Counterfield
Embodied Research and Movement Workshop
24 November 2022
Goldsmiths, University of London

Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine

An invitation to breathe and move:

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,
Exhale,
And find a place to settle.
When you are ready, I invite you to listen with your body.

This embodied research and movement workshop was a collaborative session facilitated by myself, Daphna Westerman, and Jiaying Gao, as part of the research collective Counterfield.

The workshop departed from my filmic body Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine, an in-process film exploring breath, and the poetics of the hydro-feminine. We invited participants to move and think collectively, activating their bodies in dialogue with the screen and each other.

Workshop Description:

Held in-person, with Jiaying Gao joining virtually from China, this session welcomed participants of all backgrounds, no prior dance experience was required. Together we explored filmic bodies of breath and suffocation through improvisational movement and guided reflection.

The workshop emerged from Ocean as Archive, a Master’s module in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths. It was shaped by feminist, queer, and decolonial inquiries into the oceanic as a site of loss, transmission, and speculative futurity.

The Filmic Body: Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine

This work is a meditation on breath as archive, water as relational medium, and the ‘feminine-to-come’ as a tidal presence. Filmic Breath becomes a methodology: the film itself breathes—in digital, analogue, and post-lens (found footage) forms.

As we collectively inhabited the rhythm of this filmic body, we were unknowingly shaping what would become a central methodology in my PhD research, exploring the Irish Catholic maternal through breath, shared air, and embodied transmission.

Literary Anchors and Feminist Currents:

The texts that hold this filmic body drift in and out like tides. I felt with and through the 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)

• Manoka in Mohale Mashigo’s Intruders (2018)

Reading these fictions, I pulled fragments that resisted narrative containment; acting as anchors and ruptures throughout the film. The voice slows with the breath. Rhythms traced the contours of an oceanic archive.

The piece is also in dialogue with Luce Irigaray’s Marine Lover and The Forgetting of Air, thinking with her invocation of breath as a ‘tangible invisible’—a passage between autonomy, feminine subjectivity, and woman-to-woman sociality.

Process and Exhibition Context:

The film was also part of the Choreo Archive exhibition at SKEWED Gallery (Nov 2022), which explored archive-making through dance and movement workshops. Jiaying Gao, co-curator of the exhibition, joined the Counterfield session virtually from China.

Working with breath, bodies, and the Skin of the Film (Laura U. Marks), I began my search here for a reorientation of the Irish Catholic maternal through filmic breath and Irigarayan shared air.

The Repetition Is Intentional.

We hold the shared breath.
We resist forgetting.
We move with breath and memory.
We return to rhythm.

The filmic bodies are part of my ongoing embodied practice—only stills are shared here.
To truly meet them, come breathe, move, and listen with us in future workshops.

Remember to breathe.

Instagram:
@mtcdigitalcreative
@daphnawesterman
@jaelyn.999

This workshop took place as part of counterfield’s ongoing workshop series, which explores embodied, experimental, and collective approaches to theory and practice.

counterfield is a research and practice collective where practitioners and researchers experiment with emergent forms of knowledge production. As a core member, I contribute to its commitment to disrupting institutionalised modes of learning and blurring the boundaries between theory and practice. Rooted in the geography of visual cultures, counterfield offers an informal and nourishing space to push boundaries, move beyond dominant academic parameters, and co-create alternative methodologies. Our work embraces performance, embodiment, curatorial experimentation, and collaborative inquiry, foregrounding relational feedback, situated learning, and what it means to stay afloat in complex research streams.