This paper presents the trajectory of the artist researcher Graziela Andrade. She based herself on the experience with her daughter to search new approaches to rehabilitation centered on the subjectivity of the disabled person. The goal is to integrate art and Somatics to deepen the understanding of the intersection between dance and disability. The methodology includes knowing, practicing and discussing the somatic technique spiral praxis in an affective research, in which the personal experience of the researcher is essential. This involves being affected by practice, moving the theory and fostering political and ethical reflexivity, with a plural, performative writing to explore and communicate these impacts. Researchers from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Federal University of Minas Gerais), under the coordination of Graziela, investigated and shared the process with the brazilian audience through workshops, video lessons and interviews on YouTube. The considerations for this field highlight dance as a knowledge that goes beyond common sense, reflecting the history and identity of the dancer.
Another Delicious Story consists of photography and video taken by my preschool-aged child with text and narration by myself, his mother. This video essay contemplates such questions as “How does a four-year-old frame photographs?” “What is a ‘punctum’ to a four-year-old?” and finally, “What stories do a mother and child tell each other?” I compose alongside the children’s book A Delicious Story by Barney Saltzberg, which consists of an absent or eaten narrative within a narrative, within a third unfolding story. As I trace how my child appears to be trying to externalize embodied affects and feelings in the photographs he takes, I relate this, inversely, to A Delicious Story, which brings the outside in, in the form of an edible (consumable) story.
This video essay argues and shows a form of academic symposium curation that works to combat epistemic coloniality. Convened by Caroline Gatt and Valeria Lembo, the symposium held in Aberdeen in May 2018 was called “Of Words and Sounds”. Gatt and Lembo organised this symposium with the explicit aim of holding space for different ways of knowing and acknowledging their scholarly value. Epistemic coloniality delegitimises and attempts to erase a wide variety of ways of knowing. The university has been and remains key in what has also been referred to as epistemicide. It is the institution of the university which consecrates the epistemologies considered properly scholarly, and defines for instance Indigenous, non-Western, performative, gendered, neurodiverse, poor ways of knowing as mere culture or belief. In other words, as forms of non-knowledge. Collaboration was the basis of the principles of the way Gatt curated the symposium; organising a meeting, where the most important underlying aim was to enable the participants to have meaningful encounters with each other. To share their work and experiences in ways that made sense on their own terms.
Our work is a collection of artefacts: drawings, storyboards, films, music and poems created by a tribal community in rural India during interactive workshops which used various participatory arts-based methods to tell stories about the experiences related to a new solar powered community building. Energy use is deeply connected with human cultures, practices, norms and values. This article challenges assumptions about linear progress between energy access and women’s empowerment, demonstrating that the impact is not immediate but requires social adaptation over time. It gradually uncovers complex power dynamics and social hierarchy within the tight-knit community. This article is also a five-year journey (2019–2024) of four different researchers from diverse backgrounds and their attempts to capture and edit various acts of thinking surfaced through these methods. As global momentum towards sustainable energy gathers pace, our work reflects different ways of engaging, stimulating various ways of thinking and structuring dialogue about energy transition within the community. We focus on the potential of these methods to capture the embodied dimensions in the forms of artefacts as shown in the film. We position our work as a novel approach in energy studies that uses the lens of embodied research to understand the frictions of social realities in energy transitions, and surfaces hidden factors like socio-economic status, stakeholders’ involvement, and the critical role of gender in energy.
This video article draws on visual and textual materials developed as part of a doctoral research project that examined embodied and sensory encounters with fashion and clothing. The core focus was on understanding the significance of embodiment in fashion and exploring opportunities for redirection through critical approaches to researching embodied experiences and exploring and representing those experiences in the broader context of fashionable representation. To achieve this, the research developed and applied a digital video-based methodology, which allowed for the identification, elaboration, and thematization of sartorial behaviors and actions. This video article presents eight digital video works as a sequential series, developed using the aforementioned methodology. These videos synthesize the primary findings of the research into a visual form and invite viewers to engage in a somatically felt reflection on them. At the same time, the video article details the development and process of the sartorial sessions as specific contexts where body-garment relations can be examined. The audio narration accompanying the visual content is derived from the textual material of the research. It combines contextual information, visual descriptions, and analysis of the images on screen, using selected passages from the written thesis. The aim of the article is to cultivate reflexive forms of sensory knowledge in fashion, encouraging viewers to become more attuned to the sensory dimension of fashion.
An improvised, one take, partially live exploration of the relationship between body and world as intermaterial. A poetic layering of movement, images, words, things and sites. Based in a Berlin living room and on the island Suomenlinna, outside of Helsinki.
Polly Hudson, “These Hands: an EcoSomatic approach to a woman’s labour - of the body, and on the land” (6:31). This video essay is part of an ongoing practice as a gardener and dancer, a long-term project at an inner city urban allotment, entitled And So we Sow. The work responds to notions of women's labour from an EcoSomatic and eco-feminist perspective, drawing on principles from releasing dance practices particularly Skinner Releasing Technique, from permaculture, and from wider embodied engagement. // Ana Luiza Azevedo Dupas, “Practice of Resting, Reading and Translating the Text: ‘Hapticality, or Love’” (9:52). This video shows fragments of the workshop: “Practice of resting, reading and translating the text: ‘Hapticality or love’,” held online in the context of IV EIRPAC event in September 2021. From the practice of Eutony, participants of the workshop are invited to a somatic reading, and “transcreation” of the text, which is an excerpt from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. // Lea Spahn and Hana Magdonova, “‘Within the Memories of a Mountain’: Posthuman Embodying as Techno-material Becoming” (11:00). This video essay is based on footage from performance artist Hana Magdoňová during her 39-day stay in Hády – a renaturating quarry in the post-socialist Czech Republic. Through an immersive layering of (video)images, sounds, and spoken words, the essay depics embodied encounters with this space and reads them through feminist materialist and posthumanist thinkers highlighting the entanglement of bodies, technologies, things, and other beings on a planetary scale.
This article is a crossing through the Anthropocene. Between the body and the landscape, between the past and the future, between concepts and dances, between Edouard Glissant and the Atlantic Ocean, between tremor and uncertainty, between the Forest and Monoculture, between dance and the visual arts, between poetry and concepts, between the body and philosophy, between the animal and the plant, between what I desire and what I get, between Emanuele Coccia and the butterfly, between the thousand names of Gaia, the anthropology and what remains of our planet. They are letters thrown into the sea, directed to the landscapes that inhabit me, written with pieces of images and sounds that were inside my body/computer in these last years of journey. Shared in a list, like an alphabet in ruins, a (un)alphabetical order. Each letter carries a journey in itself: a way of doing and thinking about dance, an invention of a world that is possible to imagine today.
Sonic Kinesthetic Forest is an interdisciplinary research project that explores novel methodologies for studying trees and forests through embodied sound, movement and drawing practices. Our video article reflects on this interdisciplinary research through the lens of a performance piece in which embodied sound, movement and drawing practices were intricately interwoven with a forest landscape. The process of developing this artistic work has strengthened our conviction that embodied interdisciplinary knowledge is urgently needed to support and bring new dimensions to the wide array of nature-based climate action initiatives happening around the world today.
This Companion Issue continues the collaborative work of problematizing the notion of the ‘more-than-human’, which began with the summer solstice of 2021, by bringing together different artistic, educational and cultural ways of belonging to earth. The editorial explores listening-with as a speculative and generative (eco)somatic practice for attuning to the situatedness of each article and sensing the impact of audiovisual work in our bones and nervous fascial tissues. Our process deepened into the relation between listening and voicing - listening until a voice emerges. Alongside video excerpts from the authors’ works, we offer poetic resonances which make tangible the connective tissues between them. We conclude by discussing how embodiment as an ecological experience can transform established academic modes of knowing and doing by allowing a different aliveness into the inquiry.
The video article outlines an aesthetic theory of performative beauty. The article investigates experiences of beauty that occur while one is bodily engaged in an activity. The concrete case is the social dance Argentine tango. The article shows that the flow of interaction between the dancers and the music brings about the dance as an agent proper. The distributed agency allows for a situated, aesthetic awareness that includes the kinaesthetic awareness of the partner’s actions. This transactional awareness crystalizes as the sentiment of beauty.
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This video-essay is the output of a research on rurality and rural imaginaries. The research project focuses in textual and audio-visual materials to analyse diverse understandings of the rural. During a walk in the countryside, however, the researcher entered in a reflective state through the reading of the landscape, the embodiment self-awareness, and his direct interaction with the environment. Beyond stereotyped narratives and the discourse of the rural idyll, the reflective observation while the walk displayed richer, anti-idyllic and even cacophonous texts. This revelatory process nevertheless transported the researcher to a state of ontological, even existential, anxiety. His convictions, deeply rooted in social constructionism, were questioned, to some extent, damaged. The awareness of the meaningful materiality of rurality, expressed in texts, signs, stone borders or plant arrangement, ultimately led the researcher to a temptation to speculative realism.
