nana francisca schottländer

“...our bodies always extend and connect to other bodies, human and non-human, to practices, techniques, technologies and objects which produce different kinds of bodies and different ways, arguably, of enacting what it means to be human. The idea of the body as simply something we both have and are is displaced in this perspective as the focus shifts to what bodies can do, what bodies could become, what practices enable and coordinate the doing of particular kinds of bodies, and what this makes possible in terms of our approach to questions about life, humanness, culture, power, technology and subjectivity. These are some of the themes.... Which radically refigure the idea of the body as substance or entity and even as distinctly human.”

(Lisa Blackman, The Body).

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Heavy Kinship Series is an ongoing exploration of the co-creative potential of stone and flesh, rock and human. Of the meeting between entities and bodies, both human and other-than-human, of ways of being, notions of time and the act of collaborative creation. 

 

In Playing String Figures with the Companion Species of Rocks Nana Francisca Schottländer explores the potential of deep, intimate and transformative encounters between humans and rocks, letting their speed and felt intention guide the progression of the performance.

In staging a space and a situation for these encounters to unfold she wishes to fuel and inform a further development of intimate co-existence, of ‘thick co-presence’ (ref. Donna Harraway) between humans and other-than-human entities - in this case rocks.

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How can we step beyond the instrumentalization of other-than-human beings, matters and resources to create genuinely respectful encounters between entities?
What does it take to engage in respectful and intimate encounters with something existing on radically different terms than ourselves?

Nana Francisca Schottländer works performatively with encounters, dialogues and co- creational processes spanning species and modes of existence to explore what constitutes an encounter, how it can be instigated and how different kinds of encounters affect the entities involved.