Sunday, May 3, 2009

Welcome!

The Body Collective

We invite you to contribute to a new and vibrant project : The Body Collective.

We are creating a living archive of people's experiences in their bodies. We are looking for people to share their creative representations of their bodies: a poem about skinning a knee, audio of your laughter, an ode to sweat, a photograph of your toes. These reflections and captures can and should take any form: text, image, audio, video.

This project began as a collaboration in feminist art, growing out of shared intellectual pursuits in different artistic disciplines. Emily Gastineau has been a dancer all her life, and is working on using choreography as a political tactic. Sarah Welch has been writing poems about her body and the bodies of others for the past eight years. Though our roots lie separately in poetry and dance, we are imagining a larger collective that can include and reflect all bodies and all modes of expression, in all their differences. We hope you make this archive grow, using it as a space for meditation on your embodied experience, or letting the collection inspire your own creative work.

Email us at thebodycollective@gmail.com! All submissions will be posted here, at http://thebodycollective.blogspot.com.
We will be collecting and posting material continuously and think with it in devising future artistic projects, as we hope you will do. Submissions can be anonymous or credited as you wish.

Why? Because we all have bodies, because we have to live in our bodies, because we usually don't value our bodies enough. Because our bodies have things to tell us, because bodies touch each other, because all our experiences leave marks on our body, because our bodies think differently than our minds, because we want to find out what bodies can do, because we want form new connections between people/bodies. Because we think bodies have the potential to change.

To get you started: What is your relationship to/with your body? How does it feel to live in your body? What experiences have shaped the way you feel about your body? How has your body changed over time, and why? What have other people told you about your body? How do you move, and what does that mean to you? What practices have shaped the way you move? How are social labels written on your body, and do they match the way you see yourself? What have you accomplished with your body? How is your body different from others? When are you most aware of, or connected to your body? When have you felt most connected to other bodies?


The bones often do not exist prior to the flesh, but are shaped after a vague and broad shadow of its form is discerned or uncovered.
-Gloria AnzaldĂșa, Borderlands/La Frontera

The Body Collective: You can pinch that!



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