environment embodiment - towards poetic narratives

Academic summary

The artistic research project environment embodiment – towards poetic narratives explores the concept of agency in the context of encounters between body and environment. Proposing the body as an environment, the project draws from uncanny, poetic and embodied perspectives, while a single action is practiced cyclically throughout the research: walking backwards.

Situating itself in the performance field, the artistic works form a series, exploring performance in a hybrid dialogue with films and installations. As narratives, the research inhabits spaces between genres, braiding together poetry, facts, fiction, speculative mythology and theory. As method, poetry is present in every aspect of the artistic research as poetic imaginary, language, aesthetics and approach.

Branco’s embodied movement-voice-environment practice is shared through workshops that explore states of wonder, attentiveness, evocation, observation, sensorial awareness and perspectives of becoming-with these experiences.

The research is based on processual, regenerative modes of work, guided by explorations of cycles, rhythms, extended temporalities, embodied states of persistence, endurance and transformation, mostly, in dialogue with epistemologies and cosmologies of the Global South.

The documentation processes are artistic practices, focused on activating the imagination in relation to the loss of the experiential during the process of documenting live art works and embodied practices. Non-conventional forms of documentation are explored through drawing, poetic descriptions and participant testimonies, which are transformed into artistic printed objects.

The artistic mode of the research is informal and playful, developed on a collaborative basis with other artists (like musicians, visual artists, designers), places (like forests, sea, towns) and matters (including objects, other species and living beings), while exploring the capacity for self-generation through cyclical or long-lasting creative processes.