performingbordersLIVE: Our Bodies in the Commons

Times: 16:00 – 18:30 

In-person and Live streamed on HowlRound Theatre Commons

In the afternoon session Youngsook Choi will guide us through performingborders’ latest e-journal Rallying the Commons. Our journey through the journal will include embodied interventions into its content, texts, and images to collectively explore other ways of working together. Through the format of a Reading Karaoke, we will experiment with communal reading as a site of radical joy, collective un/learning and solidarity building. We will be joined by artists and contributors from the e-journal Ximena Alarcón-Díaz, Harun Morrison and Helena Walsh, throughout the session.

The day will end with a special screening of It is impossible to say everything here so I leave you with this, a performance to camera by SERAFINE1369 which we commissioned last year, and provide body butter for audience members to apply on their bodies whilst watching.

There will be a space for conversation and refreshments before this event  (between 15:00 – 16:00). This will be free and everyone is invited to sit at the table to rest, gather, talk, and eat ahead of the session.

The afternoon session will be live streamed by HowlRound Theatre Commons and you can access it here.

About the Artists

Youngsook Choi is a London-based artist/researcher. Her interdisciplinary practice, mainly performances and installations, explores the concept of political spirituality by experimenting with intimate aesthetics of solidarity actions and collective healing. More recently, grief has been the focus of Youngsook’s practice, posing collective grief as the process of socio-political autopsy around certain types of death. ‘Not This Future’, commemorating the Essex 39 tragedy, and ‘In Every Bite of the Emperor’, the ongoing ecological grief project around traumatised lands, are in tandem with this inquiry.

Ximena Alarcón-Díaz is a sound artist-researcher interested in listening and sounding our sonic migrations: the resonances of geographical migrations. She is a Deep Listening® certified tutor, with a PhD in Music Technology and Innovation. Throughout her career, she has created telematic sonic improvisations and interfaces for relational listening, to understand sensorially migratory experiences.

Her major works are Sounding Underground (IOCT-DMU, Leverhulme Trust, 2007-2009), the telematic sound performances’ series Networked Migrations (CRiSAP-UAL, 2011-2017), and INTIMAL: Interfaces for Relational Listening (RITMO-UiO, Marie Skłodowska Curie IF, 2017-2019). In Bath, with The Studio Recovery Fund 2021, she created the INTIMAL App© for people to explore their “migratory journeys”. Emerging from her INTIMAL project, Ximena leads a collective of Latin American migrant women – Intimal – who come together to listen to their migrations and expand their notions of femininity, territory and care. She teaches Deep Listening® at the Center for Deep Listening, and independently, with an emphasis on Sonic Migrations.

Helena Walsh is an Irish live artist. She has been based in London since 2003. Her practice explores the relations between gender, national identity and cultural histories. Walsh has performed widely in galleries, museums, theatres and non-traditional art spaces, including public sites. She graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design with a BA in Fine Art in 2001 and completed her Masters in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2004. In 2013 she completed a practice-based PhD in the Department of Drama, Queen Mary University of London focussed on Live Art and femininity in post-conflict Ireland. Walsh is a founder member of the pro-choice feminist performance group Speaking of IMELDA (Ireland Making England the Legal Destination for Abortion). Between 2013 and 2018 she played a key role in sustaining the collective collaborations of Speaking of IMELDA, contributing to the development of the group’s public performances, publications and media campaigns. Walsh regularly presents and writes on feminist performance practice. She has published in collections focussed on live art and the performing arts in an Irish context. She is a lecturer at the University of the Arts, London.

SERAFINE1369 (previously Last Yearz Interesting Negro) is the London based artist, dancer, writer and facilitator, Jamila Johnson-Small. SERAFINE1369 works with dancing as a philosophical undertaking, a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world; dancing as intimate technology.  This work brings an urgency around understandings of, and sensitivity to, connection, distinction, relation and context, SERAFINE1369’s approach is experiential, embodied and structural.

SERAFINE1369 works with darkness, voice, movement, overwhelm, vibration, inviting forms to emerge and mutate, interrupting the fiction of linear time; atmospheric landscapes created through the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning. Their raw material is messages from an oracular body, on personal/structural/symptomatic/somatic/psychic levels. Always thinking about the metabolic – impact and exchange through/in/as movement – choreography becomes a ritual decomposition process for channeling, challenging and unsettling embodied (internalised or naturalised) concepts.

SERAFINE1369 has a relational, cumulative and often collaborative practice, gathering and transmitting information through working in various constellations, at different scales and in different roles. SERAFINE1369 makes performance, installation, sound, video and text that elaborate on their research into bodies, systems, movement and dance as a tool for divination, towards making spaces that might hold the complex, multiple and contradictory, spaces that consider movement and transformation as inevitable. basictension.com

Harun Morrison is an artist and writer based on the inland waterways. He is currently Designer and Researcher in Residence at V&A Dundee. His forthcoming novel, The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works in 2023/24. Since 2006, Harun has collaborated with Helen Walker as part of the collective practice They Are Here. Harun has recently had solo exhibitions at Nieuwe Vide project space in Haarlem, Netherlands (2022) and Eastside Projects, Birmingham, (2021). He is currently exhibiting Dolphin Head Mountain at the Horniman Museum. This spring Harun will develop new work for the group exhibition.