The shape of open. A journal on embodied collective experience

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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
Location:
Date
2020
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Master’s Programme in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art
Language
en
Pages
149
Series
Abstract
Written as an experimental visual journal, this thesis presents a peer learning process developed though embodied experience in a cross-disciplinary workshop. The workshop approached the body and personal experience as elements for critical praxis, while proposing safe modes of building trust and awareness. Performative techniques were used to unpack posthuman and feminist views on the body, agency, identity and knowledge, and to reimagine them. Concrete methods included free movement, mapping, experimental writing, and feminist views that articulate theory and practice. Their overlap was intended to operate as a contact zone capable of unsettling the borders between the visual, narrative and intellectual, but also between forms of presence, interdependence and care across differences. Using several voices, a selection of exercises is presented along with the findings and reflections of participants and facilitator, threading together insights from conversations as well as theoretical work. The introduction focuses on the assembly and pedagogical frame of the workshop, and the main chapters lay out the collective processes happening in three days of work, in a sequence of incremental interpellation of ideas, bodies and personal boundaries. A deep understanding of process —pedagogical, artistic, personal and interpersonal— is at the core of the research. At the end, the thesis engages with questions of representing experience and of performative interaction, and discusses the accountability of emergent knowledge.
Description
Supervisor
Davis, Lucy
Thesis advisor
Kaitavuori, Kaija
Keywords
embodiment, praxis, resistance, situated knowledge, unlearning, participatory art, contact zone, interdependence
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Citation