HEAVY KINSHIP VOL. 5: Binding Time, Binding Space, Binding Presence
Solo performance and participatory rock-bonding session
RØST Festival 2019
KØS Museum
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 Binding Time, Binding Space, Binding Presence Nana Francisca Schottländer explores the potential of deep, intimate and transformative encounters between humans and rocks, first through a 2-day binding ritual taking place alongside the festival programme, then in a solo performance in which rock and human are joined together in a ritual marking of shared life, love and death in Køge Kirke and finally in a participatory Rock Bonding Session .
In staging spaces and a situations for these cross-species encounters she fuels and informs a further development of intimate co-existence, of ‘thick co-presence’ (ref. Donna Harraway) between humans and the other-than-human entities of rocks, asking: What does it take to engage in respectful and intimate encounters with something existing on radically different terms than ourselves?
Working performatively with encounters, dialogues and co- creational processes spanning species and modes of existence to explore what constitutes an encounter and how different kinds of encounters affect the entities involved, the Heavy Kinship series explores how can we step beyond the human instrumentalization of other-than-human beings, matters and resources to create genuinely respectful encounters between entities.
Texts for this performance are developed in collaboration with Christina Berg Johansen, academic researcher of time and lecturer in social science and social change at Molde University College, Norway.
“...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).