MOVEMENT
Project Page
Practice 2
Cultural Diversity
Theme: Mending
May 2021
Concept: mending my relationship with natural vs "socially appropriate" movement
ex: how I should be moving as a afab person, as a person of my size, how I think men/women should move and what I try to replicate to feel "normal"
ex: how I move as a (possibly) neurodiverse person, how I want to and choose to move when I am most comfortable
Goals:
1) a healthier relationship with my body
2) remove embarrassment of how I feel comfortable moving
3) hating how I look doesn't have to dictate what I do and do not pursue physically
4) mending the dichotomy between acceptable and unacceptable movement
5) realization that nobody owns the space I take other than me
Documentation of movement in the form of video, sketches and some diary entries. Footage will include how I take up space, fidgeting, stimming, sitting, walking, dancing, idle standing.
Expression: choreography of "me"
Framework (by relevancy):
Rizmi, Uzma. “Decolonization as Care.” Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice, Eds. Strauss, Carolyn and Pais, Ana Paula. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017.
Preciado, Paul B. Countersexual Manifesto: Subverting Gender Identities. Columbia University Press, 2018.
Fish, Maggie Mae. “CATS & the Weird Mind of TS Eliot, An Analysis.” YouTube, uploaded by Maggie Mae Fish, 24 Mar. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tYcPuVYDHw&t=909s.
Gadsby, Hannah. “Three Ideas. Three Contradictions. Or Not.” YouTube, uploaded by TED, 12 June 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=87qLWFZManA&list=WL&index=164.
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. [Particularly Ch 5 from Design for Social Innovation].
Inspiration:
> The Concert (or the Perils of Everybody) by Jerome Robbins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDP2c2FCHAM
> Shaxikula by DJ Cummerbund
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Upzye9Ctw&t=1s
> CATS and the Weird Mind of TS Elliot by Maggie Mae Fish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tYcPuVYDHw (11:18 -13:55)
> HydraulicPress Series by Smac McCreanor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWqB6UxERAk
> Dead Can Dance by Pina Bausch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAdJ3XbUoK8
> boychind by Luke Gilford
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of9xu1glc_g
>Gyvenimas yra Gražus from Šokių Stichijos (Life is Beautiful)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwu361foaDw
> 3D Dreams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=katRN1j5jl0
Dear Body,
We are stuck in a well-established cycle of self-destruction and promise of appreciation. I consider you harmful to my psyche as I am harmful to your health. My skin burns, my joints ache; your brain refuses to spend any unnecessary second within you. At this moment, I cannot promise a new or effective way for us to be, however I am slowly getting ready to find comfort within you, as opposed to a dissociative state started in puberty. “We make ourselves a body, we earn our own body...” (Preciado, 11) the price of learning to honor you seems to be care. By refusing to live within you I am only harming myself. This refusal has manifested by internalizing the way bodies, the movements they make, the space they fill are policed in society. It took a pandemic that rendered it unsafe to interact with others for me to recognize the extent to which I punished us for trying to be comfortable. With time I was able to use you as a means of expressing emotion as opposed to using just my poorly articulated thoughts. You are a part of me and yet for nearly 20 years I was unable to use you as an extension of the “me” inside our head. Rizmi (90) says that once we “trace how your own body is being disciplined and kept in a certain place, [we] can begin to think through how [we] might design intervention.” In our case intervention must begin with care, understanding, and forgiveness. Not only can we design a framework for how to unlearn the arbitrary rules for bodies, but we can care for each other and encourage that change within culture. Our identity, culture, and most relevant to the practice Cultural Diversity, our movement is fluid. In the practice we worked together to find comfort in movement and our space, we started to move more frequently and in different ways. Instead of suppressing tics, and stims, and dances, and the way I find comfortable to stand, I attempted to embrace it. There are about 2.5 hours' worth of footage of us moving around our space, plenty of examples of ways that are “not normal” to move in public. We started roller skating again when the weather was nice, dancing in the living room, going to the gym! That’s fun! I like moving around. That realization is my project for P2, everything else is just a way of expressing that in a viewable medium. There is no telling how this will affect my work in my major, animation is a medium of movement and storytelling. By learning how to express my own self through my body I can better convince of the movement I create for the screen. This is the story of learning and caring for the self in a culture that finds little value in that. The narrative of these four weeks that will blossom into a lifelong journey of not only learning how to tell a story like this, but also stopping cycles of self-loathing. This was a good experience and I have so many ideas for how to make stuff about it, some of which will inevitably be art.
Godspeed,
Me.
Music was a huge escape for me as a teenager, I was prone to maladaptive daydreaming and always had playlists full of songs that trigger that need to escape my body for the comfort of either my fantasy worlds or just to let go of the restraints I've placed on myself. The remix here consists of some songs that for a lack of a better term "made brain go bzzzzzzzz":
- Sail Away by the Long Faces
- Shum by Go_A
- Runaway by Aurora
- Hate Myself - dodie
- 13 Angels Standing Guard 'Round the Side of Your Bed by A Silver Mt. Zion