GOING VISITING the river that dried out
September 2023
Doing fieldwork and research on the story and dynamics of the dried-out river of Les Aygalades near the Cité des Arts de la Rue. Exploring the factors shaping the landscape over time and how the dried-out riverbed has become a mirror image of our human impact.
The research included sharing the method Going Visiting in a workshop workshop as well creating photo and video in collaboration with photographer Marine Gastineau.
Workshop documentation by Marine Gastineau
The method Going Visiting has been developed through my work in and with many different geographical places and types of land, drawing inspiration from new materialist and eco-feminist writers and thinkers including Donna J. Haraway, Karen Barad and Astrida Neimanis. The method is a framework for exploring and co-creating with a given area through physical encounters between the human body and the more-than-human bodies, phenomena and dynamics of this particular place. Through this work, new understandings emerge, immersive and performative situations and potentials arise, text is produced and shared aesthetic sensory mappings begin.
To conduct the workshop is often valuable as part of my research as each participant brings with them their unique way of meeting, sensing and collaborating with a particular place. It makes sense to do the workshop with people, who already have an interest in the place in different ways or people, who are curious to explore other ways of creating in and with different types of land and their inherent dynamics.
The only prerequisites for participating are curiosity, the physical ability to move around in a sometimes challenging landscape and the willingness to step outside what you think you know to meet and engage with the place openly and respectfully.
“Visiting is not an easy practice; it demands the ability to find others actively interesting, even, or especially others most people already claim to know all too completely, to ask questions that one's interlocutors truly find interesting, to cultivate the wild virtue of curiosity, to attune one's ability to sense and respond - and to do all this politely! .... [This] sort of politeness does the energetic work of holding open the possibility that surprises are in store, that something interesting is about to happen, but only if one cultivates the virtue of letting those, one visits intra-actively shape what occurs. They are not who/what we expected to visit, and we are not who/what we anticipated either. Visiting is a subject- and object-making dance, and the choreographer is a trickster.”
(Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble - Making Kin in the Chthulucene)
Photographs from the research proces created in collaboration with Marine Gastineau:
END OF RESIDENCY PRESENTATION
Small 'exhibition' of images from the proces and a video installation as well as a participatory ritual to take part in the ongoing shaping and shifting of matter and bodies in the the riverbed.
