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Throughout the last two years of my degree I have explored what I have come to know or describe as the 'indigenous body' and the 'colonised body'. Pinkola Estes’ quote resonates with my experience of being the 'indigenous body' – who knows its intrinsic value, trusts its instincts and the roots of its belonging here on earth. Conversely, the 'colonised body', in my experience, submits to an outside agent, has value and place inscribed upon it by society and by this is severed from its natural environment.

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Indigenous does not have a verb, it is not an action and it is not acted out upon others. It just is. The questioning of  agency, ‘liveness’, language and location were important threads to my enquiry. I am aware of the polarities and tension proposed by these two ‘bodies’ – they play out in myself. 

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FOOT WASHING

 

I used the ritual of washing people’s feet as a way to investigate the structures of human relating within the social realm. In response to my learning last year I wanted to place my needs, namely my need for physical contact and embodied connection at the core of my work. How public and private space impact the body and its needs are central concerns in my practice.

 

I wanted to find a way to inhabit the ‘indigenous body’ with an ‘other’ through this simple act of touch. There is a religious tone to this ritual, which resonates with the tension held between the two bodies for it was in God’s name that thousands of indigenous peoples were ‘saved’ and enslaved and colonized. However, I wanted to subvert the religious grip of this ritual so that it actually became a door way for the ‘indigenous body’ to be ‘re-membered’, and for the connection between two humans to be embodied, reciprocal, equal, and humble.

I see vulnerability as a threshold to a deeper human connection and I wanted to stress the importance of empathetic contact in a society that ‘promotes self-centeredness and hyper-specialization’, and where the aggressive drive to survive allows little space for altruistic acts.

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LOCATION

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I started washing the feet of people I knew and I let them choose the location. Over time there was an increasing pull towards the work place, where structures of relating are prescribed and the body has been somewhat colonized to perform and produce and personal needs are negated. The foot wash confronts these institutional structures with its innate intimacy, and this in turn exacerbates a tension held within my work, a tension between  the ‘indigenous' and ‘colonised body’ and place. I also became interested in those that perform traditional roles within society, such as policemen, teachers, carers, vicars.  I filmed and recorded  conversations, negotiations and foot washes,  the feet I could access and the feet I couldn't. I started to film feet walking around different environments – my own and others – this was mostly done in secret, filming with my phone. 

 

 

FILM / SOUND

 

I wanted to reveal what ‘liveness’ signifies through contrasting the live encounters with the mediated. I realised that through the editing process I could use the recorded material to construct voice, narrative, critique and place my film within a specific social / political discourse.

I included telephone conversations alongside the actual conversations had at the time of the foot wash, to play on intimacy and distance. I recored radio interviews and internet talks - to add to a wider social and political critique but also to juxtapose the private encounter with the public and introduce a societal sense of alienation and anxiety. I wanted to show the journey to the feet, the story. I realised the power of the editing process in which I could highlight, embellish or cut certain narratives and construct an experience for the viewer through image and sound.

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RESEARCH

 

I saw Coco Fusco’s performance: Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira at the Liverpool Biennale in October 2016. This felt like a very significant moment for me as she has been a consistent resource and inspiration for me. Her work is provocative, rigorous and comical in its critique of power structures and relationships of force and control. Not only was her performance impactful, political, thought provoking, funny, – her choice of location in Liverpool was particularly poignant, as it was in an old working men's club in Toxteth, which is a symbol of the riots in Tatcher's government in the 80s. Not only is she is critiquing Neoliberalism, Dr. Zira's pacifist / feminist position calls for us to find alternatives to the colonisation of alpha males in our political and economic structures.

 

There is one essay (conversation) which was a ‘light-bulb’ moment for me in the beginnings of this project. It had such a strong resonance with my ideas and supported my deep instinct to make work from the 'indigenous body'. It is: ‘Anti-Elektra: A Conversation by Angela Melitopoulous and Maurizo Lazzarto with Elisabeth von Samsonow’ (Folie, S, Franke, A (2012) Animism: Modernity Through the Looking Glass, Generali Foundation: Wien, Austria.) Samsonow forms a critical analysis of Greek myth and the Athenian paradigm, which she discusses in her book Anti-Elektra (2007). Here she takes on the position of the ‘girl’, which is an animistic-feminist position rooted in the ‘cosmos of a totemic society’ (Folie 2012, p.199). The ‘girl’ was disregarded and left out of Athenian society and therefore, as I see it, has not been colonised. Samsonow describes her as sitting in a ‘subterranean tunnel’, underground, waiting, and this is to her advantage because now she has the capacity to undermine the whole Athenian paradigm, whose foundations our culture still secures itself (Folie 2012, p.207). She is called ‘animal-human’, ‘pre-human’, a way of ‘being–in–the–world’ that hasn’t severed its ties with nature and who sits in a larger historical and mythical context of humanity (Folie 2012, p.201). I feel that she may be the ultimate ‘subaltern’ or ‘indigenous body’ because she situates herself underground, in the earth, and is in absolute allegiance with the logic of the earth, holding the potential for a radical transformation of how we humans inhabit the planet.