Counterfield

Embodied

Research and

Movement Workshop 

‘Feminine-to-come’, and the Poetics of Filmic Breath

As part of Counterfield and thinking with researcher Sara Simić, (MA degree in Women and Gender Studies at Central European University | Researcher: women artists, oral history, and feminist film history | Trainee at Centropa)

2 October 2023

Soon, we will weave the spaces as we speak.

Together,

we breathe these words,

inhaling and holding them,

if only for a second,

before we have to exhale again.

We do not determine the space that surrounds us,

between us,

that passes as shared air,

if only for a moment.

We breath, we move, we feel.

These words were written collectively with Graduate Tutor and PhD researcher, Killian O’ Dwyer as part of counterfield, research collective.

These words that collide with my breath, have come to play with each other, collected and pieced together by conversations with members of Counterfield, and with myself and Sara Simić. Conversations by bodies of water in Brighton, Venice, Dublin, Zagreb, Berlin, Budapest, London and yet unknown seas that flow between us and beyond our joint horizon.

These words open the space for each embodied research and movement workshop from this workshop onwards.

This welcome event (introducing members to the research collective counterfield) invited members to think and move with the research collective Counterfield.

Working collaboratively with researcher Sara Simić, from our meeting at the Birkbeck Critical Theory Summer, thinking, speaking, listening together over the summer in online spaces to this collective space at Goldsmiths, to understand how our research projects speak to the other and how they can converse with other bodies of knowledges.

As we wove the spaces as we spoke,

we inhaled and held for the other,

our at first seemingly disparate archives,

one whose story is based in intergenerational gendered trauma of Holocaust in Croatia of one family of Jewish women and the other personal, and public rooted in the Irish State, Catholicism and the maternal.

We shared these archives with

words,

breath,

texts

and

filmic bodies.

The thread formed in our motions to think archives

‘otherwise’,

(I can’t think of this ‘otherwise’ without

Saidya Hartman and

Tina Campt and

also to speak here with the

potential for radical practice, and Bridget Crone and Advanced Practices).

away from vision,

concrete knowledges,

knowing…

Close your eyes.

Listen with your body.

This workshop thought through my research as a mode of being in motion, constantly traversing across the Irish sea between Ireland and England, ebbing and flowing with other bodies of water, activated by written utterances in my Irish familial archives, where I first felt the wayward ‘feminine-to-come’. Working within archives that resist this movement, the suitcase of my aunt’s that hasn’t departed since its loss forty years ago to the public textual and filmic archives of the Irish State and Catholicism.

Asking what was activated by the immigration of women who left Ireland for England in the 1950s, watched by the Irish Chaplaincy in London?

‘The feminine’ we invoked at the beginning of the event is rooted in our (the convenors) shared understanding, which acts as a threshold for the feminine-to-come. During this co-facilitated workshop, we welcomed participants to collectively explore and feel Filmic Bodies of Breath through activating our bodies while thinking of these modalities.

We invited participants to think/feel collectively again, setting in motion dialogues with new filmic bodies by Marie Theresa, to join in spaces that are constantly being remade by unfolding conversations. The filmic bodies question the modalities of the ‘tangible invisible’ shared breath that are positioned by Luce Irigaray and the potentialities to open to autonomous feminine subjectivity and sociality to emerge within these relationships.

Remember to breathe.

We asked participants to move with us, but movement wasn’t essential.

This is our collective archival practice,

to open to the

potentials of ‘the-feminine-to-come’.

The workshop, ‘Feminine-to-come’, and the Poetics of Filmic Breath tangled with ‘Indeterminate Transmissions’ and in-person movement workshop co-facilitated with artist Daphna Westerman, dancer and researcher Jiaying Gao and myself as part of counterfield’s series five workshop series, ‘Activating Indeterminate Encounters’. 

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. These workshops moved through public spaces and with students of the module Ocean as Archive on the Masters in Contemporary Art Theory. Opening each time with the departure from my film ‘'Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine'.

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.