Ways of knowing – BODIES launch

The seminar is part of the seminar series “Ways of knowing Spring 2025” where we every Wednesday this Spring explore how Ways of Knowing manifest themselves in the field of artistic research right now. Read more about the seminar series and find upcoming seminars.

BODIES brings together researchers from the arts, academia, and activism, creating sites, events and encounters in, with, and between artistic, scientific and humanities research areas. BODIES proposes that we share time, space and resources to wonder together with our bodies, exploring the affinities, frictions, complexities and potentialities produced by transdisciplinarity when it emerges from and is cared for by an artistic research environment.

In this seminar six core members of BODIES will briefly introduce the broader BODIES framework, followed by three presentation/conversations, each emerging from the three thematic working parties which constitute BODIES: animal bodies, environmental bodies, institutional bodies.

Stacey Sacks and Rebecca Hilton will be in conversation in relation to animal bodies. Focusing on concepts and practices of embodiment, Sacks shares some of the ways embodiment manifests in her performance, animation, and activism research, and Hilton stages and shares some of the ways in which Octavia Butler's phrase  'All that you touch you change, All that you change changes you'* literally and figuratively informs her research practice.
 
Cecilia Åsberg and Hanna Husberg will reflect on environmental bodies, emphasising that bodies and environments, as well as nature and culture are inherently co-constitutive, and interconnected by substance, flesh and place. To start from a situated case Husberg will screen The Free Sea, a video essay exploring the Maldives as a state constituted and unbound by the cultural, political, economic, and material flows of late capitalism and the early Anthropocene.
 
Kathrin Gollwitzer-Oh and Sebastian Dahlqvist will discuss institutional bodies; probing intermaterial, embodied and intersocial ways of re-viewing, performing and re-thinking institutions and institutionalisation in the context of artistic research and beyond. Institutional bodies as assessing and procedural forces, as fractioned and systematic organisations of set interactions, but also as potential places of belonging and community – with a critical view on the history and notion of body politic as well as the bodily aspects of institutional power and structures.
 
Participants:
Rebecca Hilton is a professor of choreography for the profile area Site Event Encounter at SKH, an honorary research fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia, and artistic researcher in residence as part of Döbra, a transdisciplinary research group exploring experiences of and relationships to, aging, grieving, death and dying. In the context of BODIES, she leads the animal bodies working group.
 
Stacey Sacks, PhD is an artist researcher traversing the fields of live stage arts, critical whiteness, clowning, animation, visual and cultural anthropology and decolonial praxis. She is the current head of subject area acting at SKH.
 
Hanna Husberg, PhD is a visual artist and artistic researcher. She is an assistant professor for Performative and Media-Based Practices at SKH where she is also the research education coordinator. Her artistic research into bodies of air explores air as both an affective and political guide of inquiry, and as a methodology unfolded via transdisciplinarity and collaborative practices.She leads the environmental bodies working group.
 
Cecilia Åsberg, PhD is Professor and Chair of Gender, Nature, Culture at Linköping University, Sweden. She heads the multi-university research group The Posthumanities Hub, a bridge-building feminist community for traversing the “two cultures” of art(s) and sciences. She is a member of the WASP-HS Project AI and the Artistic Imaginary: Socio- Cultural Consequences and Challenges of Creative-AI Technology.
 
Kathrin Gollwitzer-Oh, PhD is lead coordinator of the binational artistic PhD program at the University of Arts in Bremen (HfK), Germany. She is a lecturer and a researcher, and coordinator of the research funding context at HfK. She leads the working group institutional bodies.
 
Sebastian Dahlqvist is an artist and researcher, director of Hägerstensåsen Medborgarhus and chairperson of Den kollektiva hjärnan, a network uniting independent artistic activities throughout Sweden with the aim to make independent operations available and strengthen their position by sharing and refining existing knowledge and hybrid methods of working.
 

Accessibility at Teknikringen 35.