Research
The research within infraDIVINE brings practice, analysis, experiment, primary and secondary research, and scholarship into relation.
It examines architecture as witness, drawing as ontological inquiry, and oscillation as a method for working across material, spatial, perceptual, mnemonic, and reverential conditions without collapsing their differences.
Featured Thesis
infraDIVINE: Witnessing the Witness from the Threshold — An Ontological Study of Architecture
Vera L. Melo · Master of Research · School of Arts & Humanities · Royal College of Art · 2026
View the RCA Research Project ↗This thesis develops an ontological inquiry into architecture as witness and advances oscillation as a praxis-based method for artistic research. Architecture is understood as witness through material, spatial, and relational conditions that bear traces of repetition, ritual, habitation, movement, grief, devotion, damage, repair, and return. The research does not attribute consciousness or intention to buildings.
Through repeated movement between site and drawing, perception and interpretation, memory and imagination, measurement and embodiment, and presence and absence, the thesis establishes drawing as a reciprocal form of inquiry. It introduces infraDIVINE as the threshold at which the infrastructural and the reverential meet.
Research Questions
- 01
In what sense can architecture function as witness, and how can oscillation make this condition perceptible through drawing?
- 02
How do observation in situ and en plein air position the artist at the threshold between observer and observed, material trace, collective memory, and embodied experience?
- 03
What forms of knowledge emerge when drawing moves between observation, embodiment, recollection, imagination, and return?