BA Feminist and Queer Technoscience Module

Goldsmiths, University of London

Embodied Research and Movement Workshop ‘Feminine-to-Come’ in the Irish Catholic Maternal and the Poetics of Filmic Breath, ‘Réidhleán’

4 December 2023

I invite you to move around your space,

trace the floor with your feet,

How does the ground feel against your body,

How does the air move around you?

inhale,

exale,

and find a place to settle.

When you are ready, I invite you to listen with your body.

Dr Lenka Vráblíková invited me to explore my embodied research and movement workshop with her students on the BA Feminist and Queer Technoscience module.

During the workshop I invited students to collectively explore and feel ‘Filmic Bodies of Breath’ of an in-process filmic body, - Poetics of Filmic Breath in the Irish Catholic Maternal and previous filmic bodies of my practice within the space of Goldsmiths University of London.

Text from the workshop

‘We will explore together ways of conversing between our individual and collective bodies and that of the textual and filmic bodies. As we move, we do so with uncertainty and unknowing, through conditions and materiality of audio, video, digital rhythms, wifi interruptions, text and memory spaces. We come together physically in this space, our bodies and breath that vibrate with the filmic bodies that come to converse with us.

I invite you to find a space within this room to sit.

Before you do, move as much as you want to,

until you feel ready to settle.

Notice the bodies around you.

Notice how the air feels and moves between and upon your body.

Connect with the floor once you find your position.

Notice how the air feels on your body in contrast to the floor.

We dance with and are affected by the air around us,

whilst forgetting the earth.

Here we feel the presence of the Réidhleán, one of the 35 Irish words for field, which translated to English means to play and dance in a field.

‘Please close your eyes.

Listen with your body

Open your eyes at any point you feel ready to as I read these words.

I offer these words to enter this embodied research and movement workshop together.’

Remember to breathe.

The physical space at Goldsmiths with 20 student and myself, became a space to read, move, breath, pause, and think the Irish Catholic maternal together.

Listening,

feeling,

pausing,

and

moving together

in this institutional space in London with the

embodied modalities

of the mother and daughters

I hope to collectively think with.

Filmic body that weaves in and out of this workshop - Poetics of Filmic Breath in the Irish Catholic Maternal

The digital filmic bodies are forming and un-forming through my processes of post-production film editing, which includes cutting, layering and transitioning the visuals and audio. The film practice explores amateur and experimental cinema, characterized by blurry, sometimes illegible, washed out visuals as a tool for the “assumption of an autonomous gaze,” to enable an entering into, ‘a world that does not belong to me … but that is impregnated by me.” (Balsom, Erika, Peleg, Hila, Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, The MIT Press, (2022))

Remember to breathe.

In my filmic body Poetics of Filmic Breath in the Irish Catholic Maternal, the visual and audio of the bodies of water are impregnated with my breath and that of my mother’s as they flow with the breath of the audio that layers throughout. 

Remember to breathe.

The cuts and sonic flows are made and remade through the breath and suffocation of the state, Catholic and personal archives I am working with. I began a practice of hand-writing spoken words of films and texts within the Radharc archive and the archives of the Library of Ireland, which insisted when inhabiting the ‘Feminine-to-Come’.

Remember to breathe.

The filmic bodies are part of the embodied practice and just the stills are present here. Coming along to future workshops to move, breath, pause, listen with the filmic bodies of my practice.

Remember to breathe.