Abstract

Saturday June 4, 2022
@4pm - 5:30pm CT

A Performance Lecture

I am a queer white working-class and neuro-diverse Canadian setter artist. For the Flow Symposium, I will be putting my research map, COMPASS, into solo practice within the context of the city as an ensemble of sensate conditions and imagistic activations. I navigate my city by “Moving Weirdly” for an hour every day for a week, travelling to a selection of sites, mapping my internal navigation system onto the built environment through speech, movement, and object animation; looking for new kinds of resources and relationships; noticing how tools relate to environments; and, drawing any insights about how to decompose and re-route my perception.

My hypothesis with Moving Weirdly involves an action of feeling into the moment of being witnessed and allowing surprising physical responses to surface. I let myself be distracted from a preconceived aesthetic of presence. This method involves self-witnessing of unnamable embodied testimony. Moving Weirdly is different from the behavioural description of “acting out” that might imply a displacement of desire or the release of a repressed counter-aggression. Moving Weirdly is a conscious choice to let my trauma-informed responsiveness be present in a non-harming way. Through this method, I try to resist the erasure of white violence in my embodied memory, in order to transform the material.

How can I re-form the outcomes by witnessing the internal movements related to this psychology so that I set the conditions for healing rather than a repetition of systemic violence? This practice is born from an attempt to confront white violence in myself; a violence that often begins with a psychological orientation and leads to physical states and ancillary outcomes that are often distanced from the internal sources that are not always visible to me in the flow of action.

My primary actions are listening, accepting, responding, following and not imposing on myself a need to encode physical responses into language. I practice consciousness and notice my agency and limitations while bearing witness to myself. This is to understand what self-development I need to do to come into right relation with entities in the world that I am are reliant upon and that rely upon me to behave with ethical consideration for the well being of others.

In the speed of response and impulse, I let legible meaning fall apart, hopefully an opacity unfolds or a new porousness opens up that invites the viewers to notice their own embodied response. This is a speculative approach to a future that includes the neuro-diversity of someone like me - wherein I can contribute in positive ways to my community through non-linguistic modes of sharing embodied knowledge and dropping into intuition as a methodology.