Group is super important.

RH: How do you now formulate the topic of your PhD since voice has been prominent?

AC: Now I’m interested in the ways that voice unfolds during performance and how voice can help to inform us or lead to new modes of ecological relations, to create spaces of ancestral healing or conjure up alternative realities or speculative futures. Voice as a way of knowing; or voicing as navigating, like a research method.

I think that in the poetry community, it’s all about the language. About whether you’re a good writer. And in the spoken word community, it’s about whether you’re a good performer, if your presence is nice. No one ever really considers how they voice, or what is happening when they voice a thing, or how voice betrays language so many times. Voice is like an ecological artefact because it only happens in relationship to your immediate environment.

RH: How do you conduct your research?

AC: I’m tracing a voice through theory and philosophy. And there’s already a very rich field of writing about voice and what it means and what it does. So right now I am reading a lot of theory. And with every book summary I write, I try to reflect on the other pieces that I’ve read before within the context of this framework. And then I am also trying to envision my practice as a manifestation of theory. It’s as if I’m writing a theoretical text through my practice, through actually performing.

RH: Your performances are your sources that you use for your research, but can they also be considered output?

AC: I think it’s always both. I like this kind of like queer idea of research being both output and also material source. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Your output is input for others, of course, but I also mean within your own research. It feeds back in. After a performance, I try to just sit there and ask myself, “Okay, what’s happening here? Let me take a look at this”. And that’s when I’m pulling in bits of the theory that I’ve been reading. So, I’ll say, “When I do this thing with my voice, I see how it’s a bit similar to how Nina Sun Eidsheim writes about critical performance methodologies”. It’s not always successful, but that’s the goal.

RH: To which area do you think your research contributes the most?

AC: I think to knowledge development and the research domain. I don’t know, like, maybe I’ll be an “Alice” after all this!

RH: Have you already generated outputs from your participation in the Research Group?

AC: I have been working on a new mode of performance that emerged from sharing my research at the Fault Lines Research Forum in December 2022. I have an alter ego named Darius that I perform with. Darius is from the “Black Arctic” alternate reality that I mentioned before. And I’m trying to get Darius and myself into some kind of conversation by recording my voice during a performance, looping it, deconstructing it and then performing a story over that and seeing what happens.

RH: How do you make your research public?

AC: I got invited to talk about my research at the New Institute in Rotterdam, about using Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation as a reference point and about how we imagine or reimagine our relationship to our ecological relationships or ecologies.

I have also given lectures at the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, University of the Arts Bremen, De Waag, and at Maastricht University. I have an essay [“Apropos Vocal Epistemologies: an Interlude”] which will be in a collection of essays about the imagination, edited by Christian Ernsten and Erik Wong. Also, here at the KABK, the BA Fine Arts department invites me to speak in their Artistic Research symposium because the head of the program is in the Research Group with me.

RH: And do you receive any funding apart from the addition to your appointment from the Research Group?

AC: No, I have the hardest time finding funding because I’m caught between being a student and a teacher, between being an artist and a researcher. Artistic research doesn’t fit under scientific research, nor does it fit under art.

RH: Do you collaborate within the KABK with other tutors?

AC: Through the Research Group, yes.