The Leaky Bodies Archives
A collaboration between research centre What Art Knows and art collective BLOB at the Dutch Design Week.
The Leaky Bodies Archives is an interactive installation which documents practices of leaking bodies. Contrary to the conventional understanding of the body as a closed, autonomous system, this project invites us to consider the body as porous, fluid, and inextricably intertwined with its surroundings. We adhere to breaking the one-body-one-person rule (Boll & Müller 2020) that has already been challenged by feminist scholars who present bodies and boundaries as leaky, permeable or dissolving (Shildrick 1997, Mol 2002, Hildyard 2017). The aim of the archives is to contribute to a radical rethinking of bodies and their boundaries and to undo the certainty of the body as unchanging, whole and one. Rather than a mere conceptual intervention, we aim to articulate how such an embodiment is practiced. We ask: how do leaky bodies feel?
We invite visitors to actively contribute to the archive by engaging their leaky bodies and documenting this experience in detail. Likening the process of documenting to a process of tasting – in which (e.g., tea) tasters learn to taste nuances through finding nuances in language (finding specific words for what they taste), we develop a language for specific forms of leaking. The process of documenting and archiving is a continues method-in-the-making. By experimenting with different categorizations, storing, and note-taking, the archive itself becomes a playground for radical forms of merging and leaking.
About the makers:
Research centre What Art Knows provides a space for developing new forms of art and knowledge. We do this by sidestepping any fundamental debate about whether art can be research and focus instead on enriching specific artistic research projects and the conditions in which these are practiced. We stimulate the reflexive development of relevant techniques and practices, focus on methodologies-in-the-making, and construct sensitive and transformative methods that disturb classic academic conventions, as well as common artistic practices. In particular, What Art Knows focusses on three aspects of artistic research: non-linear documentation, ethics and engagement, and embodied methods. As part of embodied methods, we explore and cultivate forms of embodiment that enable researchers to attune to their research subjects in ways that allow them to mutually and generously transform each other (Scholtes, 2022;2023). One of such embodiments involves articulating the labour of leaking or dissolving as a methodological skill.
More information: https://whatartknows.nl
Art collective BLOB is inspired by the blob fish: an underwater creature that lacks structure and form above the water and only gains substance and sustenance through the pressure of the environment in the depths of the ocean. In our practice, we foreground the conditions within which our practices can take place and constantly seek new ways in which (sometimes seemingly limiting) circumstances can be artistically generative. BLOB is a caring and restorative art practice with humoristic and absurdist edge. BLOB interventions take shape in fluxus-like performances, gatherings, installations/spaces, exercises and small publications. Concepts and practices of leaking, merging, and dissolving are part and partial of BLOB, both thematically as well as methodologically.
More information: www.ulrikescholtes.de/blob
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.
Scholtes, U. (2024) ‘Working Words: Words as tools to visualize embodied labour’, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Special Issue 2: ‘Ways of Writing (WoW)’.
Shildrick, M. (1997). Leaky bodies and boundaries: Feminism, postmodernism and (bio)ethics. London: Routledge.