Counterfield
Embodied Research and Movement Workshop
2 October 2023

Framing the Workshop in Context

This workshop was part of the launch event for Counterfield, a research collective exploring embodied and interdisciplinary feminist practices. In dialogue with researcher Sara Simić (MA, CEU), the session invited participants to move with archival fragments, to breathe with the poetics of filmic bodies, and to collectively dwell in the space of the feminine-to-come.

Through breath-led movement, dialogue, and shared archival exploration; working across embodied research, feminist film history, intergenerational trauma, and diasporic memory, the session mirrored Counterfield’s wider commitment to activating research “otherwise”—through sensuous, durational, and collectively held processes.

Facilitated by:
Marie Theresa Crick and Sara Simić
With Killian O’Dwyer (graduate tutor and researcher) and members of the Counterfield collective

Together, we breathe these words—
inhaling and holding them,
if only for a second,
before we exhale again.

We do not determine the space that surrounds us,
between us,
that passes as shared air—
if only for a moment.
We breathe, we move, we feel.

These opening words were collectively written with Killian O’Dwyer and Marie Theresa Crick, gathered from conversations across Brighton, Venice, Dublin, Zagreb, Berlin, Budapest, London—and other seas yet unnamed. They now open each embodied research and movement workshop in this evolving series.

This welcome session invited participants to think and move with transnational feminist archives: to explore how breath, sound, and gesture might activate stories passed down or held back. Working closely with Sara Simić, whose oral history work traces intergenerational trauma in Jewish Croatian women’s narratives, we found points of correspondence between our archives: one shaped by the Holocaust, the other by Irish Catholic state violence and maternal loss.

Together, we asked:
How can breath hold these wounds?
How can film cut differently,
or air pass between us otherwise?

Drawing from theorists like Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, Bridget Crone, and the Advanced Practices framework, we questioned archive as a site of resistance and relational emergence. Participants were invited to close their eyes, to feel with their own bodies, and to sense the tangibility of what escapes documentation.

This workshop traced my own practice as an ongoing crossing, between Ireland and England, between the suitcase of my aunt that never arrived, and the broader archives of the Irish Catholic State. Breath becomes a method for returning to these moments; resistant, fugitive, intimate.

We asked: What was activated in the migration of Irish women to England in the 1950s?
Who watched them? Who remembers? Who breathes with them now?

The ‘feminine’ invoked at the start of the event was not a fixed category, but a threshold. A shared opening into the feminine-to-come. Through collective breath and embodied attunement, we invited participants to meet the filmic bodies emerging from this inquiry.

Participants engaged in an unfolding dialogue with new works, including a performance by Marie Theresa. The filmic bodies questioned Luce Irigaray’s concept of shared breath—opening space for feminine subjectivity and sociality to emerge, not in definition, but in relation.

We moved together, but movement was never required. Breath itself was enough.

This is our collective archival practice:
to open toward the feminine-to-come,
to stay with breath,
to listen otherwise.

The workshop Feminine-to-come and the Poetics of Filmic Breath built on Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine and a co-facilitated movement session with Daphna Westerman and Jiaying Gao, as part of Counterfield’s “Activating Indeterminate Encounters” series.

These breath-led workshops were also shared with MA students in Ocean as Archive, moving through public space, film, and the felt poetics of relational air. Each began with a breath; a shared threshold, an opening.

The filmic bodies are part of the embodied practice.
Just the stills are present here.
Join future workshops to move, breathe, pause, and listen with the filmic bodies of this work.

Remember to breathe

This welcome event (introducing members to the research collective counterfield) invited members to think and move with the research collective Counterfield.

Working collaboratively with researcher Sara Simić, from our meeting at the Birkbeck Critical Theory Summer, thinking, speaking, listening together over the summer in online spaces to this collective space at Goldsmiths, to understand how our research projects speak to the other and how they can converse with other bodies of knowledges.