Research is a creative process and learning is a social activity. “Art as a Means of Historical Inquiry” is a teaching-led research initiative which combines these two values. This website is an invitation to think along by using and further developing the exercises we have developed at the intersection of critical artistic conversation and rigorous historical research.
On this website, we present a summary of projects, prompts and take-aways from our collaboration. These contents have been developed in an inter-university exchange by students and instructors from the University of Zurich (UZH) and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).
You may also download and transferable teaching moments designed for different educational frameworks, or for individual exploration. We would be excited to learn about your creative responses to these open-ended prompts.
Art as Archival Work
Unlike conventional uses of artworks as historical sources, we engage in artistic work as a cognitive process that helps identify tensions, voices and perspectives otherwise hidden by the archive.
Our projects are prompts to explore the potentials of historical research beyond classical frameworks. We ask how archives are compiled, filtered and reduced in time, and how the limits of the knowable is defined by the resulting blank spots. How can one turn the resulting stories into critical conversations about past and present?
What is an archive? What interests and power relations have left their imprint on records of the past? How do we tell the story of the blank spots in this record? And how do our possibilities change as we explore new tools and media?
Research as a Creative Process
“Art as a Means of Historical Inquiry” brings together artists and historians in multidisciplinary conversations. Participants experiment with historiographical and artistic research methods to explore new perspectives and ask new questions. With these new points of view, we return to our respective fields and rethink research as a creative process.
We explore, for example, how the meanings of spatial relations have been mapped differently across cultures and times, and how creative experimentation with cartographic styles can sharpen our analytic understanding of historical maps. We ask how abstract academic concepts can be rendered in different medialities, and how these medialities help us experience the meaning of words. We explore how collective historical writing exercises alert us to voice, perspective and positionality as creative choices. Such experimental exploration instigates a cognitive process that strengthens theoretical literacy and the rigorous quality of student-led research in the humanities.
UZH Students Present at Biennale di Venezia
Participants in the MA-Seminar “Art as a Means of Historical Inquiry” were invited to the panel or architecture “Taking Care of Care” at Biennale di Venezia on Oct. 3, 2025.
Giuanna Largiadèr, Aferdita Kazimi as well as PI Jonas Rüegg have worked in a transdisciplinary exchange with material scientist Veronica Contucci and the renowned sculptor Hannes Brunner on a project titled KetchUpBoat––an eco-critical collaboration around the aesthetics and commodification of a stranded cargo boat.
By studying this “Ketch Up Boat”as a multidisciplinary collective, we explore how observations translate into collective action in a decentralized manner. It is an intellectual laboratory for human responses to man-made crises. How do disciplinary background, personal life experience and different ethical compasses inform how we suggest cleaning up this mess?
Learn more about the KetchUpBoat at:
http://www.hannesbrunner.com/the-ketchup-boat-stranded-cargo-a-restitution-reconsidered/
Black Box of Danish Colonialism at the Bernese Museum of History
Jil Rissi’s artistic research project “(De)Colonization Through Greenlandic Lenses” reflects on the dynamics of conflicted memories in Greenland and Denmark. Her artistic installation, a black cubus with peepholes into photographic memories by Greenlandic photographer John Møller, invites observers to reflect on their own position vis à vis the lived reality of a place that is, otherwise, removed from their sight.
ULF and “Art as a Means of Historical Inquiry” congratulate Jil on this recognition of her outstanding work––by one of Switzerland’s most renowned museums of history!
Jil Rissi wins the UZH Semester Prize for fall 2024.
Jil’s excellent paper “(De)Colonization through Greenlandic Lenses: an Artistic Approach to History” engages with the Greenlandic past by studying and curating the work of indigenous photographers from three centuries. Her project makes several interesting contributions to the current state of research. By bringing to life abstract issues of representation in postcolonial contexts through the curation of documentary and artistic photography, Jil has successfully explored a complex humanities problem in a multidisciplinary way. Besides a rigorously argued seminar paper, Jil also constructed a three-dimensional installation that makes questions of archival formation, perspective and positionality tangible in an exhibition environment––thus developing an original analytical method at the intersection of history, museum studies, and creative arts.
Jil has conducted an impressive research effort on a little-known topic. Her work is timely and relevant beyond the academe: it engages actively and critically with the nature of memory in Kalaallit Nunaat / Greenland, and it even makes a contribution to recent controversies on the evaluation of Danish colonialism.
(Jonas Rüegg, academic advisor.)
