BODY AS SPACE - Space as a transformative place
(2022)
Alejandra
Hey,
I'm Alejandra, the writer of this research, and before starting this journey I'm going to make a little summary of what you will experience if you decide to read, watch or listen more.
I'll start by introducing myself. I am a multidisciplinary artist, I am dedicated to aerial harness and contemporary dance, and sometimes I include art therapy -since I am also an art therapist- in my research, whether academic or personal, as an experiment.
This research is the result of two years of a master's degree in contemporary circus at UNIARTS, Stockholm.
The purpose of this research is to try to understand and be aware of what happens when space is transformed and the body becomes space.
Space understood as the place where bodies and movement are situated or inhabit, commonly characterised as unlimited, continuous or three-dimensional, as well as, on the other hand, a limited surface with common purposes. The physical body understood as that with mass, energy and three-dimensionality, which does not distinguish between human and non-human, material and living.
The manipulation of bodies as the action of manipulating with the hands, with other parts of the body or even with another instrument, is the idea of distorting reality, of transforming and transposing it. Through manipulation, or rather movement, space is changed and dialogues and stories are created. Since the concept of manipulation focuses on what the person wants to achieve, creating a hierarchy between bodies, and the concept of transformation can be understood as the exchange or dialogue between bodies, where everyone offers and receives, the term manipulation will be changed to transformation.
Transforming space as a horizontal place where bodies and movement inhabit; understanding bodies as that human and non-human, material and living, and movement as the means by which they dialogue with each other and with space. The transformation of space as a leap from what has so far been known as the manipulation of objects, with the aim of understanding the relationship between bodies and space as a circus discipline through movement as dialogue.
As an aerial harness dance artist working with suspension, distortion of reality and shifting perspectives between the vertical and horizontal plane, I seek to understand what happens to space when it is transformed through a series of methodologies and methods.
The methodologies employed focus on the practice of circus and dance, spatial architecture, the art therapy and the adaptation of bodies as pedagogy.
In terms of methods, there is a difference between those that already exist, such as the study of concepts and other projects, and others that emerge as a result of the research. The latter are new methods, concepts such as movement as dialogue, horizontality as a multidimensional space [the breaking down of boundaries between human - non-human and space – body], limitation and control as possibility, vulnerability as a potential, bodies as spaces; as well as pause, adaptation, installation and observation as means to understand the transformation of space and the body as space.
Treat this study within the field of research of new materialism with the aim of developing the potential of interconnectedness, understood as that which reciprocally relates bodies occupying a space, and spaces occupying a body; the means of expression that arises between body and space; and the breaking down of barriers inside, such as between living and material bodies, space and body, or the human being and everything else; within the circus with the aim of transforming the space.
According to this, what can space offer? and bodies? what can we offer them? what can be done with space and bodies? can bodies be considered as spaces? who [what] moves who [what]? can we blur the border between space and body? how can we break the hierarchy between human and non-human bodies? How does the circus inhabit space? where is the circus as a spatial practice? what is the circus? where does it begin and where does it end? could the transformation or transposition of bodies, both animate and material, human and non-human, be considered circus or a discipline within the circus?
And now, after this summary....
I invite you to travel with me during my two years of research.
Silence surrounds us, silence around us – on creativity in communication
(2022)
Erika Matsunami
Silence surrounds us, silence around us – on creativity in communication, which interacts with and addresses the theoretical and practical exploring of the artistic research for Green x (2022 –). Simultaneously, it might be possible to create an artistic method of intervention artistically, which aims at the theoretical level evolutionally.
Is language the tool? If it is yes, what kind of tool is the language? Through the language, what can we produce and provide? Thereby, I address the topic of creativity in communication in reading silently, speech, and listening. On creativity in communication is a play to draw models. Thereby the leitmotif is "reading".
Critical seeing in a model on reading subjectivity and objectivity at the online artistic representational level, Question for on creativity
The research objective(s) is a future idea for physical space and its mobility within virtual space (potentiality) for a new type of idea for notation between tradition and modernity.
In this aspect, towards international communication gaps between tradition and modernity, DADA solved the issue of communication and explored a new way of communication, that was not a philosophical metaphor, but rather that consisted of semiotics and semantics in the context of design, was creative. – New visual and auditory codes. Thereby I deal with “Tractatus logico-philosophicus”, that is a logic of nonsense by Wittgenstein in the theme of space, body and time.
"Silence surrounds us, silence around us" is an artistic research series, after "N.N-Zwischenliegend", I have been started to explore in 2020, after the corona-pandemic.
thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices
(2022)
Emma Cocker
THINKING AESTHETIC THINKING THROUGH AESTHETIC RESEARCH PRACTICES focuses on ways in which aesthetic research practices realize a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking. The aim of this project is to explore the following working hypotheses through aesthetic research practices as a foundation for different forms of reflection and dialogue between philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic research.
- Firstly, aesthetic research practices systematize forms of preeminently sensorimotor and emotional action, which are neither target-oriented nor will-based.
- Secondly, aesthetic action enables and intensifies immediate and unmediated interactions between researchers and the inquired issues, co-constituting a field of nonhierarchical, shared agencies.
- Thirdly, aesthetic interaction conditions the ongoing processes of sense-making between researchers and the inquired issues with the agency of destabilizing the habitualized forms and meanings with which these issues appear.
- Fourthly, on this basis, aesthetic thinking allows for disclosing new intelligibilities for the researched issues, that is, it enables the potentialities of radically new understandings to arise.
Since 2019, we — four artistic researchers: Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Nicole Wendel and Sabine Zahn — have been working together intensively within a series of exploratory sessions or even ‘laboratories’, inquiring through specific aesthetic practices the concept, performance and conditions of and for aesthetic thinking. This exposition presents a set of aesthetic research practices, a series of "Ecologies in Action' (a set of interconnected aesthetic research practices in relation) and research artefacts generated through this research project.