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41 — December 2024

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Conditions of Spectatorship (2/2)

Arne De Winde, Goda Palekaitė & Margaux Schwarz (eds.)

The 11th-century mosaic floor in the crypt of the Basilica of St. Gereon in Cologne displays a series of scenes from the life of the biblical figure Samson, the Nazirite with an immense superhuman strength, bestowed upon him by God himself. However, Samson was betrayed by his lover Delilah, who cuts his long magical hair and turns him over to the Philistines. To consolidate Samson’s disempowerment they gouge his eyes and force him to mill grain at Gaza City. Although blinding, which consisted of pressing a heated iron instrument to the area around the pupil until the victim lost complete vision, was an excruciating punishment, it was – as Jake Ransohoff argues – often presented by rulers as “an act of philanthropia – a clement commutation for offenders who by law deserved death” (2023: 88). In any case, blinding functioned as an “exclusionary force” (2023: 73), dispossessing its victim of political power. In other words, robbing a person of their sight was not only a physical mutilation, but also a “political disfigurement” (2023: 74).

The punctum of this image resides in exactly one mosaic tile, the one where the pupil is supposed to be. It is in this tile that the act of violence – the puncture – takes place. At the same time this puncture also deeply touches the viewer. This affective response is only intensified by the contrast between the naïve schematism of the illustration and the surgical precision of the perforation. As Susan Sontag points out in Regarding the Pain of Others with regard to figurative (non- or pre-photographic) representations of violence, “(a)n invented horror can be quite overwhelming. (I, for one, find it difficult to look at Titian’s great painting of the flaying of Marsyas, or indeed at any picture of this subject.)”

What makes it difficult to look at this image – or walk on it, for that matter –, is not only its graphic content (in both senses of the word), but also the evocation of Samson’s despair – and more particularly, the responses of the bystanders and spectators to it. Samson is flinging his arms around, while stomping and kicking – clearly in distress. What we see, however, is not only an entanglement of strained limbs, but also of gazes. Apart from the executioner, who’s eye to eye with his victim, his two assistants seem to – willfully or not – avert their gaze, while holding their victim down. The perpetrator holding Samson’s legs is staring off into space, as if the scene next to him is unbearable to look at. The left eye of the perpetrator in the middle, who’s swinging his right arm forcefully, is inadvertently or not covered by Samson himself. In any case, these askew gazes keep the assistants from entering into an empathetic relationship with the victim, and thus enable them to shed responsibility. This indifference is even more striking as the four figures are almost indistinguishable: their faces and attire are (apart from the color of Samson’s tunic) so similar that not their difference, but rather their common humanity is stressed. In any case, the boundaries between victim and perpetrator are turning very blurry.

This blurriness (between victim and perpetrator, activity and passivity, looking and looking away, empathy and apathy) also draws us as spectators into the entanglement. We’re witnessing a gruesome torture, but at the same time we’re not really shocked, are we? We know that what is being depicted is intolerable to watch, but then again the depiction is so figurative and pixelated we’re not really touched, are we? Or, as Susan Sontag explains:

In each instance, the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look. Those with the stomach to look are playing a role authorized by many glorious depictions of suffering. Torment, a canonical subject in art, is often represented in painting as a spectacle, something being watched (or ignored) by other people. The implication is: no, it cannot be stopped—and the mingling of inattentive with attentive onlookers underscores this.

In this sense, the floor mosaic depicting Samson’s gruesome blinding confronts us with what Sontag calls “the indecency of (…) co-spectatorship”.

This indecency of being voyeurs of the pain of others is only enforced by the fact that the photographic reproduction of the mosaic under scrutiny is part of the historical glass slide archive of LUCA School of Arts, Campus Sint-Lucas Visual Arts, in Ghent. This glass slide was supposed to be projected by a so-called magic lantern or Bildwerfer in a darkened auditorium, in order to arouse a mix of curiosity and fascination in the audience. The apparatus of the magic lantern was thus a tool of both study and spectacle. It was a medium that by projecting or throwing images evoked the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Self-evidently, new technologies and media (from TV tube to YouTube, from snapshot to Snapchat) only intensified this ambivalent dynamics of aversion and attraction, repulsion and fascination. And as spectators now inevitably contribute to the virality of images (they accidentally encounter), they can no longer hide behind their supposed passivity - let alone innocence.

This fundamental unease inherent to being a spectator is also at stake in the contributions to this second Cluster on Conditions of Spectatorship. Toon Leën’s contribution explores the interaction between spectatorial agency and empathy, and more specifically the limits to responsiveness and identification, especially in an age where we’re incessantly exposed to “jarring, clamorous, eye-opening” images. From very diverse perspectives, the contributions of both Katinka de Jonge and caterina daniela mora jara question what it means to be an onlooker (of yourself), a bystander or to raise your voice, blurring the boundaries between activeness and passiveness. Aline Verstraten too stresses how the act of looking holds our bodies in limbo, in a liminal state between being awake and falling asleep – and ultimately between life and death.

In any case, you cannot help but be involved.

Bibliography

  • –Jake Ransohoff, “Blinding as Punishment and Politics in Byzantium”. In: Karl Shoemaker, A Global History in the Medieval Age. Volume 2. London, New York & Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, p. 71-92.
  • – Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

 

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On Spectatorship and Empathy: Homage to an Absent Pony.
A video lecture*

Toon Leën

Between December 1968 and February 1969, Harun Farocki made a short film about the war in Vietnam, Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire). The film’s famous opening sequence shows Farocki reading the testimony of a Vietnamese farmworker who survived a napalm strike. Following this one-minute statement, Farocki looks into the camera and explains that his film can give the viewer “only a poor idea of how napalm works.” He then takes a burning cigarette and puts it out on his arm, while a voiceover comments: “If viewers want to have nothing to do with the effects of napalm, then they should investigate what they have to do with the reasons for its use.”1

Farocki’s self-mutilation can be seen as a staging of empathy: he inflicts on himself, on a smaller scale, something of the harm suffered by the Vietnamese under American bombardment. Yet, his gesture also addresses the limits of such empathy. While it is one thing to be affected by images of destruction and suffering in war, it is another to critically investigate how this destruction was enabled, and how we, the viewers—witnesses from a distance—may or may not be involved in creating its conditions.

The British civilian Aiden Aslin enlisted in the Ukrainian army in 2018. He was sentenced to death after being captured by the Russians in April 2022, but got out alive thanks to a prisoner exchange six months later. In an interview with the BBC, he described how watching TV news programmes had first prompted him to take drastic action. As a twenty-year-old, after seeing footage of Yazidis fleeing ISIS fighters in Iraq in 2014, he took up arms and joined a Kurdish militia in Syria to “at least show [the Yazidis] that they’re not forgotten about.”2

Late at night on the 1st of June, 2019, a far-right extremist shot politician Walter Lübcke in the back of the head while he was enjoying a cigarette on the terrace of his home in Kassel. A police recording of the murderer’s confession, controversially released on YouTube by German public television, shows the offender sobbing as he recounts what motivated his actions: images and videos of the Nice terrorist attack in 2016, which touched him deeply. “I watched them again and again. I had to watch them. And I think it was then, after the attack in Nice, that I made the decision to do away with Mr Lübcke,” he tells the police investigators.3

Although empathy is facilitated by the neural mechanisms that biology endowed us with, it is above all a cultural phenomenon.4 Who or what we empathise with is culturally determined and prone to biases, as are the actions that follow from these empathic responses. Empathy is not necessarily valuable if it is selective, inaccurate or leads to the wrong actions. Therefore, when it comes to image-mediated empathy, for example with regard to the photographs that circulate on our social media feeds from various conflict zones, we may wish to critically examine (and even mistrust) our immediate affective reactions. What exactly is shaping our empathic gaze? Why do certain images touch us more than others? Are we really concerned with the persons in the images or rather with the images themselves—with the symbols, the metaphors, or the ideas they might represent? And anyway, how helpful is it to feel vicariously bad for those depicted in the images on our screens, only to continue scrolling after just a few seconds of focused attention? “Please don’t just watch us get killed online,” Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to the Ukrainian government, pointedly wrote in a Twitter post in October 2022. “It’s not a show. It’s our lives, millions of lives. Act!”

In 1224, while meditating on Mount Alverna in Italy, Saint Francis of Assisi had a vision of Christ on the cross, which “pierced his soul like a sword of compassion and grief” and “left behind it a marvellous fire in his heart, and a no less wonderful sign impressed on his flesh.”5 Saint Francis’s appropriation of Christ’s wounds can be considered a graphic instance of what neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese has called “embodied simulation”.6 Clearly, Francis was not just a passive spectator. Comparable to Farocki’s self-harming gesture, Francis’s staging of his empathy made manifest a form of spectatorial agency that produced new images.

The video lecture Homage to an Absent Pony (2024) explores the interaction between such spectatorial agency and the ability of those who are “inside” the images—the “inhabitants of images,” as artist Rabih Mroué calls them—to assert a form of agency of their own.

* This video is based on a talk that was first given at the conference Conditions of Spectatorship in Brussels on 23 March, 2023. Many thanks to Goda Palekaitė, Margaux Schwarz, and Arne De Winde for providing that opportunity, as well as to Frederik Vergaert at Fred&Ferry Gallery in Antwerp, Bert Willems at PXL-MAD School of Arts in Hasselt and Giovanna Caimmi at Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna for organising further presentations, which helped improve the talk. Additional thanks to Andreas Hartmann, Tom Lambeens, Ying Sze Pek, Benjamin Rubloff, and Rahel Schrohe for their comments, and to Isabella Ritchie for copy-editing.

Notes

  • 1 Harun Farocki, Nicht löschbares Feuer, 1969; my own translation.
  • 2 Aiden Aslin, “Aiden Aslin: Captured, tortured and swapped by Russia”, Interview by Stephen Sackur, Hardtalk, BBC World Service, 23 October 2023, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct4p3m.
  • 3 Nino Seidel, Julian Feldmann, STRG_F, Funk, NDR, “Exklusiv: Die Vernehmungen des Stephan Ernst”, posted by STRG_F on YouTube, 28 July 2020, https://youtu.be/lF6_8sAHPZQ.
  • 4 Fritz Breithaupt, Kulturen der Empathie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2012 [2009], 114.
  • 5 S. Bonaventure, The Life of S. Francis of Assisi, London: R. Washbourne, 1868, 164.
  • 6 Vittorio Gallese, Michele Guerra, The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 9.

 

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Soup Opera

Katinka de Jonge & Renée Goethijn

Soup Opera, presented at Campus Atelier, in collaboration with Renée Goethijn. Photo by Elly Van Eeghem © 2023

“Soup Opera” is not the script for a regular theater production, but for an orchestrated improvisational exercise performed by the audience. It begins when someone in the audience starts reading the script hanging from a big arrow on the scene with the text: “start reading this to add drama”. And it unfolds itself through instructions given in the script and played by the audience. The audience takes the place of an imaginary collective and makes an important decision. There are several ways to make this decision and the outcome is always different.

Based on conversations with artistic hub De Koer (BE) and the theater alliance K.A.K. (Koekelbergse Alliantie van Knutselaars, BE), artists Renée Goethijn and Katinka de Jonge developed this exercise. Every time it was executed it was followed by an aftertalk, in which the group was asked to reflect on their experiences while performing and watching, and on questions around power, decision-making and forms of (micro)democracy. ‘Soup Opera’ is an exercise for anyone who wants to experience what it’s like to be part of a collective, or for collectives who want to experience what it’s like to be in another collective than their own.

 

 

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The Uneasy Dream of Spectatorship: An Integral Body Experience

Aline Verstraten

Last Sunday, my partner and I watched Memoria (2021) by Thai movie director Apichatpong Weerasethakul for the second time. A rewatch was in order, since the first time we had dosed off towards the end. However, this time, due to the long shots, the slow narrative, and the confused state of the main character, Jessica, my eyes did not even last twenty minutes. Luckily, there was no need to feel bad about this, as Weerasethakul does not mind his viewers drifting off for a while.1 Still, while I was snoozing for a bit, Jessica was completely unable to get any rest. The movie started with her being woken up by a loud and mysterious bang, a sound only she heard and that kept returning throughout her search for its source, all the while destabilising her life because it prevented her from getting any sleep. The movie as a whole reflected her confused perception. The chronology of events got jumbled up and surreal events made me question if I was still watching the movie or dreaming again. In an indirect way, the sleep-inducing quality of the movie made it extremely immersive: as soon as I started to drift off, those strange thoughts and perceptions that come along with being awake nor asleep did not disrupt the viewing experience. On the contrary, the movie almost made more sense. By closing my eyes, the television screen became permeable and the film shots and my half-awake thoughts started to mingle in our living room. As it gives them barely anything to hold onto, Memoria has a peculiarly effective strategy to engage its viewers. By making them fall asleep, it pulls them onto the same strange wavelength as the film’s. The slow pace of the movie is not hostile to its viewer, on the contrary: it is slow enough for the viewer to fall asleep, find a more interesting mental state to experience the film, and reawaken to the same shot. The long length of the shots might even make it seem like the viewer has not been asleep at all, just like our grasp on time disappears whenever we drift off.

Curiously, the scene where I felt most awake, was the one where Hernán, a mysterious recluse with the same name as a younger lookalike that helped Jessica earlier in the film but then disappeared, obeys Jessica’s request to show her how to sleep. In a wide shot, he lies down on the grass alongside a river, turns his head upwards and becomes suspiciously motionless. Jessica soon shares the viewer’s concern and starts checking for signs of life, all of which seem negative. She appears slightly uncertain about what to do. Then she decides to just sit down next to him, without trying to get him out of his unknown state. In the next shot, the montage has broken Hernán’s body in two: we watch Hernán’s upper body and head with his eyes and mouth slightly opened, without any sign of life, for about ninety seconds. Some trembling blades of grass (which looks rather coarse and uncomfortable) increase the contrast with the motionless body. Here, we feel like we cannot blink, because we might miss a sign of life for which we are desperately scanning the screen. The more Hernán looks dead or asleep, the more we feel alive and awake.2 We want our gaze to bring him back to life, but we fear it has a Medusa effect, as it seems our stare petrifies him, keeping him imprisoned in his deathlike state. The agonising shot lasts long enough for me to start assigning meaning to unimportant details, like Hernán’s shirt. Its base is beige, with extremely thin stripes of white and black spaced evenly across it. The stripes create a subtle visual, low-relief illusion, which perfectly matches his in-between state of sleep and death; even more so because the individual stripes of white (life) and black (death), with the wide bands of beige between them, seem to visually emphasise there is a lot more to be found and experienced between life and death. In another shot, which shows Hernán’s lower body, it becomes even further clear how close sleep and death are, as his feet rest in his shoes in an extremely lifeless way. There is something about the angle of his ankles which still occupies my mind, something which captures the vulnerability of Hernán’s whole body as it is surrendered to our gaze.

After these shots, which seem to last a lifetime, we finally get an answer to whether or not our gaze is able to resuscitate and save a body which appears lifeless. This answer is of course illusory, since we as viewers cannot really influence the outcome, but there is still some sense of resolution. In contrast, in Edgar Degas’ The Fallen Jockey (1896-1898), we are not as lucky since our question remains unanswered. The painting shows a body which is lying in the grass in an awkward manner, similar to Hernán’s. However, unlike the movie Memoria, Degas’ work is an oil painting, and as such it cannot move. It is thus unable to definitely shift the jockey’s fate one way or the other: is he alive, is he injured, is he sleeping, is he dreaming, is he dead? The weight of our gaze increases as we try to find an answer; the jockey’s life seems to depend on it. As we cannot just wait for the jockey to move, we have to scan the painting intensely for details that might indicate something about his condition. Unfortunately, the ambiguous pose of the jockey’s body opens up a frustrating array of possibilities, some of which ignore the painting’s title. Has he just fallen off his horse? Is he still falling? Do the horse and the man belong together, or was the man already lying there in an unknown state when the horse happened to pass by? Is he just a man that was relaxing in the grass, searching the clouds for funny shapes, when the horse suddenly startled him? Is he spreading his arms to fly away with the clouds into a beautiful daydream? Is the horse even real, or is it a nightmare which suddenly awakens the man, giving his body a shock just as he was falling asleep? After all, the thickness of the green brushstrokes does provide something to hold onto, but at the same time the grass lacks any perspectival depth, putting the human figure at risk of sliding right off the painting. Even though the green looks soft, its ambiguity makes it an uncomfortable patch of grass. While the horse’s back hoofs are firmly planted in the grass, providing it with a stable ground to launch itself into the spectator’s space, the jockey’s body is not fully incorporated into its surroundings. Unlike the horse, it has no shadow, so it must be touching the ground; yet it does not sink into the grass like the horse’s hoofs, so it is not in full contact with the ground either. It only has a strange black contour which, in its varying thickness, sometimes belongs to the jockey’s body and sometimes to the piece of grass he is lying on. In this way, the jockey is left hovering in an undecided in-between space. Thus, both the jockey and Hernán find no cosy place to fully rest, at least not without having us questioning whether they are still alive. Maybe this lack of comfort contributes to the ambiguous state of their bodies as they cannot fully settle into one state or the other, a lack of comfort they consequently transfer to the body of the spectator. In this way, the spectator is no longer just a set of two eyes, but a whole body that starts to twist and turn in its seat to find a more pleasant position to watch the movie, a body which shifts its weight from one foot to the other in an attempt to better discern the jockey’s condition.

Moreover, while we as viewers feel our own bodies more and more as we watch the movie and view the painting, we suddenly start wondering whether we are dealing here with bodies at all. In Hernán’s case: what kind of body dies during its sleep, only to reawaken several minutes later as if nothing has happened? In Degas’ painting: why do we speak of the jockey’s body when it does not have a shadow (not even mentioning that it is painted and thus obviously lacks the volume and transience of a real body)? We start to suspect these are not bodies, but images or shadows of bodies. That this thought only arises after a lengthy viewing time might be because, as Hans Belting notes, “the image has lost its symbolic power”, and “death has become an abstraction, and the analogy between the image and death, which seems as old as image-making itself, has fallen into oblivion” (2011: 128). Thus, we inadvertently take the images of Hernán and the jockey for real living bodies, which is further complicated by the fact that Weerasethakul and Degas seem to have done everything in their power to blur the lines between being a body and an image, being awake and asleep, being alive and dead. This is not without its consequences. Looking always entails projections and reflections that influence and are influenced by our (literal) stance in life. How and what we project and reflect is highly dependent on what we are looking at, so we are always affected by what we see. In this case, the question of what it exactly is that we are looking at will remain forever open, holding our own bodies in limbo through our projections and reflections. Whether this state is freeing or daunting, might ultimately depend on how comfortable we are with the thought of our own bodies turning into images once we have crossed the ultimate border.3

Elkin Díaz as the older version of Hernán Bedoya in Memoria (2021) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Edgar Degas, The Fallen Jockey (1896-1898)

Notes

  • 1 Bhargava, Alaina (2023). “Cannes Film Festival award-winning artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul on sleep as resistance, the power of the in-between”. Tatler Asia. Accessed on 5th December 2024 via https://www.tatlerasia.com/lifestyle/arts/apichatpong-weerasethakul-hongkong-exhibition
  • 2 This is a reversal of how, according to Hans Belting (2011: 130), “we want [images] to be alive even though we know very well that it is we who are lending them a life, a life that is none other than our own.” In this scene, however, it seems like we are inadvertently sucking the life out of the image. Belting, Hans (2011). An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton University Press.
  • 3 After Maurice Blanchot in Belting (2011:130)

 

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Conflicted Embodiment.
A sensory report of a 15-minute performed paper

caterina daniela mora jara

This contribution emerges from a paper on Conflicted Embodiment performed at the Performance Studies International conference in London, June 2024. It gathers a never-ending, always incomplete, sensorial register of the sensations, pauses, feelings, contradictions, thoughts and different voices that are implicated in the process of text embodiment. In other words, it is proposed as a radical sensitivity: sensing everything, anytime, anywhere. This writing attempts to register the practice, as well as the transformation of this sensation into material for the performer. Developed since January 2023, the radical sensitivity practice was shared for the first time during the Conditions of Spectatorship Symposium in Brussels, March 2023.

The following sensorial report is organized in three columns: the text, which consists of the presented paper; the actions and space demarcations; and sensations and thoughts. In addition, the script presents the three voices of the current research: caterina, the researcher; Daniela, the citizen; and Thalia, the stripper. The voices are different versions of the I and in the script they are marked in bold. In cases where the voice is made out of the three of them, the we pronoun is used.

 

Text out loud

Actions / space

Sensations / thoughts

W A R M - U P I N T R O ( C U R R E N T P O S I T I O N ) C E N T R A L P O I N T S

caterina: Speaking Hola a todos! Welcome to a sensory report that gathers the script of a 15-minutes paper, presented at Performance Studies international (London, 2024). Can we do this presentation from here? Gracias for being here. We would like to begin this presentation with our current struggle, which problematizes my own position in research. We went dancing in a strip club, and there we encountered a split in my own personhood. caterina, the researcher/academic, transformed herself into an anonymous persona in order to go to the club. She was asked to hide her real name and adopt an alias. So caterina became Thalia, the stripper who is not here at the moment, she belongs to the night. Between caterina and Thalia there is Daniela. Daniela, the middle figure, the citizen in between, who connects the two and is the mediator between them. We will speak from this ‘we’, using it as a position that emerges from the splitting of the I. As another way to start, we would like to recognise the territory in which we currently find ourselves. Two hundred years ago, not far from here, the first loan began, the first Argentine debt of the Rivadavia´s Presidential government, which was not paid for another one hundred and twenty years. caterina: Speaking We, so caterina, Daniela and Thalia, want to articulate the complexity of dance on both sides of the Atlantic as a movement: The movement between cities: from Fiske Menuco (Argentinian Patagonia) to Buenos Aires, then to Brussels and later to Stockholm. The movement between continents: from Abya Yala to the European continent. The movement between urban densities: from the desert almost to the countryside, past three capitals. The movement between different dance practices: From ballet to reggaeton; From tango to Contact Improvisation; From salsa to Graham technique; From malambo to Flying Low. We are interested in the perspective of the dancer/performer as a researcher. Our voice seeks to speak to, with and for the performing arts field. In this field it is rare to have a permanent job, a position. We are mostly an army of freelancers. So having time to think and reflect on this practice is a luxury. And that’s why we are grateful for the framework conditions that make this possible: a doctoral position for artistic research at the Stockholm University of the Arts and a budget that is earmarked for our research.

caterina: Putting lipstick on Thalia. We: Saliva test. Thalia: Looking at everyone in the audience, almost smiling. Daniela: Inquiring to the moderator, who agrees. Thalia: Smiling without showing her teeth. Daniela: Sitting with our asses in the Senate House, London. We: We draw an imaginary triangle after the names. Daniela: Emphasizing the ‘we’ with her hands. caterina: Pointing with her right arm in the right direction. Thalia: Emphasizing the ‘we’ making a circle with her hands. Daniela: Imaginary drawing of the cities in an imaginary planisphere in front of us. Thalia: Imaginary drawing of the continents that ends up in a form of what is codified as a 2nd position in ballet. Our head looks at our hands and we accompany the movement of our head and arms towards what is codified as a 3rd position in ballet, Vaganova School. We briefly pause and put our arms as if we had an invisible tango partner. We briefly pause and rotate our arms with palms towards the audience, tense fingers, and we make a contraction, which is a spine movement coming from the Graham Technique. We briefly pause and lower our hands, dropping them towards the hips.

We: Overproduction of saliva. Saliva is wet. We swallow saliva. Thalia: No one responds to our smiles. There are about 13 people in this room. I am one of the last in presenting, this is the big end of the conference, maybe. Daniela: We should stop smiling if people don’t smile. caterina: Better be serious for this presentation? We: We enjoy this moment of confusion, usually people open their eyes when we mention this operation in the I. Thalia: Laughing inside, trying to not make it visible to others, checking gazes of the audience. Daniela: Internal anger that we suffocate by breathing deeply. We: Our chest is tight. Daniela: Someone took a photo. Thalia: Nobody is getting my drawing. But! I have my ass in the Senate! Yay! What does this mean? Is anyone enjoying this as much as I am? Daniela: Are we confusing people with so many images? caterina: Are we confusing people with this presentation? Thalia: What if the ‘we’ in this presentation is not speaking to this audience? Another attempt: What if I do not speak to this audience in this presentation? Another attempt: What if Daniela does not speak to this audience in this presentation? Is there a conflict in the fact of speaking in this context and this audience?

1 S T P A R T

caterina: Speaking So we ask in this research: How is our embodiment triggered by migration? How does this “conflicted” appear? Well, through an embodiment that is already conflicted: our embodiment is in itself conflicted. We propose Conflicted Embodiment as a device for artistic research. Conflicted Embodiment brings together several different performing dance traditions together as a way to question hegemonic ways of understanding learning processes in performing arts. At this moment we are also very attentive to the fact that perhaps the concept itself is in conflict and needs to be reconsidered. However, let’s try to hold this notion together, through the practice of it. We invite you to pay attention to your body, and combine at the same time two dance traditions, or two performing arts practices. We repeat: we invite you to feel at the same time two dance traditions or two performing arts practices.

Thalia: Calling attention while moving her hand making eights. Daniela: Looking at the audience. Thalia: Looking at the audience, suspending attention in those gazes. Moving hand until forming a gun with thumb and forefinger. Pause in that position for three seconds and later continue moving. We: Briefly pause, frozen position. Check the paper and speak slower than before. We: Swallowing saliva, slowly.

Daniela: Feeling fragile speaking in English. caterina: Are people understanding my pronunciation? Thalia: I don’t care about language. There are a few people that don’t care a shit about what we are doing here. Others seem to be interested. caterina: Could Daniela and Thalia try to slow down the amount of thoughts? I am trying to give a lecture here. Daniela: It is hard to focus on the paper. We: Realization we are sweating. Drops of sweat fall from our left armpit.

P A U S E

caterina: Speaking ¿Están conmigo? Si vous voulez je vous parle un petit peu en français, comme ça je recentre l’attention vers nous. Na mentira, pero ahí va, me abrieron los ojos.

Thalia: Looking at them and while doing that activates our right foot, lifting the leg a bit, as if we’re taking a step.

Daniela: Feeling the audience´s gaze, sustaining the gaze among all of us and them. We should have incorporated one of the words we learnt in this congress, like ‘vagrant’ or ‘busking’ or ‘endeavors’.

2 N D P A R T

caterina: Speaking At this moment, for example, we are with cumbia and Passing Through. Have any of you been able to read or see or perceive this? As you can experience, we are busy with the fact of seeing and being seen in performing arts practice. Here are some of the current questions of the research: - How does our accent and our mother tongue play a role in this research? We are not speaking about language itself, we’re rather asking: as performers, what is our mother tongue? How has our accent been influenced by the place we come from? - What triggers the fact that our embodiment is never fully accessible? - How does the performer develop a sense of legibility and allow themselves to be “read” in a certain way? -What does resist legibility? -What happens when one perceives virtuosity in a practice that deals with conflict? How can virtuosity appropriate conflict? It is also important to clarify that this research locates a philosophical pleasure in dancing. We love being on stage, but at the same time we encounter so many restrictions on access (as migrants) to the stage and so many problems with how the art market appropriates critical discussions of these issues.

caterina: Moving arms slowly in front of the heart. Daniela: Balancing hips from one side to another. Thalia: Taking over the balancing and accelerating the rhythm. Daniela: Taking over the movement and embodying cumbia, alone. We: Smiling at one person, then another one. While sharing our nervousness, we move our hips in a continuous movement, feeling the change of weight in our foot. Our tongue tries to articulate as much as possible the language in which we are speaking. Sometimes we open our mouths bigger than necessary for the task.

Thalia: caterina, don´t forget to check the time. caterina: Yes, Thalia is right. Thalia: Can I start inventing something? Daniela: Stick to the script, please, don´t invent. Thalia: Why should I stick to the script? caterina: We will be misunderstood, shit. Daniela: caterina, don´t forget to pronounce all the letters. Did you say parties? Like political parties? Or caterina, did you want to say “party as mother tongue”? Dancing alone in the cumbia is boring. We: Cumbia is in our stomach, moving our trochanters like simulating waves. caterina: Why did the organizers of this congress put me in a panel with theoretical researchers? Daniela: Because it is important to share this discussion in academic contexts. caterina: Why, Daniela? Why is that important?

3 R D P A R T

caterina: Speaking So we propose Conflicted Embodiment as a way of accepting the fact that the experience of dance is never pure. And as for the “conflictedness”, we take two different approaches from two territories: the European approach and the Abya Yala approach. On the one hand, political theory considers Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic approach. On the other hand, there’s the notion of ch’ixi by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. The critic of the decolonial critic. We apologize that we do not have time to explain these concepts. What we can say is that we invite you to dig into the publication we launched in September 2023. We have some physical copies with us, but if you would like the PDF file, please contact us after we have finished this paper.

Thalia: Dancing in the in-betweenness with a little bit of ballet and reggaeton, and breathing with the calm of the Klein Technique. Daniela: Worrying about the volume of her voice. Making it louder.

Thalia: I hate the artificial light of this space, the acoustics are so horrible We: What does resist legibility? Thalia: Don’t rush, caterina, rather say that there is no time than make an inaccurate statement. caterina: I wish I could have time to read something of our reflection on Mouffe´s approach: “Conflicts can be described as agonistic or antagonistic. Agonistic conflict contains not only consensus and opposition, but also difference and dissent”. Without time, I just don’t say it. Thalia: caterina, you should rework your text to make it fit in 15 minutes. caterina: I wish I could have time to explain how we perceive the role of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in the current discourses around decolonial practices.

A S A W A Y O F E N D I N G

caterina: Speaking So, as a way of ending but not as an end, in the context of the artistic research we are busy with, we defend the right to opacity; we recognize the never-ending struggle of speaking and writing in English; we acknowledge the effort in the continuous exercise of translation; we question hegemonic ways of dealing with the error in performing arts practice; we keep dancing, as a way of provoking joy, and we problematize legibility while suspending recognition; we strip, as a way of provoking ethical and legal problems in the domain of research. We embrace the conflicted as generative resistance. Muchas gracias for your attention.

caterina: Checking the moderator. The moderator approves. Thalia: Smiling again with a bigger smile, like dedicating the words to the people who are listening. Sometimes if people reply with a gesture, like a gaze, or a chair movement, or swallowing saliva, I make them know that I see them. We: Looking at the audience and feedbacking it, by asserting with a gesture that says “yes, we see you”.

Thalia: Calming down caterina and Daniela to reach the end of the presentation. Daniela: Imitating Thalia, calming down caterina to reach the end of the presentation. Thalia: There is another girl taking notes in front of us. We: We are pretty okay now in relation to time. caterina: This paper is going to finish soon. We: Fin, chau.