PhD workshop / Trajectory • Punctum, Enrico Miglietta and Liselotte Vroman, with Thierry Lagrange and Jo Van Den Berghe @ CA²RE Hannover. 26.03.2026

This workshop invites participants to portray their PhD by drawing both its trajectory and its pivots. Every doctoral project evolves through a field of movements: shifts in scale, changes of approach, lines of inquiry that bend, branch, or return. The workshop aims to assist the participating PhD students in identifying a pattern—an orientation, a rhythm, a sequence of gestures that unveil the research as a living, unfolding process.

At the same time, within this dynamic field, certain moments acquire a heightened density: a detail, a junction, a gesture, a fragment that concentrates the meaning of the whole. Following Barthes, we may call this punctum: the point that interrupts or intensifies the movement, making the trajectory suddenly legible.

Participants will produce one or a series of drawn ‘portraits’ that hold these two conditions together. The drawings may express movement through axial lines, layered traces, spatial tensions, iterative variations, or shifting frames of reference; the punctum may appear as a figure, a cut, a collision, or a charged detail. Most of all, this can be seen as a section through a crucial ‘place’ in the research. What matters is the ‘place’ where the field in motion and the point that anchors it merge.

A central aspect of the workshop is the role of the hand—the manual gesture as an interpretative act. Drawing does not simply record a trajectory: it constructs it. Through the hand, movement becomes visible as a series of decisions, hesitations, intensifications, and returns. Likewise, the punctum emerges not as an abstract concept but as the moment in which the hand slows down, presses, insists, or allows a form to surface. In this sense, the hand functions as both an instrument of distance and a medium of proximity: it externalises the research while revealing the researcher’s own position within it.

The portrait does not aim to summarise the PhD but, on the contrary, to render visible its inner structure and dynamics, its most hidden layers: how the project moves, and where it concentrates. The result becomes an operative image—a visual tool through which the research can be re-read, re-oriented, and understood in its simultaneous flow and its singular moments of intensity.

The workshop will end with an instant-exhibition and a collective presentation open to the public. Following the conclusion of the event, participants will be asked to provide a brief description of the impact of this experiment on their research.