Can losing be beautiful? Must losing be beautiful? Combing fissures of loss within sacred spaces from my MA Thesis, None to Nur 3.0: The Skin, The Feminine attempts to artfully extrapolate a new tapestry of the female identity by necessary retelling of lived experiences through poetry, performative gestures and text, both spoken and unsaid. The study disentangles the metaphorical void through exercises of participatory collaboration with my students, as they respond through the philosophical strands and material archive dislodged from my own work wherein tropes such as “un-mosquing” and “carrying the sacred house within you” became complexes of imagination. These preoccupations echo Rosi Braidotti's Nomadic Theory (2011) that summons us to “organize from our locations, our here, the fleeting present”, [1] of that urgent migration- to womb wounded feelings into corporeal home-bodies. This critique/creation methodology within this paradoxical, mutating, non-linear age, draws me to the positionality of the errān -sprawled into symbolic wanderings within the feminine corpus- both exposing and gathering insights into its diverse fragments, fractures, disruptions, multiplicities, solidarity. I remain curious: where does the thirst of such tenderness borne out from- divine immanence, a radical resistance, an act of survival, a multi-belonging? What gaps will be stitched up, what other wounds will the body relearn, unlearn and participate in through these exhalations? Through these excavations, a conscious and intentional reflexivity of the ‘I’ as the auto-ethnographer, the pilgrim poet, the artist-educator emerges, allowing for cyclical spontaneity and fluidity of voices and memory to scatter without refrain. The encounters had turned out to be rather ritualistic in ways the body hold words as chants, as deep meanings- fragments loaded with visual, aural, conceptual threads for my autoethnographic installation. The process is akin to floating islands with amorphous borders, enabling me to shift the margins of embodiment and disembodiment- giving power to gendered imagination. Like the word ‘Nur’, meaning ‘Light’ in Arabic, and often used as a female first name within the Malay Archipelago, this study proposes a re-flowering of conversations of Art and Faith while simultaneously sketching vignettes of A New Sacred Feminine, in its choreography of new subjectivities and counter-cartography.
[1]This strand of Critical Theory coupled with elaborations of the counter-proposals and ‘erring’ against modern accelerations can be surmised from Braidotti, Rosi. "Thinking as a Nomadic Subject" ERRANS Lecture Series 2014-15, uploaded by ICI Berlin, 7 Oct 2014 ,
https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/rosi-braidotti/.
https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/rosi-braidotti/.
Tracing back the imprints of our first workshop with Rose last year, one line stood out within my roadmap: "can't speak of religion in artmaking, education...then what do I even speak of?" That idea of using pedagogy as protest, as resistance that enables marginalized conversations like Faith and Art was impetus to this project
I recall using the attar fragrance as swash of gestures of possibilities, what this project could offer, kind of a promise, a seed of intention on the pages and am proud of what it has evolved into.
I recall using the attar fragrance as swash of gestures of possibilities, what this project could offer, kind of a promise, a seed of intention on the pages and am proud of what it has evolved into.
Some words I wrote within my map are "vestige, loss, bloom, terra incognita, probing the dark, the great perhaps, mediate/meditate"..and indeed the past months of conceptualising the project have really witnessed such invitation to openings...reverberations...of becoming and unbecoming...
The project has encroached new possibilities, testing what could still be sacred in contemporary pedagogy, where the classroom centres upon critical thinking and expressing, curiosities such as memory, vignettes and anecdotes as performative framework, embodied lived experience/encounters as method of expression, the virtual nomad and distance/space as approach of art-making, the dislodging of Archives as perpetual living inquiry of the present.
The intimate exercise has triggered an overarching project entitled A New Sacred, a conviction of sort to push for such conversations dealing with new ways of looking at the rites and rituals of being, the sacredness it holds especially in the pandemic perversions. This exercise will be positioned within the first chapter of the project ; HIJRAH (migrations) possibly looking at this search for a new sacred feminine. What are lost, displaced and discovered in the process of departing and arriving.
Questions that surface through these encounters border around the body of ethics and representation. Of the vantages especially that of the positionality of the male voice within a feminist confluence. It makes me question the threshold of mouthpiece, on speaking on behalf, what are the privileges and pauses. The unmouthing, and what then, fills this void of unspeakable?
It also highlighted the ever present gaps, that demands a constant acknowledgment of limitations and limits. How far can intimate nuances of religion, gender, racial systems shake the collective unit of the educational space? How can we reconcile the hyperactive nature of diversity and differences?
I hope with this impulses, I get to reevaluate the pedagogical design, that allows for such praxis to be conducted with support of a theory and method of creative teaching/learning.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
I have framed the inquiry for the project (including that of the workshop) to be less eliciting provocations but rather honouring the lived experiences of the female body within this notion of loss when encountering sacred spaces. Also between beauty and sacrality.
Prompts include: Is losing always beautiful? Can losing be beautiful? Must losing be beautiful? What are some lived experience when wearing the skin? What are deemed sacred when practicing femininity? What should be deemed as a new feminine? Where is art in all of this?
METHODOLOGY
Performative workshop ,Autoethnography, practice-based artwork/research : bears the use of Archives , materiality and the body as living sources of examination, expression and creation.
"Questioning positionality to research the concepts of ‘carrying the mosque’ and notions of the female body. Tensions of exploration potentially encompassing gender difference and representation, speaking on ‘behalf’ of others, discussions or engagement of religion within context where this requires navigation. The work could build explicitly on the 2018 Master’s work, teasing an aspect of this out. The auto-ethnographic element could still be a core focus, and the queries raised in our conversation could indeed be the project for this A/R/Tographic exploration. The poetic and photographic could be key creative elements to engage with."- Rose Martin
"Questioning positionality to research the concepts of ‘carrying the mosque’ and notions of the female body. Tensions of exploration potentially encompassing gender difference and representation, speaking on ‘behalf’ of others, discussions or engagement of religion within context where this requires navigation. The work could build explicitly on the 2018 Master’s work, teasing an aspect of this out. The auto-ethnographic element could still be a core focus, and the queries raised in our conversation could indeed be the project for this A/R/Tographic exploration. The poetic and photographic could be key creative elements to engage with."- Rose Martin
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Bell Hook's Teaching to Transgress has affirmed the position this project will follow as it re-established the very motivation behind my work and all these overarching vestations: to convert practice in a counter-hegemonic approach so learning becomes liberatory. A pedagogy of resistance...schools as terrains of ecstasy; pleasure and danger both...transformative..."with ideas counter to beliefs and values...".
I pursue this project in an attempt to amalgamate my pedagogy and practice as spaces of resistance and excitement as transgression especially for communities often on the fringe and margin of the society. This tropes are evident in my own practice and pedagogy especially within the context of spirituality, the faith, the Art especially in secular Singapore.
I have also begun delving into Rosi Braidotti's exquisite Nomadic theory and Thinking as a Nomadic Subject and found much resonance in my work and trajectory as the Pilgrim Poet. Braidotti calls for examination of the living subjects, to organize from our locations, our here, the urgency of the home, the nowness, pace and space. I find that extremely valuable to conduct especially when speaking of dissolution of the units and systems. There is that amorphous floatingness of processes.
In my work, I departed from metaphors of unmosquing, on wombing the mosque, on carrying the mosque within oneself. This imagination parallels Braidotti's nods on "fragmentation, complexity, and multiplicity with its commitment to the ontology of flows, networks, and dynamic transformations." To find the balance between critique and creativity. I hope these encounters converge the politics and poetics of the errāns. Wanderer as the educator, researcher, practitioner...
OUTPUT
Engaging with 7 students in a workshop spread over two sessions with these materials, could involve written and performative aspects. (format and design of workshop will be separately detailed)
Kimberly will be invited as a speaker to share about the feminist embodiment during the first session of workshop for context-building, feeding of encounters from both philosophy and process.
Auto-ethnographic reflection report by me based on the encounters and derivations of the workshop and research process as a whole
A presentation-performance to the a/r/tographic team encapsulating the research process from creation to execution
A short-term showcase during the NAFA Staff show in September 2021.
Included as the debut iteration of my artistic overarching project A New Sacred
Some notable milestones are currently a work in progress; from designing workshop including preparing the ethics review. The process provided insight on the practicality, premise and perimeters.
The process also reminded me on the question of sensitivity , how to allay such risk in exposing too taboo a discussion when it comes to religion and gender.
The process also reminded me on the question of sensitivity , how to allay such risk in exposing too taboo a discussion when it comes to religion and gender.
CROSSING 3. AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC ART INSTALLATION (JULY-SEPT)
TIMELINE
June 17 -Workshop Day 1
June 18 -Workshop Day 2
July- Autoethnographic Artwork Initial Stage
August- Performance-Presentation
August- July- Autoethnographic Artwork Final Stage
September - SOAD Staff Showcase
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hooks, B. (2000). Feminist theory: From margin to center. Pluto Press.
Hooks, B. (2014). Teaching to transgress. Routledge.
Inscriptions and body-maps: representations and the corporeal – in Feminine/masculine and representation
Blain, M. (2020). Artistic research in performance through collaboration. Springer Nature.
Medina, J. (2014). This battlefield called my body: Warring over the Muslim female. Religions, 5(3), 876-885.
Abu‐Lughod, L. (2002). Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others. American anthropologist, 104(3), 783-790.
Abu-Lughod, L. (Ed.). (1998). Remaking women: Feminism and modernity in the Middle East. Princeton University Press.
REFERENCE POINTS
Mia Habib
Noor Iskandar deems his a/r/tographic journey as rituals of counter-cartographies, teasing out a series of meditation and mediation on terrains that are often perceived to be monolithic like Faith and Art. He values this methodology as an invitation to openings, guided by reverberations, arriving and departing to a series of becoming and unbecoming. He is inspired by Bell Hook’s manifesto to convert practice into counter-hegemonic approaches that enable learning to become liberatory and the classroom to espouse on the pedagogy of resistance and transformation. He sees situations, micro-moments, interventions as divine disruptions. He charts these scatterings into alternative constellations of probing lived experiences, feelings and all that is in-between. He indulges in archives, gestures, images, word fragments, dreams, melancholia, sentience and the spirit in his practice. He aims to expand sites of tenderness, coexistence and deep meanings through his art.
