In the year 2088, the artist Poem Johnson dies at the age of 102. His estate bequeaths his artworks and papers to the Kamau Brathwaite Center for Research in Black Studies. The archive contains eleven artistic outputs spanning Jacquard-woven textiles, video installations, performance works, and an artist book.

This is the speculative framework of Marc Johnson's practice-based dissertation, which examines how artists from diasporic communities can shape archival custody and posthumous reception of their work before institutional stewardship begins. The future-oriented framing draws on Kamau Brathwaite's concept of tidalectics, a geopoetic model of history that combines Einsteinian non-linear time with Caribbean routes and roots. Brathwaite argues that diasporic histories cannot be traced to a single origin point. In the context of African diaspora, where displacement and forced migration fracture linear genealogies, identity and history move in tidal patterns across multiple shores and temporalities. This dissertation reimagines tidalectics through material practice, using the speculative structure to displace linear historiography, interrogate the politics of memory-making, and challenge the assumed stability and permanence of archival records.

The artworks trace a research journey of artistic experiments conducted between 2021 and 2026. The Sea is History (2024) is a series of Jacquard-woven textiles that engage the colonial legacies of industrial textile production and cotton economies while rendering the ocean as living archive. The loom's punch-card system is itself an early form of data storage, and becomes a site for counter-archival practice that reclaims colonial infrastructure to materialize suppressed narratives. Sun/Sum (2024) is a performance work developed through public rehearsals that privileges process over product, establishing rehearsal-as-research methodology where Afrodiasporic movement vocabularies circulate through iterative process rather than fixed performance scores. Riot/Uprising (2023) is a three-channel video installation that foregrounds the materiality of decaying footage from the 1971 Attica prison uprising, directing attention across screens through sound remixing.

Through speculative fabulation, the dissertation generates a post-custodial future: practical frameworks for how artists from diasporic and Indigenous communities can intervene in preservation systems before depositing materials into institutional care, shaping how their work will be encountered, interpreted, and activated by future researchers and communities.

Doctoral Thesis Defense Committee: Season Butler (Opponent), Nicole R. Fleetwood, Jon Refsdal Moe, María Elena Ortiz, Florian Schneider

Doctoral Thesis Opponents (Seminars): Petra Bauer, Sara Callahan, Jyoti Mistry, Alessandra Raengo, Andrej Slávik

Doctoral Thesis Supervisors: Magnus Bärtås, Mick Wilson, John-Paul Zaccarini

This project investigates the methodology of TeaterPi, an Italian Stockholm-based theatre collective known for its multilingual, transcultural performances and collaborative devising practices that bridge the gap between professional and non-professional theatre-makers, and the fluid leadership used within this context. Departing from an initial exploration of film montage theories applied to performing arts, the research shifts to an in-depth examination of fluid leadership, a dynamic and adaptable approach that has organically emerged from TeaterPi's process. Fluid leadership, characterised by a conscious shifting of roles and responsibilities, a willingness to relinquish control and self determination, and a focus on facilitating collective creativity, directly reflects TeaterPi's commitment to ensemble-driven creation and the integration of diverse skill sets within a mixed ensemble. Through a detailed case study of the collective's production of Pinocchio 2.0, the written reflection analyses the practical application of fluid leadership and TeaterPi's methodology, highlighting how this approach fosters collective ownership, embraces emergent artistic choices, and cultivates a strong sense of belonging among the diverse ensemble. Situated within contemporary discourses on collaborative and transcultural theatre-making and evolving leadership models in the arts, the research argues for the significance of fluid leadership as a valuable alternative to hierarchical structures, offering potential benefits for artistic innovation, alternative work setting and process and ensemble empowerment in the performing arts field.

The research is based on personal experiences of working as a director and creator in the field of participatory performance. It raises questions about how the specific conditions of the field, where authenticity, presence, and relationality often are prominent aesthetic values, can influence the role of the director and the interaction between director and performer. Furthermore, the project examines how an artistic practice situated in this field and shaped in relation to these values is challenged and conflicted by the shifting and sometimes conflicting management cultures that exist in contemporary performing arts.

The project consists of seven documented artistic projects, a reflective lyrical essay, and a summary of methods, all of which examine weakness as a cultural taboo and a potential path to artistic, professional, and personal liberation in different ways.

i svaghet - att regissera deltagandebaserad performance / in weakness – directing participatory performance

How is the relationship between me and the actor affected by the specific conditions that the field of participatory performance sets for our joint work?What challenges and opportunities arise when I, as a director, try to apply an artistic practice based on weakness within the framework of this work?These questions form the starting point for a reflective essay on directing, acting, intimacy, and integrity. The essay describes how the participatory field constantly brings the creator into contact with vulnerability, both their own and that of others. It describes how the work culture within the same field can simultaneously make it difficult for both the director and the performer to exercise their profession based on acknowledged and shared vulnerability. The essay provides personal examples of how formative experiences and asymmetrical power relations can lead to a working culture characterized by short-term attempts to live up to stereotypical expectations, even when they conflict with one's own values or have a directly inhibiting effect on artistic work.

på en ostörd plats / in a secluded place

The doctoral students compilation of the methods she has applied to navigate thecontradictions of the director's role.