ELIA ’24: Teaching bodies and boundaries to blur: attuning bodies and worlds – Ulrike Scholtes & Ties van de Werff
Over the past decades, artistic research – research in and through art practices – has become a recognizable and justified form of knowledge production. Artistic researchers increasingly are called upon to normatively engage with topics of societal concern. While artistic researchers are expected to challenge the contexts they engage in, they often run the risk of becoming merely an icing on the cake. How can artistic research become truly transformative?
This workshop is made possible in collaboration with BLOB: https://www.ulrikescholtes.de/blob/
At research centre What Art Knows, we experiment with ways to foster a generous and resonating artistic research practice. We experiment with embodied methods, in order to attune researchers to research subjects, in ways that allow them to mutually and generously transform each other (Scholtes, 2022;2023). In this workshop, we collaboratively explore the idea that the contemporary planetary context asks for a form of embodiment in which bodies are not bounded by that which is contained by the skin. In this experiment, we show that what our planet needs is a conceptualization of the body that is different than the individual, bounded, and separated body (such as a “second body” proposed by Daisy Hildyard 2017). We adhere to breaking the one-body-one-person rule (Boll & Müller 2020) that has already been challenged by postmodern scholars who present bodies and boundaries as leaky, permeable or dissolving (Shildrick 1997, Mol 2002, Hildyard 2017). How does such a body feel in practice? How can embody methods allow artistic research to become more transformative?
In this workshop, we present body work exercises that provoke a feeling of blurry boundaries, practice attunement and feel connected. We end our session with a lively dialogue about the societal and planetary impact of thin-skinned, weakly bounded, and attuned artistic researchers, as well as how it may transform art education, by questioning/complicating individual authorship, voice and self (Strand 2022).
Take home exercises!
Blurring Boundaries Audio exercise 1
Blurring Boundaries Audio exercise 2
Writing Exercise: making embodied labour of art teachers explicit
More information about the Leaky Bodies Archives:
https://www.ulrikescholtes.de/blob/leaky-bodies-archives/
References:
Boll, T., Müller, S.M. Body Boundary Work: Praxeological Thoughts on Personal Corporality. Hum Stud 43, 585–602 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-020-09555-2
Hildyard, D. (2017). The second body. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple. Ontology in medical practice. Durham: Duke University Press.
Scholtes, U. (2022), ‘Feeling techniques: Making methods to articulate bodily practices’, Ph.D. thesis, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.
Scholtes, U. (2023). Finding Words for Feeling Bodies: Exploring Drawing Techniques in Dutch Care Practices. Medical Anthropology, 42(8), 828-844.
Shildrick, M. (1997). Leaky bodies and boundaries: Feminism, postmodernism and (bio)ethics. London: Routledge.
Strand, S. (2022) “On Mycelium, Compost, and Animate Sensibilities: A Conversation With Sophie Strand,” Embodiment Matters Podcast, Carl Rabke and Erin Geesaman Rabke. April 22 [Accesses January 12, 2024).