Selected publications and conferences
Performative Video Tutorials:
An eco-somatic approach to geopolitics
This contribution presents six Performative Video Tutorials, which were created in response to Bruno Latour’s ideas about the terrestrial. The video tutorials combine the DIY character of tutorials with geopolitical and philosophical reflections through the use of somatic practices. Notions such as grounding, folding and dwelling are being taken from the theoretical work of Latour and tested as scores for somatic work. The viewers are hereby invited to shift their attention through bodily and sensorial experiments, and to witness possible effects on their ways of thinking.
Performative Video Tutorials:
Eco-Somatics as Tools for Navigation
contribution to Body IQ Festival 2021
The Terrestrial and Improvisation Practices
ZKM Website, 2021
In this article, published on the ZKM Critical Zones exhibition Website, I reflect on my series of “Performative Video Tutorials“ which I developed in 2020. Based on the method of movement improvisation, the videos offer a means for practicing a number of aspects of ‘being terrestrial’. Distilling three aspects of improvisation – scores, imagination and witnessing – the article interweaves the tools of improvisation explored in the videos with the Critical Zone scientists’ understanding of improvisation within their research, which I was able to talk about with several scientists of the Critical Zone Observatory Strengbach, France.
Embodied constellation: reflection on the 7 planet exercise
in: Critical Zones. The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, ZKM exhibition catalogue, MIT Press, 2020
This reflection looks at the exercise that Bruno Latour gave the study group which had been formed to support the preparation of the exhibition Critical Zones at ZKM 2020/21: to turn the diagram of the 7 planets into a choreographic scene. According to Latour, we don’t live on the same planet, there are currently at least seven concepts of what living on Earth means. In the article, I think about the knowledge to be gained out of embodying and improvising this diagrammatic thought.
Eco-somatic Research: What if the Complexity of Nature can Teach me a Dance?
– and, it’s just an imaginationin: The International Journal of Creative Media Research, Issue 4 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2020.14
This portfolio gives an insight into my practice-based research exploring how somatic/mindful dance and multimedia collages link to critical thinking about ecologies. It reflects on the process, the difficulties, possibilities and questions that continue to arise when I try to grasp the complexity of ‘nature’ while trusting the embodied knowledge unfolding within dance improvisation and dance scores. The portfolio is a collage that includes parts of the score that I presented as a lecture performance at the Cracking the Established Order conference at De Montfort University in June 2019, critical reflections and various media artefacts that form part of my research. It also proposes to be a score in itself, in order to enable a form of access to the experiential dimension of the live performance and the practice-based research process so to highlight the challenge of sharing such a process in the frame of a journal.
Micro-worlds: dancing co-creation
lecture performance at TAPRA Conference, 2019
This lecture performance on my research into the linkage between dance, somatic practices and ecology focused on the scale of micro-worlds that shape me as a consortia of bacteria, that co-create us and our environment, to a degree that I am myself a stranger. I asked, what if somatic practices and dance are means to experience and learn something about this life-world, in a phenomenological and experiential sense, by moving and sensing into a heightened state of witnessing the inner and environing world? How do needs, emotion and cultural role come into play? And how to talk about, share, perform this research?
Being part of nature, somehow. A somatic inquiry into attending to that which is unfolding
MFA thesis in Creative Practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire and Independent Dance, London, 2019
My research in the frame of the MFA Creative Practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire and Independent Dance 2017-2019 focused on how to attend to being-part-of nature. I applied somatic based dance both outdoors and indoors, the inquiry into various artistic media such as sculpting, drawing, photography and writing and improvisation as well as score development. This investigation looked into the transformational force of attention, following the sensory experiences of life as an entangled, co-created reality. It is embedded in references to New Materialism and geopolitics, and it is mainly inspired by the somatic practice of Skinner Releasing Technique and by the work of choreographer Deborah Hay. My practice shifted from the attempt to conceptualise complex meanings of ecologies to the intention to attend to my own, already given, being-part-of ecologies. Being-part-of somehow, as said in the title, marks the openness of this inquiry. I developed a score of attending to that which is unfolding in order to follow this intention and shared my research in workshops and a performative installation.
reciprocal turn, online platform
in collaboration with Johanna Ziebritzki and Michael Rybakov, 2013 to 2016
From 2013 to 2016, reciprocal turn combined an online journal for artistic practice and art theory, a printed matter accompanying each issue as well as a label under which events take place. For issues in total invited local and international artists and thinkers, hosted conferences, workshops and exhibitions and produced several objects and magazines.
Participation in Movement. The Function of Participation of the Audience in Choreographic Performance-Art
(Teilnahme in Bewegung. Die Funktion Partizipation des Publikums in choreografischer Performancekunst), final thesis (Magisterarbeit) in Art Research and Media Philosophy at Univserity of Arts and Design Karlsruhe, 2015
In my final thesis at University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe in 2015, I explored the concept of audience participation as a polarising term. Taking three examples, I analysed the performances with the help of theories of performance, choreography, collectiveness and part-taking in artistic and socio-political contexts. I focused on the piece „Niemandszeit“ by deufert&plischke and compared it with „Tanz aller – Ein Bewegungschor“ by LIGNA and the happening „IN ULM, UM ULM UND UM ULM“ HERUM by Wolf Vostell. Thereby I tackled the conflicts and potentialities of the method of participation which were created out of its entanglements with concepts of identity, power and authenticity. It was pivotal to take a choreographic view on these conflicts in order to question and differentiate between different understandings of what aesthetic perception and the engaging body would mean and do. In the end I asked, if participation can, despite its conflicted status, still be considered a critical practice in the arts.
I claim part of your imagination and you claim part of mine. – An Interview with Marcos Lutyens
online magazine kunsttexte, 3rd edition on Das Interview in Kunst und Kunstkritik, 2012
The interview took part in the frame of Marcos Lutyens piece “Hypnotic Show in the reflection Room” as part of dOCU-MENTA(13). I took the meaning of the word interview literally in order to expand its verbal dimension into the visual imaginative realm and participated in the hypnotic session. How would this practice influence our dialogue?