Embodiment  

Elke Gaugele & Mona Schieren Awareness, Un-learning and Transformation of Violence through Body Practices in the Field of Art, Migration and Diaspora

Our lecture performance focuses on awareness, un-learning and transformation of violence through body practices in the field of art, migration and the diaspora. It reflects on recently artistic practices that had been developed as bodywork and micropolitical tools. (Rolnik 2018) Addressing ‘the body’ of specific groups as BPIOC, people who experienced flight and/or migration and further audiences contemporary artistic projects include workshop formats that aim at consciousness raising as well as at processes of reconciliation through bodily practices. This assumes that violence and traumas caused by experiences of racism, flight and migration have equally inscribed themselves in the body and sedimented as corporeal archives in all intersectional dimensions of discrimination. This paper exemplarily analyzes three approaches which, through the activation of body knowledge, allow alternative epistemologies to emerge. The queer-feminist performer and activist Maque Pereyra operates in her concept of yoggaton with body practices that combines elements of yoga and Latin American reggaeton dance. Daniela Reina Téllez has developed an art practice based on workshops with BPIOC whose common narratives become soundtracks for installations. Tabita Rezaire navigates digital, corporeal and ancestral memory as sites of struggles and violent experiences. She nourishes visions of connection and mending processes. Thereby the artwork shifts to the performative, to somatic aesthetic experiences of the participants and with it to the creation of new collective group experiences. Awareness experiments serve to make one conscious of body perceptions and behavioral patterns. The aim is to see how hierarchies and exclusions are violently (re)produced and to perceive how strong this calls for unlearning processes. Commoning practices and convivial procedures (Yildiz 2020, Gilroy 2014) shared beyond essentializations promote emancipatory skills and resistant attitudes.

Anja Plonka breathing psoas

Synopsis Title: breathing psoas Germany/Switzerland 2021, 14:59 min., performance video Based on her own experience of sexual violence, the performer explores in her performance video associated body phenomena such as pain, tension, heat, fear, disgust or anger. The body as a place of violence and pain transforms these memories with the help of somatic body practices. In the process, the performer’s naked body makes kin with an animal, stones, water, wind, and plants. Inspired by “The Camille Stories” by Donna Haraway the video tries to make this utopia concrete. In search of a utopian existence, the body breathes through and into the landscape. Stone to skin, Breath to wind, stone to vulva, smoke to blood, water to wind. The magical-poetic transformation of the body allows the landscape to perform as somatic body and psychogram. The video wants to create visibility for a taboo subject and is an ode to all traumatized bodies.

Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley A Thing of Teeth: Performing the monstrous feminine

This proposed paper explores the extended threat of violence implied when a clinician tells you that the growth in your ovary will one day need to be excised, only to assert that the day has not yet come. How does the body perform whole, perform healthy, perform feminine, in the shadow of excision? The experience is something like the twofold decay that Herbert Blau evokes when he reminds his reader that to watch performance is to watch someone dying right before your eyes (Blau 1982: 134). Once you are told this, it is impossible to forget that as a watcher I am myself similarly experiencing a process of decay. As I move through the world, apart from the occasional interruption, I succeed in ignoring this by quieting the noises of my body. But that growth, this dermoid cyst, a bundle of cells, a thing of liquid, of hair, of teeth wants to chew its way out of me. I carry its suspended violence in the place I should grow something else, and its small tugs remind me of the man (I wish it hadn’t been a man) with a knife, a scalpel, zeroing in on me and hastening me towards the moment where any chance of generation is lost. He wants to scoop me out, hollow me out, leave me like a pumpkin at halloween. I run from him in slow motion. I’ve been running now for four years. I can hear his footsteps, and his scalpel hangs over me still. This paper braids together questions of how the monstrous feminine is performed, how sharp understandings of sub-fertility offer trauma, and how clinical intervention can feel like an attack.

Fiona Davies The Violence of Medicine 

The American academic Johanna Shapiro in a 2018 essay established a framework of types of violence in medicine that ranged from the systemic bureaucratic “organisational violence”, originating from the hospital’s architecture and design, through to physician arrogance and what Shapiro calls “the laity’s faith that medicine can solve all problems”. This framework could be extended to understand the end point where violence is inherent in keeping people technically alive while prolonging a meaningless existence. The framework does not define violence in terms of motive or intention. This framework had been built on Foucault’s seminal publication The Birth of the Clinic, where Foucault stated that the idea of violence in the patient–healthcare worker relationship could be seen to be inherent, saying “but to look in order to know, to show in order to teach, is not this a tacit form of violence, all the more abusive for its silence, upon a sick body that demands to be comforted, not displayed?” This acceptance of it’s just the way it has always been done can lead to patients experiencing serious difficulties with sleeping while in hospital and this experience of sleep deprivation is even more profound when the patient is in ICU. The deprivation of sleep as a form of violence can also be extended to those who work unreasonable/unsafe and often unlawful shifts within the medical system. Violence informs the use of the language of war to describe the treatment and the patient’s response to certain conditions such as cancer and the means of choosing who is the chosen one, the one to be allocated resources of equipment such as a ventilator and the staff to nurse them or to be the chosen one to receive that rare body organ.

Dorell Ben The Silencing of Tattooed Voices

The Oceanian’s identity was once aligned to the tattoos received as marks of ancestry, history, memory, and status. During colonialism, tattoos became marks of the Other that threatened the Western Self. Colonisers imposed western way of life into Oceanian communities replacing much of the tattoo culture with western religion and sociopolitics. Tattoo culture dwindled from Oceanian practices and were transferred to other materials. This paper looks at the religious, political, and social violence that stifled the voices of Oceanians and the continued existence of such violence inflicted in a postcolonial Oceania. First, it will look at the examples of colonial violence enforced on several tattoo cultures (Aotearoa, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji etc), and the negative impacts these have had on Oceanian people’s tattoo identities. Second, it will examine the various art forms depicting tattoo art on different mediums from carvings and bark cloth to the sketches in colonial records and ethnological accounts. The third aspect focuses on the violence presented to postcolonial Oceania through cultural appropriation and negative perceptions of the cultural tattoo. This paper points out that this violence stems from colonialism and that the acts of cultural appropriation affect the current movement of the cultural tattoo’s return to skin. There is a sharp disconnect between Indigenous Oceanians to their tattoo culture, and by approaching the persistent effects of colonial violence in a postcolonial Oceania, Indigenous Oceanians are reclaiming their voices through tattoo identities. This paper hopes to conclude that the voices of Oceanians are resilient to this lingering colonial violence through an engagement of tattoo art and returning tattoo cultures.

Christina Varvia Investigating through an Expanded Body

Visualising the body (human and other) has in the past coincided with efforts to control it, often violently. This paper questions whether images of the human body can also be used to empower resistance and claims for justice. What we understand as the human body can no longer rely on the boundary of its skin for its definition. At the start this paper offers a thought provocation for the re-measurement of the human body. Almost like taking a long exposure photograph of a body throughout its lifetime, this new conception of an expanded body includes: every bite of food the body ever consumed, every drop of water that ever quenched its thirst, every molecule of oxygen it ever breathed, and all the excrement it ever produced. As a methodological tool, the expanded body allows the study of material flows, grounded in the intimacy of our interior, yet reaching out to distant landscapes and getting entangled with all sorts of toxic substances and alternative creatures on the way. The paper then turns to introduce the project Biopolitical Imaging which develops a framework for reading historical and contemporary representations of bodies across realms, in order to reveal traces of substances that evidence state violence. Starting with lead, a naturally occurring material, which acts as a neurotoxin when entering a human body, and treating lead as an interscalar vehicle , the project strings together images from different registers and techniques: photographs, medical drawings, x-rays, microscopic sections of living cells, and GIS conglomerated data. These images form geo-bio-chemical maps that allow the study of material flow and thus expand the realm of accountability for forms of environmental, slow violence that elude direct causality.

emilia izquierdo Violence and the Body: Resistance in motion

I will present a screening consisting of two 5mts experimental films and an extract exploring dance, the body, violence and resistance.

Cage (Breathe) 2020: is a film made with hand drawn animation and archival footage exploring bodies under extreme restrictions, bodies that cannot breathe, and the strive to release from socio-political/physical and psychological constraints.

Ghost Dance, 2019: explores dance as protest, the body in movement as a form of resistance against injustice and the imposition of foreign powers. Using as base 1894 footage from Sioux American Indians, and dances in locations such as Gaza, South Africa, Peru and Armenia.

Insomnia: violent nights, 2021: explores violent waking life events as experienced in the dream insomniac state through dance and bodily movement. Using hand drawn animation and archival footage it takes us into the labyrinth of ancient forces battling oppression through dance and cosmic encounters.

My work explores how the communicative power of the body has been instrumental to survival and emancipation, particularly in political circumstances in which subjects are not allowed to use words, such as historical slavery, colonization and totalitarian regimes. In this way dance can be experienced as a method of claiming human rights but also as an exploration of how the human is integrated in the cosmos.

alejandro t. acierto The Violence of Possession: Images of abjection in digital economies 

“The violence of possession” is a lecture-performance delivered by the (fictional) archivist and scholar Emiliano Ignacio Maria Silang. As the chief archivist for the Archive of Constraint, Silang discusses the emergence of the archive as a form of digital harm reduction in which he attempts to relieve us of the violence that occurs in the recirculation and redistribution of images made from traumatic pasts. Focused on ephemera made during the US colonial occupation of the Philippines in the early 20th century, Silang scans online retailers for images, objects, and ephemera that continue to sustain multiple formations of Pilipinx constraint, in what Catherine Ceniza Choy refers to as “corporeal colonization”, and remove them from the online marketplace through purchase. As image-objects that normalize the consumption of violent histories and spaces, ones developed under white supremacist values of settler-colonial possession, this project of removal continues the work of what Neema Githere calls “data healing” to respond to the “compounded effects of navigating digital infrastructures created to exploit, categorize, and discard personhood.” While material cultures of Pilipinx constraint are suspended indefinitely in servers online as digital images, they live in the purgatories of search results and haunt our queries with jpegs of abjection. While retailers are frequently unaware of these violent histories, they inadvertently contribute to the circulation of these formations of constraint through the digital imaging process needed to authenticate the objects as part of any online sale. As archivist and data healer, Silang traces the residuum of these images to offer us a way out through the development of his Archive. In the project of reclamation and repossession of this material culture from the trappings of online circulation, Silang shares strategies for how these images might be used or accessed in the future and prototypes different models for screen-based engagement.