Poner el cuerpo – Making spaces public
(2023)
author(s): Rossanaconda
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In this exposition, I expand the notions and practices of collective body-action intervention (dance, performance, happenings, etc.) as a method to strengthen embodied knowledge, an instigation to engage in restorative encounters, and an invitation to intervene and disrupt political biases of (public) spaces. These methodologies propose alternatives for knowledge exchange/production beyond hegemonic, Eurocentric education.
In parallel, I reflect on my own practice and the anti-patriarchal and decolonial feminist political basis of the collectives of which I am part. We work with strategies and methodologies inspired by feminisms from the Global South, such as taking care of others as a practice that puts aside the patriarchal capitalist model of life that mainly separates, individualizes, prioritizes, and promotes competition and exploitation. We promote exchange, cooperation, and interdependence. I reflect on how these encounters summon the festive memory of our territories and the resilience of our* wounds.
Emotions of the bodies and the resistances will trigger our rituals in Abya Yala**, the flows and drifts will make this poetic-affective encounter, as will the skin itself.
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*We: Here I refer to collectivity in a broad sense in each case: We as the collectives I am part of, we as women (cis, trans, nonbinary), we as immigrants, we as bipoc, etc
**Abya Yala: Self-determined name for the territories in the global south named "America" as a result of the colonizing process.
The Last Portrait: A microscopic view of transience, mourning and loss
(2017)
author(s): Lucy Willow
published in: Research Catalogue
In 2009, I began a photographic series of work titled Memento Mori (remember that you are mortal and will die) based on the melancholic symbolism of 17th Century Dutch Vanitas paintings. Appropriating the symbolic language found in these paintings, I was looking to draw attention to the parallel beauty found in both life and death. The images contained rotting fruit, decaying animals, bubbles, extinguished candles and jewellery to serve as a reminder of the transience of everything in life. The paintings held, within them, an understanding of a narrative from 17th Century culture, which warns against the vanities and temptations in life such as wealth, knowledge, lust and earthly pleasure. The narrative emphasises how we ought not to be distracted by these, but remain focussed on the spiritual, the afterlife. I borrowed the symbolism in order to examine mortality. In the reflection of a sad and moth-eaten taxidermied magpie I saw my own grief, resting between its tatty feathers as I photographed its stuffed corpse. I bought a lambs heart and placed it in the centre of a still life, to signify young loss, vulnerability and sadness. I hid any outward signs of mourning amongst a symbolic visual language that found its expression in the photograph. What else could I do? Working into the surface of the photograph with water, I was able to bleed and merge the colours, giving the surface a visceral, opulent quality that made the image feel as though it was disappearing and rotting in the presence of the viewer. The colour was an externalization of what was happening, on the inside: the feeling of dissolving. I was looking to understand death through the arrangements of objects I assembled and photographed. An event, once photographed, becomes more real. I photographed death, drawing it close, feeling its omnipresence intimately in the midst of life. A photograph confirms reality. The scythe of death cuts through all the unnecessary in life, bringing us to stillness at the core of our being, where nothing else exists but a silent longing for the peace it brings.
WCEH 2024 Craftivist
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Britta Fluevog
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Britta Fluevog, Venera Winiwarter & Anna Svensson set up a series of craftivist projects, workshops and a makerspace at the world congress of environmental history conference in Oulu, Finland 2024 and this space documentation of this.
In The Ordinary And Ineffable Instant
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Madelief van de Beek
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Visualisation of Thesis Koud en wit en bleek: Perceiving time in times of grief
When gathering - and singing - is no longer safe
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Kristin Norderval, Linda H. Lien, Jonas Howden Sjøvaag
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The human voice is vital to the creation of rituals around important and existential life events: to celebrate, to mourn, to commemorate, to protest. Speeches, chants, singing, intoning, shouting are all used to mark these events. What happens when the voice itself is dangerous, instead of healing? How do we engage in ritual and vocal expression? This explores the actions and sounding strategies taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Oslo, spring 2020.