Journal of Embodied Research
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Open Library of Humanities (GB) |
| ISSN | 2513-8421 |
| Wikidata | Q73551742 |
| OpenAlex | S4210181952 |
| MAG | 4210181952 |
| Website | https://jer.openlibhums.org/ |
| Total publications | 48 |
| Coverage period | 2018 - 2025 |
| Country | GB |
| Language | EN |
| Access | Open Access |
| Indexing | DOAJ indexed |
| Cited by | 1 |
| Impact factor | 0.023 |
| h-index | 1 |
This journal focuses on embodied research, a topic of significant and growing interest within social anthropology, particularly in areas like sensory ethnography, performance studies, and the anthropology of the body. It is a closely cognate venue that frequently publishes work read by social anthropologists
Action Observation and Synchronization · Art Therapy and Mental Health · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Artistic and Creative Research · Cinema and Media Studies · Climate change and permafrost · Conflict of Laws and Jurisdiction · Cryospheric studies and observations · Digital Games and Media · Diversity and Impact of Dance
Of Words and Sounds
This video essay argues and shows a form of academic symposium curation that works to combat epistemic coloniality. Convened by Caroline Gatt and Valeria Lembo, the symposium held in Aberdeen in May 2018 was called “Of Words and Sounds”. Gatt and Lembo organised this symposium with the explicit aim of holding space for different ways of knowing and acknowledging their scholarly value. Epistemic coloniality delegitimises and attempts to erase a wi…
Ursidae Interventions
Botanical gardens and museums are considered sites for producing and legitimizing knowledge. However, they can also be seen as urban sites of multispecies trauma originating from colonial imagination and fantasy. Through performance art and moving image, we explore the traditions associated with exhibiting bears for entertainment and education. Acknowledging the troubled histories of bear performances and coming to terms with the past allows us t…
In the Spirals of Knowledge
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This paper presents the trajectory of the artist researcher Graziela Andrade. She based herself on the experience with her daughter to search new approaches to rehabilitation centered on the subjectivity of the disabled person. The goal is to integrate art and Somatics to deepen the understanding of the intersection between dance and disability. The methodology includes…
Another Delicious Story
Another Delicious Story consists of photography and video taken by my preschool-aged child with text and narration by myself, his mother. This video essay contemplates such questions as “How does a four-year-old frame photographs?” “What is a ‘punctum’ to a four-year-old?” and finally, “What stories do a mother and child tell each other?” I compose alongside the children’s book A Delicious Story by Barney Saltzberg, which consists of an absent or…
‘Story of My Village’
Our work is a collection of artefacts: drawings, storyboards, films, music and poems created by a tribal community in rural India during interactive workshops which used various participatory arts-based methods to tell stories about the experiences related to a new solar powered community building. Energy use is deeply connected with human cultures, practices, norms and values. This article challenges assumptions about linear progress between ene…
How Little is Enough? A Quest for Existential Sustainability
Existential Sustainabilityis a term that has recently caught the attention of scholars across the academic field e.g. sociology, health, religion, arts, and design.The term concerns systematic care and innovative means to meet fundamental human needs. In the article the term is explored through the artistic research project, How Little is Enough? Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters, where existential sustainabilty tra…
The Matter Ecologic, Six Passages on Sound
The film essay ‘the matter ecologic, six passages on sound’ endeavours to re-probe and contemplate the known through the language of movement and sound ecology. The personal reflections ruminate on a re-softening of the borders between human and beyond human, they propose the notion of embodied technology. The combination of textile artworks with performance, public engagement and poetry formulates fresh encounters with the technology of weaving …
“This is me”
This video article illuminates what stories can be told about kulturskolen — Municipal Music and Performing Arts Schools in Norway — when pupils are the storytellers. The method is based in collaborative, long-term, performative work with a group of students in a particular kulturskole. These students Were asked to consider the question: “What does the phenomenon of the kulturskole do to us?” The primary researcher (Hauen) met with the students o…
Sartorial Sessions
This video article draws on visual and textual materials developed as part of a doctoral research project that examined embodied and sensory encounters with fashion and clothing. The core focus was on understanding the significance of embodiment in fashion and exploring opportunities for redirection through critical approaches to researching embodied experiences and exploring and representing those experiences in the broader context of fashionabl…
Embodied and Sensorial Methodologies for Researching Performance
This video article shows some of the embodied methodologies during fieldwork researching the corporeal practices by Catalonian artist Fina Miralles (b.1950). I made use of my own performances, feldenkrais and 5Rythms dance; re-create some performances in the sites that took place, extensive archival work, film during fieldwork, and conversations with the artist and curatorial practices. This research-creation process provides a genuine tool to de…
Ecologies of Embodiment
Polly Hudson, “These Hands: an EcoSomatic approach to a woman’s labour - of the body, and on the land” (6:31). This video essay is part of an ongoing practice as a gardener and dancer, a long-term project at an inner city urban allotment, entitled And So we Sow. The work responds to notions of women's labour from an EcoSomatic and eco-feminist perspective, drawing on principles from releasing dance practices particularly Skinner Releasing Techniq…
Breathing the Earth
This video article is on the body movement, bodily exploration to make relationality with earth. On the body movements in environmental activism, rituals, and dances this article focuses. In spring 2003, the author attended a penance and walking called Samboilbae. Ever since, Samboilbae has been revered as representative, bodily, non-violent resistance in Korea. It has been recognized as highly sincere quest for resilience in human beings with mo…
Sonic Kinesthetic Forest
Sonic Kinesthetic Forest is an interdisciplinary research project that explores novel methodologies for studying trees and forests through embodied sound, movement and drawing practices. Our video article reflects on this interdisciplinary research through the lens of a performance piece in which embodied sound, movement and drawing practices were intricately interwoven with a forest landscape. The process of developing this artistic work has str…
Ecologies of Embodiment
This Companion Issue continues the collaborative work of problematizing the notion of the ‘more-than-human’, which began with the summer solstice of 2021, by bringing together different artistic, educational and cultural ways of belonging to earth. The editorial explores listening-with as a speculative and generative (eco)somatic practice for attuning to the situatedness of each article and sensing the impact of audiovisual work in our bones and …
Dancing with World
An improvised, one take, partially live exploration of the relationship between body and world as intermaterial. A poetic layering of movement, images, words, things and sites. Based in a Berlin living room and on the island Suomenlinna, outside of Helsinki
Performative Beauty – On the Pleasure of Dancing (Argentine Tango)
The video article outlines an aesthetic theory of performative beauty. The article investigates experiences of beauty that occur while one is bodily engaged in an activity. The concrete case is the social dance Argentine tango. The article shows that the flow of interaction between the dancers and the music brings about the dance as an agent proper. The distributed agency allows for a situated, aesthetic awareness that includes the kinaesthetic a…
Letters to the Landscape (or an Alphabet in Ruins)
This article is a crossing through the Anthropocene. Between the body and the landscape, between the past and the future, between concepts and dances, between Edouard Glissant and the Atlantic Ocean, between tremor and uncertainty, between the Forest and Monoculture, between dance and the visual arts, between poetry and concepts, between the body and philosophy, between the animal and the plant, between what I desire and what I get, between Emanu…
Peribiophoty
Creative practitioners inside academia are often tasked with explaining how their embodied practices constitute research. The Peribiophoty project reverses this paradigm to ask: how does academic research constitute embodied practice? By considering the personal and intellectual contexts (peri), surrounding academics and their biographies (bio), through audio-visual representation (photy), we investigate how academic thinking is embodied thinking…
Ecologies of Embodiment
Looking for ways to address and attune to the urgent ecological crises of our age, this special issue problematizes the notion of the “more-than-human” and explores the nexus between ecology and embodiment across different artistic disciplines and traditions of embodied research. The editorial evokes our ecosomatic processes of co-editing with the more-than-human, and we offer a poetic commentary alongside video excerpts from the authors’ works, …
On the Audiovisual
We are living through a moment of radical transformation in the audiovisual. Since the beginning of photography, the forging of images has been explored alongside their documentary capacities. For every argument and testimony based on photographic evidence, there was a creative and fictional experiment. Audiovisual recording is always audiovisual creation. The ubiquity of cameras is a defining feature of the present age. Cameras are seemingly eve…
Ecologies of Embodiment
Dominique Rivoal, "The Shared Space of Hackney Marshes" (9:04). My aim as the filmmaker is to develop a somatically informed film-making practice, investigating how attending to soma while operating my camera, can further reveal aspects of relationality within the filmmaker and mover dyad and environment that contains us. // Daniel Portelli, "What the River Doesn't Say About Itself" (9:55). Along a river surrounded by branches and root systems of…
Sentience, Sentences, and Sentiment
At this moment of climate crisis, deep-ocean carbon sequestration has been proposed as a strategy to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. The video article Sentience, Sentences, & Sentiment: Sensing Deep-Ocean Sediment through Artistic Practice explores ecological attunement and the role of language in perceiving the more-than-human—specifically the deep-ocean ecosystems facing potential carbon sequestration, ocean acidification, global heating, and…
Branching Songs
In cities, trees are seen predominantly as entities that beautify streets, parks and gardens. Often they’re regarded as obstacles to urban development, where their importance to ecosystem health plays a secondary role to economic growth. How can multispecies art offer new perspectives on trees and their crucial contributions to urban life? Branching Songs is a project with old trees in the Vancouver area, including the ‘1308 Trees’, urban forest …
Dancing Calgon
This embodiment study is presented in video from the qualitative analysis of two dancers’ experiences with dancing and writing using Motif Notation as they engaged in the practice of learning a dance from video. They interpreted their scores, revised the notation, and performed for accuracy. Through the dancers’ voices, movement, and Motif Notation scores, the study captures dancers’ experiences of how score writing can inform embodiment of an un…
Ecologies of Embodiment
Csenge Kolozsvari, "Bodylandscapes I." (10:58). A proposition for remembering the ecological ways of belonging, a feeling into other ways of knowing, connecting into the vastness that surrounds us and moves across us, becoming-environment once again. // Anja Plonka, Marko Stefanovic, and Rasmus Nordholt-Frieling, "Breathing Gaia: Searching for Kinship Around Walensee" (8:28). The video essay creates a speculative-utopian body and existence of hum…
The Shore Revisited
This video article is based on a recorded return, in 2018, to the site of a performance for camera repeated weekly on Harakka Island in Helsinki during the year of the goat (2003–2004) as well as for a day and night during Easter that year. The video installations made fourteen years earlier are inserted in miniature format within the recent recording, complemented by journal entries from the day and night. The voice-over text discusses concerns …
The Shore Revisited
This video article is based on a recorded return, in 2018, to the site of a performance for camera repeated weekly on Harakka Island in Helsinki during the year of the goat (2003–2004) as well as for a day and night during Easter that year. The video installations made fourteen years earlier are inserted in miniature format within the recent recording, complemented by journal entries from the day and night. The voice-over text discusses concerns …
Poetics of Relations
This video article expands upon the Poetics of Relations, the embodied research of VestAndPage (Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes), which informs their performance-based filmmaking theory and practice. Since 2010, the artist duo inquires into the pillars that constitute the cross-contamination of the two art forms of time-based live art and filmmaking. Their films have been produced geo-psychologically in a variety of locations around the world: fr…
Embodiment and Social Distancing
A collection of five video essays on embodiment and social distancing, with a focus on practices. RAFFAELE RUFO, “Dancing Together Alone: What Can Be Learnt About Connection When Touch is Forbidden?” (00:10): This video essay reengages the experience of leading a dance improvisation practice on Zoom during the Coronavirus lockdown. As a tango and contact improvisation dancer confined at home, I felt urged to ask: what can be learnt about embodied…
Performative Ethnographies of Migration and Intercultural Collaboration in Arrival Cities
This video article explores the embodied experience of migration by revisiting the process of making Arrival Cities: Hanoi. This piece of experimental music theatre sought a new format for politically informed theatre that would be responsive to the challenges of a globalized society. It is built on ethnographic fieldwork carried out by the Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones, in collaboration with director Jörgen Dahlqvist and the composer Ke…
Embodiment and Social Distancing
A collection of five video essays on embodiment and social distancing, with a focus on performances. ELLEN KRESS, “Rest is Resistance: Embodied Reflections of the Retraction Period in the Creative Process” (00:10): This video essay contemplates the role that rest performs in my own creativity, connecting the labor movement, technology and the radical act of restorative rest. LASSE MOURITZEN AND KRISTINE SAMSON, “Pandemic Encounters” (05:34): As s…
Embodiment and Social Distancing
A collection of five video essays on embodiment and social distancing, with a focus on projects. ANNIE ABRAHAMS AND DANIEL PINHEIRO, “Why is the use of videoconferencing so exhausting? An analysis on the demands” (00:10): Video footage from Distant Feeling(s) project run by Annie Abrahams & Daniel Pinheiro, a yearly reconnection, eyes closed, no talking. MAURICIO CARRASCO AND DANIEL ZEA, “Vortex Decameron: Building narratologies in pandemic times…
Workshopping
The craftsperson’s workshop, the academic workshop – how comparable are they? Historically, craft workshops have been sites of sustained cooperation, imbued with elaborate social rituals and hierarchies, and are considered places of experimentation. Through close engagement with materials, tools, places, and other bodies, the body itself is acknowledged as a ‘learning’ and ‘knowing’ entity (Sennett 2008). Academic workshops, similarly, have ritua…
From an Ethics of Estrangement to an Anthropology in Life
Taking difference seriously is a key anthropological aim. Recent debates in anthropology surrounding the ‘Ontological Turn’ have brought to the forefront the need to recognise the extent of epistemological colonialism in anthropological accounts. Proponents of the Ontological Turn have suggested that to take difference seriously anthropologists should engage in recursive anthropology: enabling the concepts they encounter through fieldwork to reco…
In-Between
In January 2020, I spoke with Lucy-Lou Marino, Gold Ray Martin, and Todd Roosevelt Martin about their experiences as performers in “As deep as I could remember, as far as I could see”, a performance by Swedish-Palestinian artist Tarik Kiswanson for Performa 19 Biennial (New York, November 2019).The interview was conducted through a card game to encourage them to think, talk about, and reenact their participation in the performance.From the record…
He Almost Forgets That There is a Maker of the World
What can jewishness be — a nation, a race, a religion, a style of humor? A history of diaspora? A relation to whiteness? A commandment to work for justice? Where is jewishness in the body? In this illuminated video essay, 30 minutes of uncut experimental songwork practice are augmented by 50 annotations or “illuminations.” These are embedded into the video, as they would more commonly be embedded in prose, providing a dense critical context for w…
Dear Olive Tree
This video article consists of the video Dear Olive Tree (19 min) recorded in La Foia d’Ulldecona on 19 December 2019 with olive tree no. 968, three letters written to the tree and some reflections
Becoming a Caterpillar
Butoh is a dance and somatic movement approach that emerged in Japan in the 1960s and today is practiced around the world. Due to its stylistic idiosyncrasies and lack of a formalised movement vocabulary, butoh is often referred to among its practitioners and in the literature as an indeterminate or ‘formless’ dance. While ‘metamorphosis’ has been recognised as butoh’s core aesthetic trait (Fraleigh 2010; Baird and Candelario 2019), what this ent…
Touching Outward
Touching Outward; Art-making at the seam where care meets risk.What it is to touch? If we think with, and take seriously a fluid ontology, can we recognise embodiment itself as fluid? Drenched with unknowing and drenched with sensation and made possible by movement, vibration and magnetism.This video article engages with the potentiality for research in marine sustainability to develop through poetic logics, visual, filmic, relational art practic…
Illuminations
One of the most important questions for videographic research today is the relationship between textuality and audiovisuality. Does textuality always have to frame and contextualize video, in order for it to be research? What if textuality were located topologically within video, instead of the other way around? Is text needed at all? Can’t some audiovisual material “speak” for itself? In 2020, as the Coronavirus pandemic was setting in, I decide…
New Telematic Technologies for Remote Creation, Rehearsal and Performance of Choreographic Work
A Goldsmiths based AHRC funded project within the ‘Tackling the Impact of COVID-19’ UKRI call. In collaboration with LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore, Akram Khan Dance Company, and Target3D. In this experimental test session recorded in July 2020, two dancers, one in London, and one in Singapore, are dancing together, but virtually, each wearing an inertial sensor motion capture system. Live and pre-captured dance data was streamed from a da…
Six Illuminated Videos
Angela Viora, “Phenomenology of big hair caught up in the wind at night” (2:25); Al Evangelista, “How to dance with Filipinx ancestors?” (4:42); Sonia York-Pryce, “Sôma” (4:48); Claire Vionnet and André Dramé, “Dereskina” (5:39); W. Donnie Scally, “Reconfiguring sensory experience: The sounds of 100 rounds of karate shadowboxing” (6:00); Alen Agaronov, “Meeting the definition of human subjects research: A case study” (7:00)
Sinai
This video article examines the author’s embodied research in the Sinai region of the Egyptian Red Sea. It asks how embodied research can interrupt touristic and capitalistic frameworks of experiencing land and seascapes to better understand our collective responsibility to the indigenous humans and wildlife who’s habitats are claimed by tourism. It considers the ways in which embodied research is uniquely suited to support postcolonial ecologica…
Three Illuminated Videos
Kyle Barrett, “Illuminated: Antisyzygy” (8:40) — Blending film and painting, the video postulates several questions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic via the notion of “antisyzygy” or the in-between state in which, globally, society has found itself. Ilona Krawczyk, “More than one voice” (10:00) — Why do I feel connected to something which is beyond me, which comes from the past, which I don’t understand? But there are those moments of unconscio…
Affective atmosphere
The affective atmosphere approach to filmmaking emerged from a practice-as-research project entitled Affective Cinema, which seeks to explore the unique expressive potential of film by offsetting its function as a vehicle for coherent communication of narrative and drama. Affective atmosphere as a production approach is about the focused and present becoming with reality that is not interrupted by separation between periods of filming and not fil…
How Little is Enough? Porous & Embracing Dramaturgy for Transformative Encounters
The article gives an insight into the dramaturgical tools that are applied in the site specific and participatory performance Island, that was performed in Hrísey, an island north off the coast of Iceland in 2020. The project is a part of the artistic PhD research How Little is Enough? Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters, at Malmö Theatre Academy, University of Lund, that explores sustainable methods of creating trans…
Techniques of Videographic Thought
Film scholar and video essayist Johannes Binotto analyzes several of what he calls "practices of viewing." We might also call them techniques of videographic thought. As performers and practitioners who work with our own bodies in audiovisual form... What can we learn from these developments in videographic scholarship? When we cut our own audiovisual bodies, it can sometimes hurt. We should look for ways to care for these bodies — our bodies — w…
Peribiophoty
Creative practitioners inside academia are often tasked with explaining how their embodied practices constitute research. The Peribiophoty project reverses this paradigm to ask: how does academic research constitute embodied practice? By considering the personal and intellectual contexts (peri), surrounding academics and their biographies (bio), through audio-visual representation (photy), we investigate how academic thinking is embodied thinking…
Ecologies of Embodiment
Looking for ways to address and attune to the urgent ecological crises of our age, this special issue problematizes the notion of the “more-than-human” and explores the nexus between ecology and embodiment across different artistic disciplines and traditions of embodied research. The editorial evokes our ecosomatic processes of co-editing with the more-than-human, and we offer a poetic commentary alongside video excerpts from the authors’ works, …
On the Audiovisual
We are living through a moment of radical transformation in the audiovisual. Since the beginning of photography, the forging of images has been explored alongside their documentary capacities. For every argument and testimony based on photographic evidence, there was a creative and fictional experiment. Audiovisual recording is always audiovisual creation. The ubiquity of cameras is a defining feature of the present age. Cameras are seemingly eve…
Ecologies of Embodiment
Dominique Rivoal, "The Shared Space of Hackney Marshes" (9:04). My aim as the filmmaker is to develop a somatically informed film-making practice, investigating how attending to soma while operating my camera, can further reveal aspects of relationality within the filmmaker and mover dyad and environment that contains us. // Daniel Portelli, "What the River Doesn't Say About Itself" (9:55). Along a river surrounded by branches and root systems of…