Public defence: Fernanda Branco

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. Throughout the research, a single action is practised cyclically: 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 by weaving poetry, facts, fiction, speculative narrative and theory. As a method, poetics is present in every aspect, such as the imaginary, language, aesthetics and approach.

The developed embodied practice of movement-voice-environment is based on regenerative modes of working. It approaches states of wonder, attentiveness, evocation, observation, listening, sensory awareness and perspectives of becoming with these experiences.

The approach to artistic research is informal and playful. It explores the capacity of works to self-generate through cyclical or long-lasting processes guided by embodied states of persistence, endurance, and transformation. The research is developed in co-creation with places and matters while also collaboratively with other artists, primarily in dialogue with the epistemologies and cosmologies of the Global South.

The documentation processes are taken as artistic practices focused on activating the imagination in relation to the loss of the experiential during the process of documenting live artworks and embodied practices. This project engages with exploratory forms of documentation through drawings, poetic descriptions, and testimonies that are transformed into other artistic works or artist books in fanzine formats.

The Dragonfly constellation represents this artistic research project, and each work composing its results is one of the seven star-creatures forming this constellation.