In our dossier on the body, we added the subdossier Bodies and Breath: Embodied Research & Writing. With an essay by Asli Özgen, a visual essay by and interview with Kexin Hao, a visual essay by and interview with Jeanine van Berkel, a website and essay by Hannah Dawn Henderson and a essay by Moosje M Goosen. Be welcome to take a look.
It is through our bodies, our senses and sensibilities that we encounter and live through our world. It is through a hierarchy of senses that we separate and compartmentalise our modes of experience and discard the multitude registers contained within our bodies. We are taught to look at maps and cartographies, whereas the world moves and transforms with the winds, cracks, breaths, whispers, and chants between us. Embodied inquiry is not only method, but a way of being, relating, moving and transforming, with and through the many relations we have at a given time.
This dossier has been created through rich exchanges and encounters we have had with our invited guests who were asked to host workshops on embodied writing and research, and to share with us the relations they have forged through their practices in writing, research, and making. In their workshops, each contributor invited us to acquaint ourselves with our sensibilities and bodies through writing, movement, and storytelling. Embedded within cultural practices that often deal with ancestral memory, magical realism and mythmaking, these contributions trace archival processes and historiographies by reviving sounds and images, and myths and stories that are affective, sensorial and experiential. It is out of desire and necessity that we reckon with our inheritance, and to live in relation with one another that we begin to speak to the most delicate aspects of our lives, which not only changes us, but also those who can hear, feel and move along with us.
We invite you to engage with the multitude of voices, textures, places, pauses, colors, breaths contained within the pages of this dossier. Here you can encounter essays, artworks, registrations of events, and invitations to guided exercises, where the symbolic, practical, artistic, and social is not severed, but brought together in ways that we hope will expand your relations through writing, making and listening.
