Embodied Workshop in the Women’s Art Library

Entangled with

the work of

Esmeralda Valencia Lindström’s

A Wet Archive exhibition

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.

During the workshop I invited participants 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 the Women’s Art Library.

An embodied conversation between Esmeralda Valencia Lindström’s A Wet Archive exhibition and the research of Marie Theresa Crick to explore resonances others round the table.

This research exchange event was organised by Special Collections and Archives to highlight innovative artistic research looking at the Women's Art Library collection. This informal embodied discussion began with ideas raised by Esmeralda Valencia Lindström's research for the exhibition, A Wet Archive, and her discovery or recovery of the hidden life of the archive's materials and its built environment as manifested through fungi and attempts at tracing water damage through the Rutherford building.

‘The result was a uniquely live display and a new perspective on the archive as a not-so-static entity, giving us the space to consider what resists preservation as well what is overlooked in these spaces of recorded histories. Esmeralda was joined by Marie Theresa Crick (PhD Visual Cultures) who introduced her research and the overlaps with A Wet Archive.’ Text from the event.

Before the event, I shared an invitation into my research…

‘Marie Theresa Crick’s research positions a ‘Feminine-to-Come’, a radical within but ‘not yet’, to offer potentials to reorientate what was transmitted, in forms of ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ within the Irish Catholic mother and daughter relation, to the present by the displacement of women from the Republic of Ireland to London, in the late 1950s. Thus, seeking to illuminate ‘the livedness’ in the Irish Catholic maternal imagination through a methodology that flows with a re-reading of Luce Irigaray’s shared air, Marie Theresa’s film practice of watery filmic bodies of breath and movement in collective embodied research spaces, to inhabit a reorientation of ‘fixed’ archives of the Irish State and Catholicism. Marie Theresa will be thinking about the potentials of fluidity in a ‘wet archive’ and especially the Irish book which was found by the water in Esmeralda Valencia Lindström’s exhibition’. Link

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.