”Your Bones Hold the Shape of What’s to Come” by Áron Birtalan

Your Bones Hold the Shape of What’s to Come is a PhD research project exploring technologies of intimacy and permeability and the possibility of a theology of touch.

The research takes inspiration from the writings of three lay women from the 13-14th century: the Beguines Hadewijch of Brabant and Mechtild of Magdeburg and the heretic Marguerite Porete. I focus on the material, somatic and relational aspects of their writings and how they may enter into dialogue with current voices in expanded choreography, participatory and relational practices, New Materialist philosophy and contemporary radical theology.

This dialogue and the research project as a whole is grounded in praxis, and is activated through study groups, unusual gatherings, guided recordings, musical ecosystems and hybrid publications. Through these encounters and their embodied aftermath, I hope to create movements through which virtual and enfleshed bodies contaminate one-another, becoming compost for living-dying practices, technologies and epistemologies in art and theology.

From a critical and ethical angle, the project explores: What it means for an art experience to contaminate its participant? How do permeable boundaries challenge the perception, sovereignty and integrity of selfhood? What are the links between boundary challenge, sense perception and eschatology? What are the epistemological implications of a body becoming unreliable to itself? What is the methodological relationship between emergent praxis in arts and heretical theology? How do bonds of consent, trust and faith flower and collapse within intimacy? How can a relationship be an entity? Can there be a theology of touch that is neither transcendent or immanent?

Supervisors:
John-Paul Zaccarini (Stockholm University of the Arts)
Erin Manning (Concordia University)

Schedule

2021-2025