Dominique Savitri Baron-Bonarjee
Article
Space of the nameless
Namelessness in this research project is a way to invoke ‘knowing at large’, over the anthropocentric, utilitarian and scientific logic of ‘knowledge’. It is a knowing that arises through the process of artistic practice or practice-based or led research: knowing happens through practice. To propose such a model of knowing, the research unfolds through a via negativa of ‘unknowing’ guided by the spiritual traditions of non-duality – Buddhism, Sufism and Taoism – and seeks to invent an embodied methodology that lingers at the threshold of the named and bounded self. This project listens, confides with and responds to previous such inquiries in Surrealism, Butoh and post-modern dance, Minimalism and Mono Ha.
By following the movements of agency that occur at this edge through Astrida Neimanis’ ‘membrane logic’, the artwork becomes a charged zone of encounters between perceived dualities such as subject and object: the membrane allows for the interaction between bodies and things to expand into a plethora of speculative possibilities. Developing a nondual disposition unfolds as a rhythmic field, that stretches matter’s sensuous knowing, and proposes a more-than-human ethics of agency, effort and aliveness.
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Michael Archer
Nina Wakeford
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