Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

The workshop is a combination of movement improvisation, body-mapping, and story-telling. The participants are invited to enter a creative process of activating the neurological body-mind memory to freely re-access, re-live and re-tell their past, paying attention to the deviations, detours, and contradictions that appear in this process. The selection and real-time editing of autobiographical events allow an in-depth realization of the fact that as intimate authors, owners and main subjects of our own life stories, we cannot embrace it in its totality. The whole picture, complete, with all details and devoid of fractures, cannot be accessed and reproduced. We can access only fragments of the story, fragments of the past and we are unable to represent them. We can, however, create and communicate a fluid ever-changing “corpo-reality” that becomes the source of “corpo-real” stories that negotiate the limits of representation by creating a complex relationship between objects, individual stories, places/landscapes, corporealities and identities that form the living texture of our lived experience. This workshop stems from the creative work on the performance “Nomadic Woman” that circulated around herstories and fuelled the process of “corporeal decolonization” and realization of “nomadic identity” (with reference to the concept of fluid subjectivity theorized by Rosi Braidotti) of the chosen representatives of Inuit and Ainu ethnic minorities.