CROSSING 01.
PERFORMATIVE WORKSHOP (17/18 June 21)
PERFORMATIVE WORKSHOP (17/18 June 21)
Additionally, the Open Call reveals a good material to interrogate. One question I posed was "What is the Sacred Feminine to you?", and to see tropes such as power, reclaim, goddess suggests a critical thirst for such embodiment and expression
This sharing session is part of a 2-day workshop for 7 students to discuss on the notions of the lived realities of female body when encountering gendered spaces of the sacred. I will go through introductions and objectives of the work with the students from 12 to 2pm. At 2pm, participants will engage in an informal dialogue session (a conversation if you may) based on the sharing by both speakers. I will use the last hour of Day 1 to conclude and brief them on the workshopping session in Day 2 where we will be engaging in a poetry-performative output at NAFA Campus.
Objective: To push the definitions of ‘femininity’ and ‘sacrality’ while honouring personal and lived encounters. The student collaborators may use the sharing as ways to weave commonalities/differences of “wearing the skin” through new understanding, thus engaging these sentiments into their textual pieces the following session.
To arrive at this idea of a new sacred feminine. What is to be lost, what is mapped moving forward? Is there room for interfaith dimensions, a space where feminism is beyond the religious segments. To help participants brooch and expand on the multilayered, multi-belongings and complexities of identity and experiences.
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Gul:I am interested to tease out your work on interfaith, refugees, migration movement, and Art History. There is this nomadic vein in your work. “This city will always pursue you,” wrote the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy. How have this embodiment of the feminine body followed you through different geographies and terrains? How has this "skin", this thirst of uncovering the sacred grown over space and time? On the notion of multiple belonging, did you notice any disparities or identity in the consciousness of the female within sacred sites, here and there? What is lost and found amidst the migrations? Does this point to notions like unity in diversity?
Kim: I am intrigued by the feminine lens through pedagogy and practice especially in the Arts, what formed the motivations to de-center the margin? What are some sites that are sacred when speaking of the female experience? For instance, your work with artists Priyageetha Dia in The earth and Her skin unearth brown visibility through stories and experiences. Likewise, Susie Wong's Dancing Alone (Don't Leave Me) rejects traditional frameworks and narratives, how do we go about understanding a shared feminine space?
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.
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
Due to the Heightened Alert Phase 2 imposed by the government 5 days before the actual workshop in May, it made me rethink of ways to still carry out the workshop with integrity and rigour and poetic pursuits. Embracing the virtual and teasing the possibility of domestic as site of expression and excavation.
I will be designing a workshop kit that contains the archival material, some tools and instruction manuals. This would be mailed to the participants, wherein they will engage with during the second day of the workshop virtually. This itself broadens on capacity of playfulness, virtual veil/unveil, impulse(s), impetus from material, distance, spatial/textual/sculptural/ the body of bodies. All this enhance the inscription of the intimate, loading layers to the inquiry. As Braidotti puts it, to "format intensity within the force of the virtual."
Toolkit:
1 x fabric marker
2 x white fabric swatch
1 x prayer chador
2 x embroidery thread
1 x fabric marker
2 x white fabric swatch
1 x prayer chador
2 x embroidery thread
I now begin to ask "Why are we asking the students to do this? What can it offer?" , posing a larger educational/pedagogical issues which interweave implicit/abstract way in its presentation...a long term probing of such unconventional environments.
