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Topic: Opportunity for person active in the field of feminist theory, body politics and/or queer theory

Hello,

We are Rallou & Katerina, an artist duo based in Athens. We’re participating as a LEARN in The School of Commons with our project "A cyber room of our own", and we are looking for a collaborator who is active on the field of feminist theory, body politics and/or queer theory in the context of contemporary artistic practices, to dig deeper into the theoretical aspects of our work. This is a funded project, which includes opportunities for travel, public events, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Please find additional information about us and about our project below. If you feel that we share common interests or that you would like to participate in our process send us an email at acyberroomofourown@gmail.com.

Warmly,

Kat & Rallou

About us:

Katerina Maganiari: Architect & new media artist. Her research focuses on poetics of the everyday,transmedia & geo-locating storytelling, participatory art & urban commons, exploring collective memory & personal history in the urban environment.

Rallou Karella: Dance artist. Her main interests revolve around improvisation, movement and body politics.

As a dancer and an architect/new media artist we found our common interests in concepts related to the notion of the “body”, the “personal” and the “everyday”. The practice we develop consists of elements such as videos, coding, body/movement, voice, writing, photography,collages and drawings.

About the project:

It’s a collaborative project about composing an online archive of memories that emerge from our bodies. Our main question is “What might our bodies think about (our) history?”. Having as a starting point our female identities we aim to explore our “body memories”, these sensations that we are not able to express linguistically but still exist as a motor reminiscence. We intend to create an open archive that offers a space to re-collect, re-understand and re-construct (personal) history.
Our different artistic background will help us form an interdisciplinary approach, where we will use dance/ movement theory and improvisation practices to dig deeper in our body memories and transmedia tools in order to visualize, express, share and reflect on them. The combination of the different mediums allows us to experiment and compose a new language in order to express, handle and re-enact memories, find personal ways of expressing our truth and share moments of vulnerability.
Experimenting with creative and female writing, video, still images, body movement and exercises of self-reflection , we intend to explore new hybrid-forms of performing in the post-digital era. “Female writing” (“ecriture feminine”) is a term that was introduced in the context of the feminist theory by Helene Cixous. . For us, female writing is a tool to explore our identity, our sexuality and also the gender-based aspects of our experiences.
Our strategy is to provide ourselves and participants with an open space for expression and tools to play with and at the same time, distance ourselves from our personal history, giving us an opportunity for reframing and re-appropriating embodied memories and experiences, and invent our own format for expressing memories and emotional situations.

At the link below you can find a first draft of our project:
https://acyberroomofourown.space/