Dis/Connection: Multisensuality and Shame’s Touch in the Work of Gabrielle Goliath

Abstract

This article opens a consideration around what the embodied, immersive and live exchange of live performance might make us feel and in turn how this multisensual engagement awakens the feeling body, specifically around notions of touch and shame. The discussion centralises the work of South African visual artist and performance artist, Gabrielle Goliath with a critical reading of Stumbling Block (2011/2017). In Goliath’s durational piece the body both of the performer and the audience member are carefully centralised in the production and engagement of the performance. The centralisation of the body in Goliath’s works points towards and facilitates an empathetic engagement during the performance as live event. Some points of departure in the article are how the performance curates relationality between bodies which offer potential affective spaces of touch. Furthermore, this multisensual “unspoken” engagement between bodies reminds us how the body is a communicative instrument. This contemplation therefore critically positions modes of multisensual “felt-seeing” which often fall into the “gaps” of academic spaces and thinking as central bridges in opening humans to new ways of consciously “seeing”. I consider the encounter outside of text, the multisensual encounter, and ask what this might possibility necessitate.