Is My Arm the Firearm?

A workshop programmed as part of the Embodiment research strand of the fourth biennial research conference on Violence.

Date: Tuesday 22 March 2022
Time: 10:00-12:00
Place: Högskolan för scen och musik, A302 Lindgrensalen
Address: Högskolan för scen och musik, Fågelsången 1, 412 56 Göteborg
Language: English

Dages Juvelier Keates proposes to lead a breathwork and embodiment workshop centered on the body’s experience of anxiety in the context of climate collapse. The workshop is based on a long-term choreographic investigation of trauma held in the body and expressed by it. Open to up to 15 participants in real life, this workshop is accessible to people of all abilities. Participants are invited to consider their bodies as weather-vanes for the impending violent transformation of society. Please wear clothes you are comfortable moving in on the ground.

Humans are living through the collapse of the climate as we know it in the world we have made. This process is the horizon for all thought and cultural production. Pandemics, massive land fires, intense hurricane activity, acidification of the seas, deforestation and crop failure are the most recent catastrophic symptoms of this collapse. Despite how concrete these symptoms are, what is happening to us is unknowable in the sense that we cannot comprehend transformation on this scale. As a result, human beings are experiencing extreme forms of anxiety on a structural level — we are experiencing trauma collectively, yet trauma moves through our bodies individually.

Our overlapping crises are profoundly sensible and must be addressed at the level of the body, as archives of absence, as material memory. Which prostheses, objects, fantasies, third spaces do we create to extend ourselves? To make war, seek sex, fill or “fix” the situation we are in? These questions are methodologies toward reckoning with the somatic impact of large-scale structural violence. The practices proposed in this workshop reveal how we remember, forget, bond, defend, learn, organize, sequence information, and relate to ourselves, others, and the world.

Juvelier Keates’ artistic research employs choreographic and poetic methods as disparate discourses through which to feel what the body is, where it extends, and to whom it may belong. Drawing on philosophies of embodiment in psychoanalysis, somatics, queer and feminist studies, Juvelier Keates activates fantasied internal cartographies of the body, resulting in metaphors and methods for living-in, and caring-for, the ecology that is “the self.” The title for this workshop emerges from performance artist Faye Driscoll’s practice and forthcoming new work “Oh, Holy Hole!” premiering New York Live Arts 2022/23, focusing on touch: its absence, its necessity, its politics. Juvelier Keates’ is in ongoing dramaturgical work with Driscoll.

The workshop will be in English but we will do our best to help facilitate multiple languages.

The workshop will be facilitated by MC Coble.

MC Coble (they/them)  is a non-binary trans artist and educator who’s worked with performance art for over 20 years.  Their practice revolves around trans*/queer/ feminists politics, play, failure and intersectional activism. Coble has recently taught the course Perspectives on Performativity and Feminist Artistic Practice at Högskolan för scen och musik and was a Senior Lecturer at Valand Academy until 2019.

For any questions please contact: mc@mccoble.com

This workshop is open to all but places are limited. Link to register: https://forms.gle/hCdUb5kvkKotNYNh8