Roosmarijn Hompe: How do you describe your practice?

Jasper Coppes: I see myself as a visual artist and my research practice – I do not see it as something I do in addition. They are one and the same thing. I am a visual artist doing investigative research through artistic means.

RH: In general, how do you do your research?

JC: I research through the medium of film and text mainly, so I consider filmmaking as a form of research where the research tools are the camera, image and sound, but also the relationships between maker and subject and the relationships that emerge during the production of such a film – so the humans and non-humans that the film is about and the relationships that I build with those entities as a visual artist. These collaborations are part of the research for me.

RH: How do these two media, film and text, typically go together in your projects?

JC: Often, a film is preceded by a text, or the other way around. An example of this is a short film I shot in 2017 in Scotland with an archeologist. Our collaboration influenced the way we recorded that film – we merged an archaeological survey with the shooting of an analogue film.

RH: Do you also have some examples of national collaborations and more specifically, collaborations at the KABK?

JC: I am now working on a film called Shallow Lake about toxicity in the Maas and Waal area of the Netherlands. This project started during my participation in the Design Lectorate Research Group. The idea was to make a film in collaboration with the people from the area who were worried about the pollution in their backyard, but they were afraid of lawsuits. Local inhabitants received emails telling them they were being followed on the street, and a former minister who had spoken out was dragged to court. I had to adapt to this reality, so the collaboration took on a different form than I had originally imagined.

RH: When dealing with such a topic, how does your work relate to journalism?

JC: With a hot topic such as this one, there is a lot of media attention. Especially after the recent provincial elections, the topic of water quality and industrial and agricultural pollution in the Netherlands was getting a lot of coverage. Within that discussion, I tried to make a place for fiction, and to figure out what you can do with fiction that you can’t do with journalism.

RH: With your participation in the Research Group, what impact has it had on your research and artistic practice and on how you teach research to students?

JC: Well, the impact was quite big, because we had meetings with the group on a regular basis and I had a lot of feedback from peers, and gained lots of new references, books, perspectives, new questions. Alice also helped me a lot to look less at the topics and more at possible strategies or methodologies, and to think in verbs.

Regarding my teaching, in the MA Artistic Research we have days where we focus on research methodologies within a thematic framework. I organised a day about toxicity with a lecture by the curator Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, a film by Alexandra Navratil about a polluted lake in Germany, and a workshop with Benedetta Pompili, who was hired shortly afterwards by the Ceramic Workshop.

RH: Are there any other outputs connected to Shallow Lake?

JC: When it’s complete we’re going to submit it to several film festivals. But we’ve also been exploring how to share it in the middle of production.

For example, in September 2022, I was part of an exhibition, “Our Living Soil”, at Zone2Source in Amsterdam. I collaborated with Esmee Geerken, who was part of the 2021 Fault Lines Research Forum, and I used the exhibition as an opportunity to test something with animation for Shallow Lake. Two visiting scholars were invited to reflect on the exhibition. Anna Krzywoszynska was one of them. When she got a position as Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oulu, Finland, she invited me to come over and talk about my work and the film project in the context of a conference on citizen science. I brought in storyboarding as a way to prepare research. And it opened up some interesting perspectives for some of the scientists.

Last November I showed excerpts from the film at POST, an artists’ platform in Nijmegen. Around Nijmegen there are several areas where we had shot the film so that location felt very relevant. POST organised all kinds of public programs around the show, including a workshop with students from a secondary school. That was very successful as an interim output I would say.

The idea of using the exhibition itself as an editing space is also something I took with me from the Research Group – the perspective that the making of a film can be almost more interesting than the final film itself. And how can you show that process of making?

Alice Twemlow: Could you talk a bit about how you define research or how you explain the importance of research to students when they’re working on their thesis?

JC: Because the students in our department are artists, we want them to write the thesis as artists. So it fits to have an artist like me guiding that journey. I see writing as part of my practice, and how I do research. What I tell students is that they are not writing about their work or about their research. It’s not a separate line of reasoning that happens outside of the work, but it’s something that happens parallel to making artworks and is highly influenced by the process you have in the studio or however you do your work. We think through making as much as we think through writing. In the end, the thesis should be a tool to think through your practice in the space of the text. I like to call this process developing an essayistic awareness.

RH: How did you experience research culture at the KABK during the past six years? Did you notice any changes?

JC: My experience is based on being in two different kinds of Research Groups. The first one had much more emphasis on reading and writing. It helped me to write a couple of texts and we published a little booklet. In that group, I missed having the space for practice, sharing practice. I felt a little underwhelmed – maybe it was where I was at that moment, but it felt a bit vague.

And so, the second research group, I liked it a lot more. We were much more active. I loved that we went to the Rijksakademie to visit Vibeke Mascini in her studio, for example. And the emphasis was much more on methodology. And I really think that’s more important maybe than the emphasis on text or on reading. I thought about it yesterday, actually. It was one of those moments on the bike that I was thinking “yeah, that really makes a lot of sense”.

AT: How could the research culture at the KABK be further enhanced? What would make it better for you as a practitioner and teacher?

JC: For me, the ideal – but this is in a utopian fantasy – is that there would be a research element within every contract for tutors at the KABK, like you have in some universities. So that it is actually part of your contract to develop new knowledge, and that you also must actively think about how you channel what you learn in your own artistic practice into your teaching, and how you hand that over to another generation. I think you would still need the Research Group because that’s part of professionalisation also, that you create these scenarios for peer review and feedback.

AT: We shouldn’t have to think of what you’re describing as utopian. It’s quite basic really.

JC: I’ve noticed that in our department, when tutors are asked to share their research interests, it increases the sense of community and helps students understand shared discourses and to see who participates in them and what kind of work emerges out of that. It makes it much more tangible for students to think about what communities they feel they could fit into after they graduate.

AT: Is there anything you haven’t yet had a chance to say?

JC: I think this question of how research could be further developed at the KABK is a very important question. The KABK needs to devote time, to block out time, to sit with that question. And not just a little evaluation and then carry on as usual, but to use this process to create a thinktank to really activate the field of knowledge and experience within the KABK, across all departments and workshops and staff.