How to resist disaster?
About Anne Juren's WAAM – We Are All Mothers
•
Anne Faucheret
•
Essay published in the Festival catalogue 2024
•
With the companionship of Heather Davis • Karen Barad • Julian Charrière & Nadim Samman • Donna Haraway • Susan Stryker
"Art is a polyarchic site of experimentation for living in a damaged world, offering a range of discursive, visual, and sensual strategies that are not confined by the regimes of scientific objectivity, political moralism or psychological depression. Art can provide a space for dealing with the affective and emotional trauma of climate change, dams and environmental pollution as it can hold together contradictions. We need modes of expression for the collective loss we are suffering through and venues to express the emotional toll of living in a diminished world. This sense of multiplicity that is contained within art provides a way to sift through the numerous contradictions of our everyday lives, to deal with divergent and discontinuous scales of time, place and action. Art practice can also provide a space of propositions and future imaginaries."
– Heather Davis, “Art in the Anthropocene”, in Rosi Braidotti & Maria Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary, 2018
"This is an experimental piece with a political investment in creating new political imaginaries and new understandings of imagining in its materiality. Not imaginaries of some future or elsewhere to arrive at or be achieved as a political goal but, rather, imaginaries with material existences in the thick now of the present — imaginaries that are attuned to the condensations of past and future condensed into each moment; imaginaries that entail superpositions of many beings and times, multiple im/possibilities that coexist and are iteratively intra-actively reconfigured; imaginaries that are material explorations of the mutual indeterminacies of being and time."
– Karen Barad, “TransMaterialities. Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings”, in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2015
"Images are atoms of human attention. They combine to form molecules which, together, constitute the atmosphere of a culture. While particular arrangements of these molecules are experienced as discrete objects, they are nothing of the sort, but complexes. One should speak of the identity of an island-complex, just as one should a painting, in terms of density, dynamics, and stability. The cultural space is a continuum of complexes as atmospheric conditions. We are always immersed. Sometimes we float, suspended within a specific condition for years, taking local equilibrium for a universal composition. Sometimes we swim."
– Julian Charrière & Nadim Samman, As we used to float. Within Bikini Atoll, in: Anthropocene Curriculum, 2022
•
A therapeutic table together with a body lying on it, serves as a resonance body when the strings stretched underneath are brought to vibration. Anatomical plates printed on paper, filled with writing and partially covered with dripping paint, placed under a transparent dance mat, frame and support a choreography of modulation and repetition. VHS tapes out of their cases and enmeshed in an enormous soft ball are manipulated energetically by the artist, tossed in the air, hold together or stretched. The ball is at once a sign, a prop, an instrument, squealing its magnetic memory. A performer dips plaster bandages in warm water, she places on individual parts of another body so that the lower leg, forearm, thigh and shoulder are fist contained, then modelled.
A room covered with carpets and populated by the participants’ bodies resting on them, becomes the site of both individual and collective delirium, eyes closed or not, under the guidance of the artist's voice and foley sound effects. In the story, a tongue grows beyond the flesh boundaries that usually contain it, separates from the body it usually inhabits, becomes autonomous and discovers through licking the surrounding surfaces and textures. Her well-known Fantasmical Anatomy Lessons, centered around organs, symptoms and desiring machines, create visual, but also sonic and sensory landscapes. Poetically weaving words and sounds, she proposes fantasmatic journeys around, along and inside bodies, inviting body parts to transform, split and sometimes go. Each lesson proposes different choreographic strategies and body practices related to the multiple images of the body, to the boundaries of the body and its limits. Relations between fragments and their environment emerge beyond plausibility, effectivity or functionality and unfold in unexpected images and speculative fictions.
These are constellations reappearing in different pieces by dancer, choreographer and Feldenkrais practitioner Anne Juren. Her practice navigates between performance, dance and somatic practices – combining their aesthetics, methodologies and tricks –, between composition, experience and introspection. Matter and language, science and fantasm, inside and outside, the personal and the political, the recipient and the creator, the collective and the singular: all this collide – within and without bodies, within and without time. Anne Juren cherishes the process over the spectacle, labor over representation, transversality over genealogy, bricolage over formalism, opacity over expressivity. In her pieces, she invites or invokes collaborators, from diverse disciplines and geographies, with whom she shared and shares practices, which in turn are shared with the audiences. Nourished by psychoanalysis, somatic practices or osteopathy, and posthuman, materialist feminist and queer-feminist theory, Anne Juren expands the concept of choreography and activate its political potential. For the artist, choreography opens and embodies crucial issues related to body politics, to the politics of affects and desires, but also to the politics of gaze and regimes of invisibility, as well as to the politics of knowledge and access.
The collaborative working methods and the processes of composition and de-composition; the treatment of the body as a de-territorialized assemblage traversed by (anatomical) norm, (medical) imaginary and (psychoanalytical) desire; the agency of matter, language, space and more-than-human entities, as well as the questioning of the monopoly of perspective vision through multi-sensoriality, which have been established throughout her practice, are diffracted and intensified in the piece Waam! We are all Mothers, created in collaboration with Samuel Feldhandler, Linda Samaraweerova and Alex Franz Zehetbauer, with composer Matthias Kranebitter and with sound artist Paul Kotal.
The theatrical space emphasizes its dimension as a space of display and exhibition, organized around the gaze. At the same time, it unveils itself as working space. The seating arrangement in five blocks around the stage as well as their steep construction evoke an anatomic theatre [1]. The spectators watch a spectacle and at the same time they look at themselves looking, mirrored by other spectators in front of them, whose gaze might cross theirs. The central stage position of a therapeutic table reinforces the association. But here, as the audience enters the space, everything is already at work. People draw a model posing on the table. Musicians are playing. The space is punctuated by plaster sculptures of different sizes. The rough plaster covering unifies the surfaces, but still revealing the superimposed objects hidden beneath. The plaster evokes orthopedic reconstruction and medical maintenance. It also gives a peculiar quality to the sound that vibrates in its surface, as the sculptures are also functioning as amplifiers/loudspeakers. As the curtains are open – at least at the beginning of the piece – the stage is not insulated but clearly inscribed in its industrial surrounding, situating the whole scene in a space of labor as well as in a space of representation. After a long moment, the performers enter the space to prepare it and take care of it, slowly closing the curtains to frame the gaze and draw the attention to an event to begin – or, rather, a treatment.
Despite its manifesto-like title, resonating like an old-fashioned and slightly essentialist feminist slogan, Waam – We are all Mothers is a proposal. The piece proposes treatment as choreography and choreography as treatment. In the medical realm, a treatment corresponds to a practice – which can be based on chemicals, on gestures, on language, or a combination of those – tackling symptoms and lingering them. The word treatment focuses more on process than on healing. In French, “traitement” also refers to the processing of information, its transformation, translation and transmission. Four treatments take place in the piece after each other, one for each performer. They structure the composition of the piece as much as they dissolve in it.
Let’s take the first one. Alex lays on his back on the therapeutic table, eyes wide open. Four musicians surround him. With their fingers or their bows, they make the strings stretched underneath the table vibrate. The sound is amplified by a hand microphone hold by one of them. The performers join, gather around the body and exert collectively, at diverse spots, gestures of compression and contention. They press and stretch Alex’ body, rotate and lift it, cover and un-cover it, support and contemplate it. They take care of the body in a quite uncanny way. The gestures borrow from the somatic, osteopathic and liturgical repertoires. The music, rather concrete and grainy at first, seems to loosen up as the gestures intensify. The anatomical dissection practiced in an anatomical theatre accomplished a double ritual: the profane ritual of valorization of scientific knowledge and the sacred ritual, where mankind, obsessed with death, honored the human body considered as a divine image. Here, the sacred and the pagan, the esoteric and the medical mingle in a ritual that feels like a rebirth ritual, with the symbolic presence of water as a nourishing but also purifying fluid – carried in a large transparent plastic box. Alex’ body is touched, supported, rolled, and then collectively carried – offstage.
•
At the origin of the four choreographic scores, there is a body story. Right at the beginning of the making process, Anne Juren asked her colleagues to recall and narrate a singular – sometimes traumatic – event focusing on how their bodies reacted to them, and how they developed conscious or unconscious, somatic or choreographic methods, to cope with it. These very personal, situated stories were the raw material that was interpreted, translated, transformed, transposed, expanded, collectively. Anne Juren calls this exercise: Body Historicity. It is not just a question of telling a story about the body, but of examining how the body writes history on/in itself, and how it historicizes, by somatizing and by performing.
Hence, the symptom [2], as the ensemble of localized or holistic signs testifying of a disbalance or an uncommon movement in the organism, functions as an anchor knot in the process and cornerstone in the whole choreographic and musical composition. There is a movement of falling together in the symptomatic, that is: a symptom is at the same singular and collective, discursive and somatic, and it is a dynamic entity. Whereas conventional medicine seeks to treat the origin of the symptom or to alleviate, even eliminate it, psychoanalysis considers the symptom essential to the psychic survival of the speaking subject. The piece neither seeks to alleviate the symptoms that (might) appear – their shape, their painful impact – nor to eradicate their function, but to collectively try to negotiate with them, to unfold them, amplify them and transform them, through language – absent on stage but fundamental to the creative process –through fabulation and movement, and through different media. The piece proposes a composed delirium on different symptoms, based on chain reactions and feedback loops. The symptoms call for choreographies – scores, movements, bodies –, which call for composition – musical, pictural, spatial –, which call for a singular reception – perceptual, associative, interpretative, which in turn affects the space. The whole concatenation of things forms a treatment.
The soundscape reacts in real time to the sounds from the theater space, its structure, its acoustics, the props and the bodies moving in it, as if it would capture deep oscillations, vibrations and percussions from the surrounding, and then recontextualizes and reassembles them in new sequences of sound and uncanny concrete textures. The soundscape is repeatedly interrupted by concise impulses, which in turn affect the four-piece ensemble – comprising a double bass, a clarinet, an accordion, and a quarter-tone accordion – and Mathias Kranebitter‘s compositions, entering into a dialog with them and expanding the spectrum both spatially and sonically.
The composition principles, if they result in a – at times bewildering – delirium for the audience, are derived from the structure of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, from some principles of the Feldenkrais movement patterns therapy and from the phenomenon of transference in psychoanalysis. Paradoxically, the analytic methods convoked in the making process disappear in the flow and effervescence of the piece. The Feldenkrais Method is a body-oriented, educational method, that is, a somatic and organic learning using kinesthesia and deep sensitivity to improve physical functions or alleviate pain. It focuses on certain bodily movement patterns and preconises specific sequences of movements in return to access them and to treat them. Emphasizing the movement pattern – that is indulging into it, insisting exactly on the pattern until exhaustion or transformation –, reversing the movement pattern, or localizing a movement pattern through the awareness of distance and closeness within the body, are three methods which were freely applied in the piece.
The proposed multimedia treatment around body historicity and around symptoms is obviously not addressed to one body, but for all the bodies present – human and more-than-human – and from body to body. And here, another key concept in Anne Juren’s work, also driven from the psychanalysis, appears: the (sensorial) transference. Transference [3] is the – often unconscious – redirection of feelings, emotions, and desires about a specific person onto someone else. It suggests the activity of carrying something around with you. Sensorial transference is Anne Juren’s expansion on transference – proposing touch, contact, affect and porosity to sense relations through another body, inside another body, within another body, alongside another body, in company with another body, and ultimately to thwart the internalised ideas of containment and insulation, but also of territorialized identit.
The dualist Western view made the body the inert counterpart to the rational thought able to train and master it. In that framework, anatomy and conventional medicine dissected, cut, separates and isolated the body to study it – and hence imagined it as a universal assemblage of mechanical parts, protected under the shield of the skin, and held together by the mind. Dissolving classic binaries like body/mind, physical/mental, imagination/ratio, fiction/description, inside/outside, health/disease, symptom/healing, Anne Juren questions how body knowledge is incorporated and proposes a body awareness that is a "po(i)etic" engagement with the body, informed by somatic practices but away from soma-therapeutic well-being goals. The treat she proposes is ambivalent, healing and dangerous at once, respectful and intrusive, violent and soft, liberating and alienating.
•
What are the relations between the body and anatomy, between phantasm and language, between determination and agency? What do the internal voices of the organs, bones, body parts, objects, matter tell us? What sort of practices could allow bodies to understand norms and fantasms that are internalized, unconscious, and embedded in our cultural and social lives? Which somatic imaginary can counterbalance the medical imaginary? Which symptoms can be invented outside the medical discourse? How do symptoms and affects transform the common images of the body, how do they expand the body's limits? How might they turn upside down the normative understanding of dysfunctionality, of distortion, of dislocation, and how can they foster phantasms and agencies? What sensible body is it urgent to produce, which can act and resist?
In Anne Juren’s piece Waam – We are all Mothers bodies are envisaged in their interconnection and as a relation, beyond metabolism, energy exchange and mere perception. They process, exchange and diffract all kinds of information – including emotions – with the environment. They produce and reproduce. They are affected and affect in return. Bodies are not separated from each other. Neither are they limited to one’s skin. They are heterogeneous, temporary and plural embodiments, always contingent and situated, always fragmenting, dispersing, hybridizing and recombining their parts with others, through transmissions, transgressions, gaps, holes, reverberations and echoes. Anne Juren’s proposal, which is a composed dispersion, an organised swarming, raises questions, creates unease, but never gives answers. It invites us to rethink and surpass the traditional relationships between mind and body, between movement and language, between politics and ethics, between care and violence, between looking and sensing. The spectators are invited to develop peculiar modes of attention. They become participants, consciously or unconsciously. They never stay outside, safe, untouched.
•
"We are terrain; we are earthlings; we are many; we are indeterminate. We bleed into each other in chaotic fluid extravagance. We eat our owns snakey tails in sympoietic whorls to generate polymorphic ongoingness; we are enmeshed with the ouroboroi of diverse interlaced netherworlds. We are chthonic, of and for the earth, of and for its unfinished times. We live and die in its ruins."
– Donna Haraway, Capitalocene and Chthulucene, in: Rosi Braidotti & Maria Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary, 2018
"From my forward-facing perspective I look back on my body as a psychically bounded space or container that becomes energetically open through the break of its surface — a rupture experienced as interior movement, a movement that becomes generative as it encloses and invests in a new space, through a perpetually reiterative process of growing new boundaries and shedding abandoned materialities: a mobile, membranous, temporally fleeting and provisional sense of enfolding and enclosure. This is the utopian space of my ongoing poesis."
– Susan Stryker, “Dungeon Intimacies: The Poetics of Transsexual Sadomasochism” in Parallax 14, no. 1 (2008), as quoted by Karen Barad, “TransMaterialities. Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings”, in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2015
"So much happens in a touch: an infinity of others—other beings, other spaces, other times—are aroused. (…) When touch is at issue, nearly everyone’s hair stands on end. I can barely touch on even a few aspects of touch here, at most offering the barest suggestion of what it might mean to approach, to dare to come in contact with, this infinite finitude. Many voices speak here in the interstices, a cacophony of always already reiteratively intra-acting stories. These are entangled tales. Each is diffractively threaded through and enfolded in the other. Is that not in the nature of touching? Is touching not by its very nature always already an involution, invitation, invisitation, wanted or unwanted, of the stranger within?"
– Karen Barad, “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am”, in differences, 2012
[1] Anatomy theaters appeared in Northern Italy in the 14th century and developed in Western Europe until the 19th century. These theaters, open to the public, offered the double vocation of educating and entertaining: they were used to teach anatomy and surgery to students and surgeons and offered distraction for a well-informed public fascinated by death – ever-present and familiar at that time.
[2] The etymology of the word symptom comes from the Latin sinthoma "symptom of a disease," altered from Greek symptoma "a happening, accident, disease," from the stem of sympiptein "to befall, happen; coincide”.
[3] The use of the term transference in psychoanalysis refers to the patient's relationship to the analyst as it develops during treatment and often involving an earlier relationship with a parent. Transference provides a way for the patient (the analysand) to be confronted with the force of an early relationship, but in the immediacy of the present.
•
Link to WAAM at Wien Modern's website
https://www.wienmodern.at/2024-anne-juren-matthias-kranebitter-en-4138
•
Link to the artist's website
https://wtkb.org/about-new/