Abstract
This article addresses the touch of words on corporeality in reading, performing, and writing in an artistic research project. Here, touch refers to forms of listening, perceiving, moving, and writing triggered by Finnish people’s written memories and experiences concerning mental hospitals. The article, which forms part of the outcome of a multidisciplinary research project titled Engraved in the body, is based on the effects on the researcher of reading these written accounts. Through their inexplicable touch, their obscurity, these memories have haunted, fascinated, and driven the artist-researcher to perform and write in a way which, while not ‘knowing’ anything, nevertheless acknowledges the unpredictable affective touch of memories. This has led the writer and performer to experience infinite spatialities in which conscious acts are replaced by the resonance of memories, generating in turn a kind of non-personal corporeality for transmitting something in them that is hidden or inexpressible through traces of their touch on corporeality. Throughout the process of reading these memories, the continuous practice of a somatic movement technique, the Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), with its poetic vocabulary and notion of the spatiality of corporeality enabled exposure and attunement to the quality of the written memories of others and to the silence beyond them. Alongside SRT, this article draws specifically on the insights of Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy to articulate the lived relation between corporeality, language, and writing.
Highlights
In this project, approaching words and language through corporeal attunement and listening has been an exploratory process in which each step has been grounded in lived experience. This approach is in line with the practice of phenomenology delineated by Max van Manen (2014, 15) as “for
He further specifies the practice of phenomenological research as an approach which “reflects on and in practice, and prepares for practice” as well as “fosters and strengthens an embodied ontology, epistemology and axiology of thoughtful and tactful action”
The acts of reading, performing, and writing are discussed in relation to the notion of touch through the embedded and ongoing practice of Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT)
Summary
The acts of reading, performing, and writing are discussed in relation to the notion of touch through the embedded and ongoing practice of SRT. All this movement has created space between words and sentences, making it possible to listen to their rhythms, silences, jumps, so that in reading these pages my corporeality has been in a state of tremor, reverberations from which have spilled over into my performances and writing.
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