environment embodiment - towards poetic narratives

Vitenskapelig sammendrag

The artistic research environment embodiment – towards poetic narratives  explores the concept of agency in the context of encounters between body and environment. The research inhabits spaces between genres, styles, media and disciplines, while braiding together facts, fiction, documentary and poetry.

From a sympoiesis’ perspective of becoming-with-each-other (Harraway, 2016), the project proposes the body as an environment, drawing from uncanny, poetic and embodied perspectives. A single action is practiced cyclically throughout the research: to walk backwards.

The embodiment practices explore states of wonder, attentiveness, evocation, observation, sensorial awareness, and acts of becoming-with those experiences. The practices draw inspiration from the Micro- phenomenology interview method (Petitmengin, 2017), in which awareness is focussed on and in the micro-gestures of experience.

Positioning itself in the performance field, the artistic works form a series, exploring performance in dialogue with films, poetry, installations, lectures, invited artist talks and workshop explorations based on Branco’s embodied movement-voice practices.

The research is based on processual, regenerative modes of work guided by explorations of cycles, rhythms and extended temporalities, and embodied states of persistence, endurance and transformation. Proposing works which explore regenerate-ability by undertaking long-lasting creative processes with minimal production values, in collaboration with other artists (musicians, visual artists and designers) and places (beach, sea, town). As method, poetry is present in every aspect of the artistic research.

Informal, playful and collaborative experimentation is the project’s modus operandi. In this project documentation processes are artistic practices,  explored through drawing, poetic descriptions, anecdotes and participant testimonies. These atypical documentation processes all focus on activating the imagination particularly in relation to the loss of the experiential when documenting live art works and embodied practices.

References: 

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble - Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Bitbol, Michael; Petitmengin, Claire. Neurophenomenology and the Micro-Phenomenological interview. The Blackwell Companion to consciousness. Wiley & Sons, 2017.