Still from film practice - Indeterminate Transmissions – ‘Hydro-Feminine’
Indeterminate Transmissions (In-Person) Movement Workshop
All welcome (No previous dance knowledge was required)
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.
Collaborative workshop with myself,
artist Daphna Westerman and
dancer and researcher Jiaying Gao
as part of research collective counterfield.
The filmic body,
'Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine'
was our space of departure,
as we explored Filmic Bodies of Breath
and suffocation
through activating our bodies
while thinking of these modalities.
My filmic body Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine is a meditation on the search of ‘other feminine’, the ‘feminine-to-come’, that is a 'hydro-feminine' through the poetics of 'Filmic Breath'.
'Filmic Breath' thinks with how
the filmic body itself breathes,
in its digital,
analog
and post-lens (found footage) forms.
This filmic body explored the modality of filmic breath,
and within this workshop,
how it could be held and thought collectively.
Flowing (unknowingly at this moment)
towards it becoming a methodology in my PhD research
thinking with the Irish Catholic maternal.
We invited participants to think and move collectively with us.
We hoped to explore the connection between our bodies and the moving image.
Instagram: @mtcdigitalcreative @daphnawesterman @jaelyn.999
** The film 'Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine' was screened at 'Choreo Archive' exhibition that opened on Saturday 5 November at 6pm at SKEWED Gallery. The exhibition sought to think archive-making through workshops that explore dance practice.
Jiaying Gao from 'Choreo Archive' will joined the workshop in this space at Goldsmiths, virtually from China.
Remember to breathe.
Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine sought to weave amongst the rhythmics of shared breath and suffocation, feeling with selected reading materials inspired and navigated through the modality of the Masters in Contemporary Art Theory module, Ocean as Archive.
Still from film practice - Indeterminate Transmissions – ‘Hydro-Feminine’
The filmic body cultivates the Irigarayan air, which was inspired by her text Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (1991/1980) and its relation to shared air in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (15 May 1999). This film questions the modalities of the ‘tangible invisible’ breath that are positioned by Irigaray and the potentialities to open to autonomous feminine subjectivity and woman-to-woman sociality to emerge within these relationships.
Remember to breathe.
The texts that hold the structure of the filmic body, move in and out with the feminine breath of
Anyanwu in
Octavia Butler’s
Wild Seed (1980)
Sila in
Yvette Christianse’s
Unconfessed (2007)
Piya in
Amitav Ghosh’s
The Hungry Tide (2004)
Adaora in
Nnedi Okorafor’s
Lagoon (2014)
and
Manoka in
Mohale Mashigo’s
Intruders (2018)
Still from film practice - Indeterminate Transmissions – ‘Hydro-Feminine’
Whilst reading these fictions, I pulled out the words that most spoke to the movement and textuality of archives of the ocean in my imagination. Acting as anchors throughout yet resisting a linear narrative and at times, the space to be read at all; feeling with breathing and suffocation.
The film seeks a fluid modality, a lyrical dialogue to feel with the rhythm of the polyphony of breath, that ruptures and defies distinction, mirroring the depths of the ocean; Irigaray’s ‘Feminine’ represented as a fluid that resists containers. These characters become the anchors of this film and offering the hand of entry into the film from the beginning.
As the breath slows in parts and mainly towards the end,
so do the voices of the characters.
Remember to breathe.
Feeling with the textuality and materiality of breath and working alongside Laura U.Marks the Skin of the Film. My search for the ‘feminine-to-come’ was activated in many threads that began to tangle together, including taking part in Ocean as Archive and conversations and the response to this film from Dr Lenka Vráblíková.
Filmic body that weaves in and out of this workshop - Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine
This filmic body began my search for an
reorientation of the
Irish Catholic maternal
through filmic breath and
Irigarayan shared air.
The repetition is intentional, as we hold the shared breath.
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.