Situated Agencies: Mediating Places through the Body

Abstract

At a time when our ways of experiencing and inhabiting places in the city have become increasingly entangled with technology, the Situated Agencies: Mediating places through the Body explores how site-specific performance practice can be addressed through an embodied and documentary approach. By employing the notion of agency, this artistic research project examines how we can enter, access, and uncover the multiple layers of a specific place – its historical connotation, social meaning, cultural value and so forth – to collect and generate a performance and/or documentary material. In this process, a special emphasis is placed on grasping and sort of excavating the hidden narratives of a place which in short, refer to all the potential narratives that are neither representative of a place, nor correspond to certain clichés and expectations, but which may be untold, unmanifested or unexpected. With such an emphasis, a series of performance laboratories were carried out in collaboration with artist researchers from different disciplinary fields. Using approaches from place-based research, posthumanism and performance documentation, these laboratories aimed to explore the relationship between embodiment and audiovisuality. On the one hand, through designing a variety of exercises which focused on enhancing a bodily/environmental awareness and on the other, through experimenting with how the audiovisual traces of a laboratory work can serve both as data and a creative source. The claim that by challenging and expanding the documentary status (or truthful meaning) of such traces, new forms of narrativisation and agency may arise, appears here as an approach to site-oriented screen performance research. As a result, this artistic research project offers a contribution to the exploration of how a specific place, in this case, a public square in Gothenburg and another in Rio de Janeiro, can be (re)framed, (re)performed and especially, rewritten through both an editing and archival process. All this is done with and through the co-presence of different cameras and bodies and thus, through the ways in which the situated agencies emerge and operate within an environment.