Ocean as Archive

Embodied

Research and

Movement Workshop 

2022

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 MA in Contemporary Art Theory in the Ocean as Archive module. This workshop was co-facilitated with artist Daphna Westerman.

Opening with the departure

from my film Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine'

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. 

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)

Remember to breathe.

The film mirrors breath and the feeling of suffocation by using a filmic language which connects the ‘cuts’ in editing to the beats and pulsations in the reading materials. The bodies and voices of the feminine voices and all bodies that inhabit the reading materials may not have visibility, but I wanted them to be sensed by the creation of movement in the water that I filmed.

I sought an abstract of filming, using my Canon 5D Mark IV and iphone, to film textual clips that hoped

to capture the presence of bodies moving off screen,

whilst the light tangles with the particles left to dance on screen, showing the relation to different bodies and the ocean.

I allowed my breath to affect the camera whilst filming, letting the camera move with my breath.

The decisions of the ‘cuts’ were made by mapping in many forms from the counting of syllables and punctuation in the parts of the poems, texts, spoken work and so forth, that I chose, to the duration and types of camera angles, of the pulsation of the colour blue and movement between underwater and above to the appearance and disappearance of an ocean snake.

Thinking with Han Ok-hee’s 16mm film Untitled 77-A (1977) – ‘A cut is how one image meets another, forming a relation. Creation and destruction inseparable’ (Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg pp18). In post-production, I played in many registers with the filmic breath; length of ‘cuts’ mirroring the breath in the reading materials and sharpening images when the breath quickens and decreasing the readability when it slows – a soft and grainess. Finally, the edited sound played with the intensities of differing breaths. 

Remember to breathe.

The film seeks to cast the viewer as an interlocutor, entering at different points at will, feeling with the ebbs and flows of the water on screen, just as Achille Mbembe hopes his readers will do as they move at will through Necropolitics.

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.

Remember to breathe.