Uncommoning Senses of the Unsaid, Schizophrenia as Methodology

In this ongoing exploration between a dancer-geographer and body-philosopher, we offer a performative lecture to revisit the wheres and whens of life-death worlds en/dis-abled in common sense circulations of jugupsa (disgust), shringaram (erotics), and love. We explore such circulations as produced and lived through visual and performance cultures our bodies carry as diasporic artist- scholars writing from the Global South—not as a geopolitical entity but as a relation. We follow the realm of gaze and signalling, governed by codes and politics of “proper” and “respectable” conduct, passed down to us for sensing the unsaid in these circulations of jugupsa-shringaram-love, producing the “mad body,” which we connect as essential to necropolitical urban architectures of medicine, language, and psychiatry, related to genocide, slavery, and annihilation. We craft schizophrenia as methodology, as a practice of shared-listening-to-voices-between-our-bodies (also as children of parents diagnosed with schizophrenia and bi-polar), to work against such common sense en/disablings. This allows us to move the gaze and senses of the unsaid from paranoia to speculation, and from teleologies of linear progress to time as heard. We do so to expose the White/male/sane gaze and revoice jugupsa/shringara/love as a process of uncommoning senses of the unsaid, reframing questions of resources, proximity, untouchability, science, inaccessibility, and digestion, among others, for other modalities of being in relation. This work aligns with feminist technoscience by critically engaging with the intersection of embodied knowledge, mental health, and the oppressive systems of psychiatry, while challenging the hegemonic, linear narratives of science and progress. By reimagining schizophrenia as methodology, it integrates relational, speculative, and non-linear approaches to knowledge production that disrupt dominant epistemologies and embrace marginalized, embodied experiences.

Keywords: jugupsa, schizophrenia, erotics, feminist technoscience, embodied knowledges 

Leah Nieboer (University of Denver, USA)

Rupture, Estrangement, and Extensibility in the Works of Rebecca Horn

Early in her career, German multimedia artist Rebecca Horn experienced the rupture of a life- threatening illness after handling toxic materials, an event that significantly shaped her work and her understanding of subjectivity. This rupture in her embodiment, followed by a protracted recovery, was, however catastrophic, also an opening for excessive and unprecedented sensory experience. She began to work with body prostheses, motorized sculpture, mechanical repetition, language, and installations to intensify the experience of the sensory limits of the body. Body prostheses such as Cockfeather Mask (1973) or Mechanical Body Fan (1973/74) both constrict and extend the performer, allowing for strange and intimate affinities across human and nonhuman subjects: “I turn my head looking with one eye like a bird.” Installations such as The Peacock Machine (1982) and Inferno (1993) depend on the absence of the body in mechanical networks to suggest new relationships of pain, longing, or estranged desire between bodies and technology. In this paper, I’ll attend to the ways contamination, rupture, and constriction can become generative modes of critical and artistic inquiry. I’ll consider the ways Horn’s work invites us to new senses, embodiments, and modes of relationship at the intersection of the human, mechanical, and environmental, even as it insists we reckon with the essential plurality of the self.
Keywords: performance, poetics, embodiment, sound, environment

Lera Kolomietc ∆ (Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada)

Bodies Of Language Are Bodies In Movement: The Gaga Dance Phenomenon

"Bodies of language are bodies in movement" explores the many shapes of a term, language. It's format, texture, cultural constraints, and bodily possibilities. I use poetry to analyse the practice of Gaga, a movement-language practice developed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. Practitioners are encouraged to move through the intricate connections between movement, sensation, and emotional expression being navigated by the teacher's words. Words that produce bodies and bodies reproducing words. It is this interaction between modes of being/moving and speaking/moving that I aim to explore. Can poetry be the new normal for sensory ethnography?