Holding Open Space
(2025)
author(s): Nicola Visser
published in: Research Catalogue
This practice-as-research (PaR) project explores how we use our eyes in seeing and being seen within the context of the mover and witness roles, as practiced in the ‘open space’ segment of Contemplative Dance Practice (CDP). As a dance artist-researcher, I am interested in how a witness holds space for another in ways that go beyond the concept of ‘non-judgement’. My PaR was animated by the question: How do we hold ‘open space’ across distance? Framed in the context of Covid-19 social distancing, it opened up a research inquiry into practices of looking for the witness and leads me to propose that witnessing is not only an embodied technique but an improvisational skill.
Witnessing is a co-creative act, how we look changes what we see. My study was invigorated by the theoretical frameworks and writings of key thinkers—including Erin Manning on the Minor Gesture (2016, 2022, 2023), Eugene Gendlin’s practice steps of a Process Model (2017), and Lauren Berlant on transformational infrastructure (2017)—and finds re-orientation with/in the project of decoloniality. My methodology includes studio practice of MoverWitness relation in the open space segment of CDP, parallel methods of close reading, close talking (Schoeller 2022), ‘close drawing’ and ‘close dancing’, and interviews with artists about how they use their eyes in their practices. Ultimately, my PaR project formulates a principle and practice that I term Slow Seeing. The study of looking, attention and perception lead me to detail findings that contribute to ways of seeing as an epistemological concern. The insights are arranged into three broad fields. These include, first the practice as it pertains to contemplative dance training, where I propose a unit of embodied technique called ‘easy eyes’ and an improvisation score for the witness in a MoverWitness relation. Second, a reframing of CDP as a transformational infrastructure and a place of radical hospitality for fugitive gestures. And third, reflections on the socio-political implications of this eye practice and its potential to delink dance praxis as part of the project of decoloniality. A key insight is the notion that the eye technique and practice levers a shift in the sediment of our habitual unquestioned ordering of the world and cultivates courage in doing and knowing other-wise. It is strikingly significant because it wedges up a fulcrum and shifts the way we perceive small and big things —where we sit, how we stand, which tea we buy, movement, relation, migration, borders, identity, capitalism, power paradigms, ideology, the far away-nearby, love, everything-everything. So small. It makes a rupture, a crack, a glitch, and a fertile place for lively possibility
One Motorbike, One Arm, Two Cameras
(2015)
author(s): Ainara Elgoibar
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The idea of creating a video work exploring the question of how an industrial robotic arm would see a handmade product is used as a pretext to generate a meeting point for different local agents in the framework of the production of an art project titled 'Rodar y Rodear' ('To Shoot and to Surround') (2013).
The heirs of a post-civil war motorbike manufacturer (MYMSA) and the Barcelona Fab-Lab found it interesting to take part in the production of this artistic project, which is a film event built on the idea of dislocation in the common uses of its leading actors: a motorbike restored as a museum piece and an industrial robotic arm programmed to produce the image of something that was fabricated with a pre-robotic sensitivity.
This exposition explores the connections that arise between production processes in commercial cinema and the automotive industry, and the capacity that artistic research has to create a singular and significant space for mutual exploration.
Effacer-Voir
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Lynn Kodeih
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Réfléchir aux politiques de l’image, par le biais de l’intime, du fragment et de la matière. Aborder la matérialité avec la maladresse d’une apprentie. Jouer de sa vulnérabilité, transformer sa fragilité en action. Effacer pour voir.