Silent Meander — Embodying Research II
Nayarí Castillo, Helene Thümmel, Reni Hofmüller
Silent Meander — Embodying Research II is an audio-visual live performative experiment combining reading, drawing, and sound improvisation. The performance materializes part of the artistic research of the umbrella project Silent Meanders, giving form to its theoretical frameworks, narrative advances, and spatial conjectures. In this project, principal investigator Nayarí Castillo develops and analyzes narratives of resistance through intermedia installation art and spatial poetry. She observes “silent modes” or “(un)loud strategies” to counteract authoritarianism, by characterizing, transforming, combining, and performing practices of resistance collected worldwide. The research and this experiment focus on the multiple spaces that can coexist within a mind in resistance, a collective body of action, or a movement. It forms expanded spatial structures derived from and inspired by post- and decolonial strategies, feminist epistemologies, post-human considerations, indigenous imaginaries, and other forms of defiance against hegemony, dictatorship, kleptocracy, and machismo, among others. This ode to third space emphasizes rituals of the in-between, placing hybrid identity within overlapping spatial individual and collective experiences (H. Bhabha) that counteract authoritarianism. The performance embodies research on the locations/conformations/formations of resistance, such as assembly spaces (J. Butler), processual spaces (D. Massey), and psychological spaces (J. Rendell). For instance, San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia, the first free black town of the Americas, serves as a historical example of resistance. Women there braided their hair with maps, guiding escapees to freedom, illustrating the physical mapping, transforming it into abstract braided knowledge, and expanding the physical space of the plantation into a hope for the future. Adding to this inquiring dynamic, Helene Thümmel joins Nayarí Castillo in live drawing, while Reni Hofmüller enhances the experience with sound improvisation. Together, they explore the narrative and poetic potential of the various resistance spaces, shedding light on major questions: a) How to perform practices that spatialize narratives of resistance? and b) How to narrate resistances through spatial experiments/visualizations? Silent Meander — Embodying Research II explores the narrative and poetic potential of various resistance spaces.