Embodied Futurities

Abstract

This article began as a critical essay of the same title, Embodied Futurities, commissioned to accompanythe exhibition of the performance project and video installation Between Earth and Sky (2018-) bySingaporean artist and cultural worker Alecia Neo. Working with a community of caregivers of personswith mental illness and degenerative disease in Singapore, Neo’s work and this article connect thephysicality of care work and carer-choreographed movements as forms of embodied praxis. This articlefocuses on the co-created work by Neo, the Caregivers Alliance (CAL) caregivers, and the movementartists, as guided by Neo's commitment to socially-oriented art, a school of practice that seeks toproblematise traditional models of authorship or creatorship through dialogic or collaborativeprocesses. Neo’s socially engaged artworks are situated in this article as forms of public pedagogy.Embodied Futurities engages participatory ethnographic methods to develop a critical artswriting model which advocates for enhancing polyvocality in both art-making and critical discoursearound work. Exploring art-making; movement as autopoiesis (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994); living withmental illness and degenerative disease; the act and arc of caregiving; and the everyday choreographyof survival (Cox, 2015), this article’s focal points are drawn from the perspectives voiced by caregivers.Embodied Futurities explores how Between Earth and Sky posits and reorients the body as a site forexpression rather than maintenance, re-envisions the potential of community support networks, andconsiders the possibilities of self-care for carers for whom mutuality may seem remote.