Hast, Susanna & Bagheri Nesami, Maryam: Subtle Corporealities: Resistance Through Silence and Stillness (lecture-performance)
This is an artistic proposition for resistance. Maryam is an Iranian underground dancer, an undisciplined body, off the centre of legitimacy. As an artist in transition between Iran and outside Iran, between underground and over-the ground, her marginal eccentric and displaced relations to places she inhabits (locally and globally) have opened up a port for her to discuss ‘visibility’ and ‘representation’ through the ‘politics of disappearance’; What if I am seen? How to be seen alternatively? How to move without being seen? She explores these questions through the political choreography of solo performance(s).
Susanna, as both a sound artist and a movement artist from Finland, has a history intertwined with unspoken violence. Her positionality embodies the paradox of social transformation against a dominant representational system. Unsettling the power-knowledge entanglement through poetry and songs Susanna enquires how marginalised and silenced groups could be encouraged to voice their stories artistically. Other women writers and artists as her model and inspiration, Susanna asks, how to publicly mourn and transform pain without exposure and self-sacrifice.
Both Susanna and Maryam believe in resistance (Arendt 1961, Lepecki 2013, Franko 2017) which necessitates resilience and sustainability within the boundaries of social and political norms. In such a context a contingent corporeality through a contingent reconciliation benefits the existing gap and indeterminacies in the power system. Such indeterminacies allow Maryam and Susanna resist the living and artistic totalitarian ideologies; the ideologies system which is sensitive to kinaesthetically rigorous, visually bold and sonically loud practices. How these two practice-led researchers are going to strategically deal with the representational ideologies is the core subject of the lecture performance.