corporeal mapping
I first designed Corporeal Mapping as a practice-as-research method during postgraduate research at Goldsmiths College, University of London. My research was concerned with relationship between sensation, movement and social manifestations of occupying, and moving in, space.
I ofen question how sensation, so obscure in its formation and meaning to us, can be viewed as physical cartographic information. And so the question that leads this practice is this: If sensation is our physical response to being in space, what about that space where it is generated is it mirroring?
Currently, Corporeal Mapping branches further than an academic PaR method: it is a practice and process of experimentation in leaving trace, and creating a subjective, phenomenological map of personal narrative.
My interest in sensation and our sense-ability, so to speak, my work with somatic education and somatic movement. In working with people through somatic work, I realized how vast, and equally vague, the world of sensation can be. What most excited me about developing and working collaboratively through this practice with other artists is the transformation of describing, and inscribing, sensation through movement, colour and text, without relying heavily on textual logos.
I experimented with this practice through workshopping with participants on various occasions. At first, through a series of workshops I curated and co-facilitated, in which I invited visiting artists to facilitate experiments from their practice, leading up to, and informing the visual creation of individual, subjective maps of sensations that arise in certain urban spaces. These pictures are some of the maps my artist participants created: Tasnim Mahdy, Nada Judi, Sondos Mahdy and Noora Arrigoni Said.
I used material from the practice to co-facilitate a workshop alongside Dance Artist Emilia Robinson titled Undisciplining Self: Tools for Getting Comfortable in Public Space in which we combined embodied practice methodologies and co-facilitated to participants. The workshop was commissioned by and for the Sociological Review Journal Conference Undisciplining 2018. I was also invited to present Corporeal Mapping practice at the International Federation for Theatre Research congress in 2018.
