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.
Queers, Crips, and Mermaids: Disruptive Bodies as Performative Objects
(2021)
author(s): Kamran Behrouz
published in: Research Catalogue
This chapter attempts to analyze and unfold interlinked layers of a research-performance, in two interconnected site-specific Acts. First Act (Collision) happened in St. Moritz 2020 and the second Act was performed a year later in Bern 2021 . By adopting the notion of “cosmopolitics” as a method, this Performance attempts to speculate inter-relativity of human and non-human bodies within the capitalist matrix of species hierarchy. Through comparative analysis of different psycho-cultural/political narratives, this text attempts to map out interconnected traumas of transspecies; wounds and scars that are older than our bodies, older than ourselves. This text uses diffractive reading of these two Acts through the histories of the figure of the mermaid and the witch, In order to queer the hegemonic interpretations of both figures.