Dar Cuerpo al Cuerpo I

How might feminist political action be when it is not overtly revolutionary? Not even public? How is the body valued in this kind of political action, particularly as a site for learning? And how does the environment (in its material and symbolic dimensions) provide a source for embodied practice and for diverse forms of personal and social engagement?

Celia Vara has curated this programme from research-creation with an embodied methodology, closely linked to the notion of kinaesthetic empathy, to show that our sense of bodily position and movement relates to our awareness of the space we occupy.

Kinaesthetic empathy allows us to relate to another person's movement or sensory experience of movement (Sklar, Reynolds and Reason, Foster). This allows for the experimentation and creation of new bodily routines and thus a form of agency that allows for subtle somatic resistance under varying conditions of bodily repression. The forms of feminist liberation that we can observe in the works selected in this programme emphasise the body in the intimate and public environment as a central aspect of agency (McNay, Meynell, Coole, Sheets-Johnstone). In their work, it is precisely through movement (and thus kinaesthesia) that the body engages with its environment to gather knowledge about itself and the world as well as to intervene in it. These artists engage in perceptual practices that offer explorations of space and how the body occupies it. This allows for a subtle observation of the somatic emphasising different ways of liberating and situating the body. These forms of feminist liberation emphasise the body as the central aspect of agency. They are sensory instructions for feminist political statements.

Program Dar Cuerpo al Cuerpo I: Catalonia and the Basque Country

This selection takes up the pioneering historical videos and performances (1973-1981) made by the Catalan artists Fina Miralles and Eugènia Balcells, and the Basque artist Esther Ferrer during the last years of Franco's dictatorship (1939-75) and the transition to democracy. Under Franco's regime, critical thought and expression were prohibited, and artists devised bodily mechanisms as a form of protest and resistance. There was an emphasis on the sensory that provided an original access to the self. These artists were unique in that they focused on the body as an agent of liberation and self-expression under the acute restrictions on female bodies under the political dictatorship.

This programme will screen: Going Through Languages (1981, Eugènia Balcells), Duna and Deixada Anar de Cargols (1973) (two pieces from the series Translacions) and Petjades (1976) by Fina Miralles and an excerpt from Acciones Corporales (1975, Esther Ferrer).

Links of interest:

https://www.mcgill.ca/english/staff/celia-vara

https://vimeo.com/celiavara

Image: Petjades (1976), Fina Miralles.

By Celia Vara

Celia Vara is a postdoctoral researcher at the Moving Image Research Lab (MIRL) at McGill University. She holds a PhD in Communication (2019) from Concordia University (QC, Canada). She is a psychologist since 1997, and her master thesis ("Videoarte feminista en los años 70 en España") won in 2013 the 1st Prize in Gender and Research at the University Jaume I of Spain. She is a visual artist and curator. Her writings and art pieces have been published in Journal feral feminisms, Institute for Research on Women (Rutgers University, NJ), McGraw Hill, Arte y Políticas de Identidad, entropy and humanities in MDPI, and Performance Research (Routledge Journal, Taylor and Francis). Her research explores the use of the sensory body in feminist art and performance in the 1970s and its relationship to bodily agency and feminist resistance in today's cultural and political context. She develops experimental methods that employ kinaesthesia and kinaesthetic empathy as creative and research methodologies. Her research interests include the processes of consciousness, perception and bodily agency. She reflects on this through body movements in performance, curation and research-creation from a feminist perspective.

Eugènia Balcells (Barcelona, 1943). She was born in Barcelona where she graduated in Technical Architecture. Daughter and granddaughter of architects and inventors, her daily contact with all kinds of ingenious installations related to vision and mathematics initiated her in the fragile learning of the balance between the intangible and the material, between the illusory and the exact. In 1968 she moved to New York and continued her artistic training at the University of Iowa, where she obtained a Master's degree in Art in 1971. Until 1979 he lived between Barcelona and New York, when he took up residence in the United States. From 1988 he returned to live alternately in both cities. https://eugeniabalcellsfoundation.org/home/ 

Fina Miralles (Sabadell, 1950). After studying Fine Arts, she lived in Barcelona. After the death of her parents, she began a vital pilgrimage that took her to South America, Northern France, Italy and other places, until she arrived in Cadaqués, where she now lives. This coming and going, says Fina, made her get to know herself and situate herself in the world. In the distance we learn to be humble, to accept and to live according to truth, harmony and beauty. https://www.finamiralles.com/ 

Esther Ferrer (San Sebastian/Donostia, 1937). Known for her work as a visual artist as well as for her performances, solo or within the Spanish group ZAJ (formed in 1964 and dissolved in 1996). Her work has always been oriented towards art/action, an ephemeral practice, rather than art/production, created by Walter Marchetti, Ramon Barce and Juan Hidalgo (dissolved in 1996).
https://estherferrer.fr/fr/