One of the questions that I have been exploring is how one can document/capture (neither word seems adequate) an embodied experience such that someone who is not in the same time and space can share in that experience, in some way. Embodied practice is so temporally located and specific that it feels like only people who are in that very time and space can participate. While this is true, I also wanted to extend that experience, or some version/aspect of it, such that it can be made accessible to others.
Hence, a video essay.
I was very lucky to find a collaborator like Navya Sah, who has an eye for detail, is very skilled with camera work and editing, and has a finely tuned aesthetic sensibility.
When we shot the material for the video, I had no idea how we were going to put it together. I am very excited to see how Indent has been able to contextualise this video with other contemporary ‘writing’ on the body and the performative.
An excerpt from the artist note:
With Still Standing 2 the intention was to create a video that was more than documentation, that was a creative endeavour in itself, that offered the viewer an experience that was whole, not a voyeuristic experience of something that had already happened. And yet this experience is based in what has happened before. It can be thought of as the findings of an embodied research process. The questions that shaped this process were: how do we make an embodied experience available to people who are temporally distant, who inhabit a different time and space? How can experience (visceral, cognitive) be layered with the modalities available to us such as visual image, text, voice? How does the viewer’s experience intersect with the performers’ experiences in this displaced temporality?