Your body is water
Bodies moving
Bodies
Bodies of water
A body of water
A body in water
My body, your body
Our body
A body of work
The body of the group
Bodies are community
A refusal of body
Anti-body
Abjection
Anti-bodies
A body of water holds so much potential. Eventually bottled – consumed and abject. Always returning to its beginning, for it has no end. Constant transfiguration. Moving. Multiplying. A collective of individuals that shift together and apart. Supporting and supplying an eco-system. A body. An abject body. Holding the trauma of generations before. Washing over, through and onto us. Inviting us to connect and participate, holding space for what they have experienced before, to become anti-body, a collection of abject anti-bodies rushing over the shores and running from the tap. A community. A body.
We are a body of water.
I start by situating my practice within the idea of a community being a body of water. Recognising that we are one element of a much larger eco-system of living organisms, a raindrop within a tsunami. This begins to unfurl the hierarchies that we, as humans, incessantly create to form ‘order’.
A harrow breaks up the surface of the earth or the skin, an agitation of soil that has been left dormant too long where the harrow can excavate whatever ghosts, traditions, memories, viruses, melodies and gestures have been buried. The gallery reverts to barn; the barn disintegrates back to soil.[1]
My own practice centres itself around collaboration, encouraging a transparency of labour and influence. Forming relationships and connections to create cyclical learning environments that are inspired by the innate human need to move with people and be moved by them.
‘As the gallery reverts to barn; the barn disintegrates back to soil’[2], reminds me that art spaces and institutions have been born from the same earth that we have, a container with shifting potentiality. The materiality of the gallery can become anything, and the curatorial can be used as a mode or agent to catalyse a troubling of institutional thinking. The curatorial can act like water, flowing into different crevasses, the smallest raindrop of community engagement, becoming part of a much larger body, giving weight to the individual within the collective.
Wysing Arts Centre 2020 residents exhibition including Linda Stupart, Carl Gent and Kelechi Anucha, ‘and then, a harrowing’, in Stupart’s words, ‘re-ruralised the exhibition space’[3] She spoke of how they questioned the institution through valuing and exploring what lives in the soil beneath, in turn creating a chaotic, sensorial and emotional experience.[4] All adjectives that would not be attached to a traditional white cube exhibition format. Kelechi’s score of folk songs filled the space, shifting through voices and tongues, travelling like a virus from body to body, like a meme.
A meme is an ‘idea, behaviour, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture’[5] Translating facial expressions and reactions through new contexts to use humour to find relationships and likeness between one another. Meme’s travel through our phones, hand to hand, but are they truly embodied by the users, or is the interaction too fleeting? Abbas Zahedi spoke about the power of memes to be a form of institutional critique that transcend a conversation over a drink at a private view, to speak about and from an industry, moving from private to public. Archived through the internet, in multiple iterations, appropriated by many, like folk songs, for their own use and their own community. However in their common format they are a solo interaction; swipeable, tappable, saveable, only connected to a web of anti-bodies – through a like. Due to the vastness of the internet, when a meme is shared it is impossible to know exactly where it goes, there is an in-between space of delivery and connection, not too dissimilar to that of a performance, between artist and audience. There is no controlling the emotional response, nor how it may be changed or retold. Another body momentarily joining your community, them passing it on to create another moment of community. And all of this happening in tandem.
Meme thinking uses universal imagery to portray a thought or feeling in a didactic way, to be contextualised by the viewer without an explanation or an exhibition text polluted with art jargon. It is recognisable. Memes expand through imitation and arguably form communities, whether for just the moment that you agree or for an extended interaction. Meme’s have become a collective body of work, created by millions and seen by millions, remaining mostly anonymous as a shared product of the internet.
Bodies are a community.
I am interested in this notion of time in relation to encounter and how time effects community building. A community can be built in the five minutes that you are on the tube, or within generations of marginalisation. Within my own practice I am interested in how we can foster community building to shift value and importance on a cyclical learning environment that challenges single-artist genius narratives and hierarchal teaching methods. Could institutions and art spaces be more inclusive if the audience or participants are aware of their value? In the same way that a club night does not exist without the people in attendance and nor does a protest; this thinking could be transferred into an institution to create new communities that are dictated by the people in attendance and not taught by the hegemony.
However within this idea of community is a question of inclusive vs exclusive that Pil Kollectiv brought to my attention. In order for a community to be formed there is an idea of someone not belonging, for others to belong. But does this have to be a negative consideration? Eduoard Glissant’s theory of opacity asks us to;
‘agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics.’[6]
Glissant’s theory questions whether it is reducible and contradictory to attempt to understand everything about someone who identifies as different to oneself. Resulting in simplifying diversity in order for more to understand. However in order for our existences to weave together, they do not need to be completely transparent for our neighbour, they can co-exist mutually, plaited together with evenly distributed responsibility and weight. Our differences becoming integral to one another’s existence. To progress we must foster mutual respect for one another and not reduce to understand; honouring one another’s opacity. Not simply trying to attach our experience to another nor appropriate, to feel like we understand. Allowing for uncertainty or mutual respect to be developed- which if given time, space and value, could create a respect for otherness and enable multiple communities to work toward common goals.
Communities are formed therefore by an experience, or a shared moment, a shared loss – an empathetic encounter born from mutual respect. Stupart looks at ice caps as melting, weeping abject bodies.[7] To build a community to embody the climate crisis she created a didactic immersion of connecting her body to the ice caps and licking them, physically forming a connection to embody. Broadening our understanding of community to reach further than humans, to bond with nature and place, to situate us within a space that has the potentiality to transcend language and translation, arguably a learning memetic.
I am interested in Stupart’s use of the word abject in reference to the bodies of ice caps because within my own practice I embrace the negative notion of abject as a casting-off, to celebrate its slippery nature and inherent disruption of conventional identity and cultural concepts – embracing its otherness. She uses touch, tenderness and body connection to try to understand this abject and weeping ice cap. Visually embracing its otherness and trauma.
Julia Kristeva’s use of abjection is to ‘put forward notions of difference and alterity operating in relation to conventional discourses of visual pleasure’[8] In reframing Kristeva’s theories, Estelle Barnett explains abjection as becoming ‘a sign of difference and threat that refuses objectification.’[9] Therefore an abject curatorial could potentially then function to promote difference that refuses objectification within representational aesthetics, finding pleasure within its ambiguity and queerness. It can also be understood that abjection is a spatial concept of in-between, ‘is that which does not respect borders, positions and rules.’[10] Much like how a body of water can constantly shift within its borders, flooding and evaporating, it can move against the law and through different states; liquid, gas and solid. Water can then be seen as an abject body; we cast it off through bodily functions yet welcome it again in order to survive, its body transitioning. Stupart embodies the ice through her artworks, learning through physical touch, the trauma of the climate crisis held within nature.
Reclaiming abjection and transcending language through artworks and communities feels most urgent within my own work and wider society. Through my curatorial work, I look to how it can be abject within its ambiguity, moulding and shaping to different locales, in order to challenge borders and institutional control. Finding ways to respect bodies of communities, weaving together our differences without creating a transparency that belittles the individual. Moving forward I am interested in how communities that foster human and non-human connections can be created in order to connect with nature and find empathy, moving not only with one another but with the wind, the trees, the ice and the water, to counter capitalist thinking. To be uncontrollable. Noticing where that single raindrop falls, zooming in to our locale and our community to create greater social change, reclaiming abjection and feeling empathy for anti-bodies – for nature and for those who choose to refuse the hegemony.
The single rain drop’s path may not always be visible, or shouting amongst the noise, but it is integral to the ecosystem. When I think about whether socially engaged practice is worth it, or whether anyone is gaining anything from my work; I will now think of that single raindrop, that makes up an ocean of possibility. And whether one person takes something away or a thousand people do, all that matters is that the single rain drop is part of an immeasurable body. A combination of single rain drops will make a wave, and that wave of woven communities will create a change.
‘Sometimes I stand by the edge of where the ocean meets the beach, and look out into the sea, so I can see something that does not have an end.’
The sea by Travis Alabanza[11]
Bibliography:
[1] ‘And Then, a Harrowing’ | Wysing Broadcasts,” wysingbroadcasts.art, October 8, 2020, https://wysingbroadcasts.art/discover/and-then-a-harrowing.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Linda Stupart, “The Urgency of the Arts Lecture Series 2021/22: Linda Stupart,” moodle.rca.ac.uk, January 19, 2022, https://moodle.rca.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=44.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Merriam-Webster, “Definition of MEME,” Merriam-webster.com, 2012, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meme.
[6] Édouard Glissant and Betsy Wing, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor Univ. Of Michigan Press, 1997), 190.
[7] Linda Stupart, “The Urgency of the Arts Lecture Series 2021/22: Linda Stupart,” moodle.rca.ac.uk, January 19, 2022, https://moodle.rca.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=44.
[8] Barrett, Estelle. 2011. Kristeva Reframed : Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts. London: I. B. Tauris & Company, Limited. Accessed December 27, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,140.
[9] Ibid, 146.
[10] Ibid, 102.
[11] Alabanza, Travis. ‘The Sea’ in Vincent Honoré, Tarini Malik, and Hayward Gallery, Kiss My Genders (London: Hayward Gallery, New York, Ny, 2019).