panel @ DSP 2023

Raised on the seaside of southern Brazil, the wind was her first professor. It taught the inevitable aspects of human movement: gravity, displacement, change, velocities, resistance, etcetera. A curator of human expression and a philosopher of movement, the author develops her research by embodying and embracing the environment. Beyond identities, the research methods are transnational, transcultural, translaguage, transexpression. Transitory and somatic. Listening is an exercise. The research about territories of expression has been continuously informed by the relations with elements of nature and the environments that surround the body. For instance, breathing is the ventilation of the body: air transit. Indispensable to vocal expression, breathing is the body’s wind making. The skin is seriously perforated, a passage: impression and expression. Atmospheric pressure? The edge is a limit: separation. At the same time, a line of encounters. Border. Belonging. Being. Nature and cultural aspects overlap in human-animal expression. Similarities between habitats-home-nests, paws and feet, mouth and beak, eyes and eyes, bones – shells – skins, and death. Modes of connection inspired by the South American indigenous knowledge. Embodiment happens in the transpiration, transformation, and transknowledge between performance, philosophies, poetry: person and planet Earth. Training expressive bodies is then training to be alive, improving the abilities to perceive the world. As one can notice, the wind makes the sand or the leaves dance.

– Lindsay T. Gianuca

Laying on the forest ground, arm stretched to reach the trigger of the camera, I am facing a spring starflower. Where does my body end and where does the world begin? The shutter closes and opens rhythmically creating a timelapse. Is it collecting fragments of time, or is it fragments of movement? Whose time? Whose movement? The lens is a tunnel through which the river of light adorning the ephemeral petals of the Lysmachia borealis travels to me. What I can see by recomposing the time is a dance engaging flower, sun and flies, a dance some call heliotropism. The flower will live another day. Yesterday it was too young to chase the rays and welcome the visiting flies, tomorrow it will be too old, so by sunset it will swirl on a breeze, giving the fruit its place under the sun. Death, birth? Next spring another flower will dance with the sun, for the plant’s veriditas lays in its root, deep buried in the earth. One day my body too will be laying in the ground, eyes closed, but until then it will most likely retain its organs, unlike the plant I am stretching my gaze towards. How is my research embodied, or should I say which embodiment better corresponds to it?

– Oana Suteu Khintirian

The title of the video is After-affect. The video is part of my practice research PhD at C-DaRE, Coventry University. The research is titled Cute Crash: Cutting Through Violence with Choreography and Cuteness, and investigates conjunctions of cuteness/violence through the lens of choreography.

– Zrinka Uzbinec

If all knowledge is embodied, and all practices that generate and enact knowledge are embodied, then I think the question becomes, ‘How are different research practices and processes embodied differently or uniquely?’ That is, are there types of embodiment that are different by kind or degree? My hunch is that research that explicitly calls itself embodied is done so by a subject giving the body some kind of status as a special kind of object (but an object nevertheless). But who is this subject laying claim to the body as object if indeed their research is embodied? There is a grammatical ‘trick’ that goes like this: The phrases “I am a body”, “I have a body” or even “I know my body” can become: “body being”, “body having”, “body known” or even “body being known”. If there is body being known, then known by what? Radically embodied research would mean that there is nothing to be found at this point.

-Simon Ellis

My practice & research F-ing Good Provocation (FGP) is an anti-racist, anti-oppressive practice centring care, empathy and accountability within the landscape of movement and dance. A lifelong journey of education, relationship and solidarity building that requires all of us to be anti-racist, anti-oppressive daily in every space we enter, hold, pass through. Therefore, embodied through our everyday life and senses, whilst acknowledging change is constant. FGP is an embodiment of my response to a specific time (2020) in history, its social, economical, cultural contexts, implications and sentiments through holding spaces, conversations, listening, writing and doodling.

Our bodies hold experiences, emotions and labour within. One of the many effects are frustration, tiredness, fatigue, exhaustion, burn out physically, mentally and emotionally. These effects can be compounded and become chronic depending on the regularity and impact of incidents (trauma). Therefore, active self care is essential and specific to the individual. For me, centring joy is at the heart of my practice in order for it to be sustainable. For example, attending to plants, making sure I work no more than 20 days a month, scheduling osteopathy and other bodily treatments, saying ‘no’ to work, people and conditions that no longer nourish me.

I also wonder whether embodiment and disembodiment could be framed as a binary? I see it more as a spectrum. Whether one chooses to engage with comments and or feedback due to protected characteristics and or injustices, that is still an engagement. Choosing to disengage is an engagement.

F-ing Good Provocation is a zine/essay (project as well as a practice) that celebrates the 20 artists of East and Southeast Asian diaspora involved, who live, create and contribute to the vibrant arts landscape of the UK and beyond. It is multi-prong project and practice, focusing on anti-racist, anti-oppressive practice and centring care, empathy, accountability focusing on artists of the East and Southeast Asian diaspora in the UK. The first phase of the project was a scoping phase including hours of conversations during lockdown in 2020/21 on race, racism, injustices and the 20 artists’ lived/living experiences. This zine encapsulates some of the difficult, honest yet essential conversations and hopes. F-ing Good Provocation continues to be a platform in making changes within the landscape of movement, dance and be

Title: F-ing Good Provocation
Lead artist: Jane Chan
Name of publisher: n/a, self published
Type of publication: Essay
Themes: Anti-Racism | Dance | Social Justice | Global Majority Heritage
Price: £8 (plus UK postal delivery ) – please get in touch chanjane.jc@gmail.com

– Jane Chan

Take your heart, follow its traces to the sole of your feet. Can you hear its beat when walking? The practice I have been developing along the last years wants to promote a sense of anatomo-sensorial consciousness as a bodily anchor of thought, reflection and transformation. In the socio-politic-environmental context we are living in, where the value of a human body and nature is (still) responding (and reduced) to an economic system that attempts against life in all its forms, I believe that turning the attention to our bodies in their most raw physical matter can help arouse questions on how we want to live and how can we actually make it happen. I see my practice as a surface where to host a critical dialog between my physical body and the social one, where the skin that separates us is flexible, elastic and permeable. I touch myself and sense my hand´s pressure. I touch myself and remember. I touch myself and desire. I pull my skin and observe that my shape can actually change. I look at the surface that holds my organs together to realize it is object/ is subject to social representations. When I touch you I am also affected.

– Nicolette Michalla

Learning to prepare dishes from my grandmother, I never referenced standard measures. My grandmother would say, “you need this much water”, and I gauged measures using my sense of hearing, sight, touch, and taste: listening for how intensely and for how long she held the faucet open to get the measure of water she needed, looking at how much water filled the pan, holding the pan while the water was added and feeling the weight of it, tasting the dish, finding it a tad too liquid, and wishing that my grandmother added bit less water than she did… But if I were to write a cookbook full of my grandmother’s recipes that people all over the planet might use, I would need to use the standard measures that many are familiar with. I would have to write, “Add 3 ½ cups of water.” Yet, even then, non-standard and anexact measures are necessary, phrases like “lower the temperature to a simmer”, “salt to taste”, “sauté till translucent”, “add the whites of three large eggs”, etc. The prevalence of standard measures, like the 8 fluid ounce cup, not only in recipe books but in all fields of human activity, is never a mere historical accident. The establishment of any and every standard measure is a remarkable social feat, involving either remarkable common efforts or remarkable impositions of systems of domination. When impositions of systems of domination are involved, the prevalence of a standard measure indexes more harm than good.

– Muindi Fanuel Muindi

In a striking passage, Merleau-Ponty writes about a patient who, when “asked to point to a part of his body, such as his nose, only succeeds if he is allowed to grasp it. If the patient is directed to interrupt the movement before it reaches its goal, or if he is only allowed to touch his nose with a wooden ruler, then the movement becomes impossible.”

This suggests that ‘grasping,’ ‘touching,’ and ‘pointing,’ are all corporeally different.   He continues: “my body appears to me as a posture toward a certain task, actual or possible,” which suggests there are different sorts of spatiality for the body, such as situational spatiality versus positional spatiality.   And with the example of slapping one-self unerringly  — and unthinkingly — where one’s bitten by a mosquito, where the performance of the slap is not mediated by metrical observation and cognitive logic, we understand that the body “anchors itself” in its objects and its activity situation.   

thought.

In a different vein, Madeline Gins, working with Shusaku Arakawa, in a wonderful speculative experiential book, Architecture Body, suggests embodied experiments that put into question whether it makes sense to ask: “Where does my body end and the world begin?” In particular Arakawa and Gins conjure architectural-spatial experiments to sense and comprehend what they call “perceptual landing spots.”

Taken together, such observations and experiments show that while my body clearly conditions how I move, make sense of my transfinitely multiple relations to self, other, and ambient, no physical sensor based on relative or absolute geometry begins to measure what is in play with my embodied experience, and embodied enactive engagement with my ambient.

Despite this, how can we co-articulate sense in non-predetermined ways with others and with our ambient hybrid analog-algorithmically-augmented environments?

– Sha Xin Wei

My challenge is to extensively complicate understandings of the ‘distributed nature of embodiment, blurring lines between self/other and human/nonhuman in the production of knowledge’ (as stated in the Open Call). Rather than discrete individuals, human bodies are composites of collaborating cells (human and nonhuman), with nonhuman populations (the microbiome) comprised of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and protozoa, clustered in highly local micro-communities all over and inside the body. These microbial nonhumans are essential to human bodily processes, including the brain, immune system, digestion, and more. Thus, humans are multispecies entities, coevolving in collaboration with their microbiome; the ‘multispecies entity’ is in effect an ecosystem of human and nonhuman cells known as a ‘holobiont’. Further, the microbiomes of environment ‘bodies’ share species overlap with the human holobiont, implying porosity between human bodies, animal bodies, soil bodies, ocean bodies, and so on. Any notion of distinct separation between ‘bodies’ should be understood rather as a series of porous zones of exchange. Hybridity of all bodies (including ‘human’ researchers) is a messy situation of blurred edges and inter-acting affects. Whose knowledge are we creating? How do we acknowledge and deepen relations with our own hybrid selves? What is a body? Should ecosomatics consider not only the body’s relation to an external ecology but also relations within the multiplicity of the human holobiont? Could artists/researchers working with somatic, body, and movement-based methodologies collaborate productively with scientists/microbiologists to generate insights not available to either cohort on their own?

– Carolyn Deby