Embodied Research

and

Movement Workshops

Conversing with Watery Filmic Bodies of my Film Practice

and

Irigarayian Air

to

Offer Potentials

to

Reorientate

the Irish Catholic Maternal

in the Mother and Daughter Relation

I hope to open spaces, where together we can

breathe

move

feel

hold

the polyphony of voices of the Irish Catholic women from the 1950s who left the Irish countryside for London, due to ‘out-of-wedlock’ pregnancies.

These voices inspire my research and embodied practice.

This research and practice hopes to think with these women and the transgenerational ripples that are felt in the relation of mothers and daughters, to offer a reorientation.

“Soon, we will weave the spaces as we speak.

Together, we breathe these words, inhaling and holding them, if only for a second, before we have to 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 words were written collectively with Graduate Tutor and PhD researcher, Killian O’ Dwyer as part of counterfield, research collective.

Air becomes the air of curiosity

I invite you to join me to read this text collectively in this moment across different temporalities as it arrives to you and to upcoming embodied research and movement workshops.

Objects moved to the side within the institutional spaces we meet.

Just for the duration of our time together.

We determined the space collectively.

These workshops are shared spaces where I ask you to engage in ways you feel comfortable with.

Come and go as you want to.

There are no calls to perform, move or be in any way.

We will explore together ways of conversing between our individual and collective bodies and that of the textual and filmic bodies that ‘hold’ with care the voices of the Irish Catholic maternal.

Voices that

allude,

resist,

disappear,

emerge,

re-remember,

are felt

and won’t be held

I offer a hand to explore the defiant gestures of the Irish Catholic maternal that became ways of negation within framings of the Catholicism and the Irish state and seek a reorientation together.

My film practice and the embodied workshops seek to explore collectively the transgenerational psychic traces of the Irish Catholic maternal in my own body.

As we move, we do so with uncertainty and unknowing, through conditions and materiality of

audio,

video,

digital rhythms,

wifi interruptions,

text and

memory spaces.

We come together physically in upcoming spaces, our bodies and breath that vibrate with the filmic bodies that come to converse with us.

Bodies of Water

Whilst this filmic body plays,

listen with your body,

allow your memory spaces to flow to bodies of water that come to you,

that hold you,

that trouble you,

that disrupt,

that care,

that respond,

that elude,

that move amongst us.

We enter this moment together, unknowing together.

There is no call to share, take this time to just listen if you don’t feel comfortable sharing. 

We will feel with our bodies and

think with Irish emotions that are always felt on the body

Bodies of water have flowed throughout my research, since feeling their presence, which had been there all along, by taking part in Ocean as Archive module facilitated by Dr Lenka Vráblíková on the Masters in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Let’s pause, and listen to these words in our body

Here I think with the voice of Phoebe Boswell, who was the 2022 Writer in Residence at Whitechapel Gallery, this included a workshop by Black Blossoms, the day opened with an opportunity to consider the people who gathered in relation to bodies of water to reflect on the Black experience of swimming; its attendant historical legacies, and how they shape personal and collective fears and desires that have come to be associated with water. I move to Irish artist’s Jesse Jones’ proposition of the

collective power of the mass,

or a multitudinous body,

and the importance of attending to personal and collective fears and desires when we converse with care in relation to bodies of water.

All the embodied research and movement workshops have opened with asking members about a body of water that has stayed with them.

To meet each other as we are in this moment

The ‘Feminine-to-Come’ dances along with shower water, as our bodies move in and out of the waterdrops that fall, catch and move along with us. This dance took presence within the workshop space of ‘Indeterminate Transmissions’, in-person movement workshop, choreographed unexpected and unknown, in shared temporal moments and conversations in Seville with researcher and dancer, Jiaying Gao and later in London with artist Daphna Westerman.

I hope as you watched the film above, you joined in this collective conversation.

Or are you still searching along with Daphna?

My focus is the relation between mother and daughter in the Irish Catholic maternal. Throughout, I will refer to the Catholic Irish maternal, which will inhabit this focus on the relation between mother and daughter. This research and practice hopes to think with the women that left the Irish countryside in 1950s to get married in secret whilst pregnant, but the relation from this time on is on those that consider themselves mother and daughter.

I refer to the ‘Catholic’ maternal and this is to speak to the spaces these women are navigating across generations, whether individuals feel they are lapsed, practising, not brought up Catholic, and all ways of identifying or not. The Irish Catholic maternal thinks with the contemporary psychic traces that are embodied in my own body, gestures and physical spaces I navigate and that of others.

My current film practice and embodied research moves constantly between spaces in Ireland and London. Embodying the women I hope to speak with care with and my own living relation to this research. Thinking also with my own Irish Catholic mother, who lives in London and moving within, through and beyond transgenerational entanglements.

The motivation for the embodied workshop spaces of my practice was to move away from a ‘film screening’ with an audience or films that act as evidence of research practice but to offer an embodied ‘viewing’ through different entry points to filmic bodies, activating openings for bodies within these spaces to move and respond in ways that feel comfortable to them. This practice seeks to mobilises a space to feel with the entanglement of air and water; to breathe and move with a reorientation and defiance and complexities of the ‘livedness’ of the Irish Catholic maternal via the flows and intensities of feminine bodies off screen that agitate the Irish, English and ‘Catholic’ bodies of water.

I am currently filming in spaces in Ireland and interviewing women in London.

Last time I left Dublin I felt a sudden deep grief and at a loss,

moving

unwillingly

through thick mud

back to London.

The constantly movement has become unexpectedly unnegotiable

I am currently filming in Dublin and Bray.

My practice seeks to hold and speak aloud the words of these women in spaces in Ireland and London that were/are framed by Catholicism and the State, but were/are spaces that women have sought

gestures of

negotiation

with its authority.

The words are felt bodily through

my breath

and as it converses with

filmic breath.

These filmic bodies come to converse collectively with all that come to the embodied research and movement spaces.

These spaces have taken place in London but it feels important that they take place in both Ireland and London. The Irish Catholic maternal in the research constantly moves between Ireland and London and I explore how these voices are ‘held’ in both spaces and the in-betweens.

I place London instead of England or the United Kingdom as my focus is on the women who came to London in the 1950s.

As I began this research, I resisted my inhabitation within the practice, even though it began with a letter that belonged to my aunt, which is stored in her suitcase, in a bedroom at my parent’s house in London. Its resting place for many decades.

The ‘Feminine-to-Come’ that I position to navigate a reorientation is repeatedly invoked in Drusilla Cornell’s “Introduction: Writing the Mamafesta: The Dilemma of Postmodern Feminism”, the ‘not-yet’ and ‘still-to-come’ is embodied in the discovery/rediscovery of the letter.

‘The letter is always, already being written. The ultimate proclamation of the mamafesta is anticipated but never finally delivered’

The circulation between generations of women that Cornell speaks of, mirrors the letter that is in circulation within this research and practice, that is being rewritten, and recirculated, which is that of my Irish aunt’s breathy letter to my mother in the 1950s before her untimely death. It is important for the letter’s content to mostly remain with its familial circulation, yet its embodiment is felt through my filmic practice and the interventions of the ‘Feminine-to-Come’.

The writing within this letter offers revelations of a

spirited and joyous elusivity

to evade being ‘captured’ by the framings of the Catholic Church.

Movement,

circulation

and ‘disjointed times’

are offered in the feminine of change in the work of Luce Irigaray. I explore this movement that is perpetually presenting a fluid feminine placed in the “rere” by the Catholic Church but moving to different temporalities of the fore by Irish Catholic mothers and daughters through generations, that negotiate through gestures of defiance and complexities.

This inhabitation of constant movement between Ireland and London, has created an unexpected bodily and psychic unsettledness that has become part of the practice, threading trajectories from my grandmother who left the countryside in County Cork. The ‘secret’ internalised permanence of ‘shame’ has transgenerational ripples and through my research and film and embodied practice, I hope to

re-imagine

how these

residues of the states of

bodily,

spatial temporal

and relational unsettledness

of the Irish Catholic maternal are

felt

and reorientated.

Rereading Irigaray’s shared air that seeks the potentialities to open to autonomous feminine subjectivity and woman-to-woman sociality to emerge within these relationships, offers a methodology for this research.

Embodied Research Events

My practice is tangled with collective conversations, workshops and events that hold the polyphony of voices of these Irish mothers and daughters.

Text from the workshop

‘We will explore together ways of conversing between our individual and collective bodies and that of the textual and filmic bodies. As we move, we do so with uncertainty and unknowing, through conditions and materiality of audio, video, digital rhythms, wifi interruptions, text and memory spaces. We come together physically in this space, our bodies and breath that vibrate with the filmic bodies that come to converse with us.

I invite you to find a space within this room to sit. Before you do, move as much as you want to, until you feel ready to settle. Notice the bodies around you. Notice how the air feels and moves between and upon your body. Connect with the floor once you find your position. Notice how the air feels on your body in contrast to the floor. We dance with and are affected by the air around us, whilst forgetting the earth. Here we feel the presence of the Réidhleán, one of the 35 Irish words for field, which translated to English means to play and dance in a field.

‘Please close your eyes.

Listen with your body

Open your eyes at any point you feel ready to as I read these words.

I offer these words to enter this embodied research and movement workshop together.’

The physical space at Goldsmiths with 20 student and myself, became a space to read, move, breath, pause, and think the Irish Catholic maternal together. Listening, feeling, pausing, and moving together in this institutional space in London with the embodied modalities of the mother and daughters I hope to collectively think with.

Filmic body that weaves in and out of this workshop - Poetics of Filmic Breath in the Irish Catholic Maternal

The digital filmic bodies are forming and un-forming through my processes of post-production film editing, which includes cutting, layering and transitioning the visuals and audio. The film practice explores amateur and experimental cinema, characterized by blurry, sometimes illegible, washed out visuals as a tool for the “assumption of an autonomous gaze,” to enable an entering into, ‘a world that does not belong to me … but that is impregnated by me.” (Balsom, Erika, Peleg, Hila, Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, The MIT Press, (2022))

In my filmic body ‘Poetics of Filmic Breath in the Irish Catholic Maternal’, the visual and audio of the bodies of water are impregnated with my breath and that of my mother’s as they flow with the breath of the audio that layers throughout. 

The cuts and sonic flows are made and remade through the breath and suffocation of the state, Catholic and personal archives I am working with. I began a practice of hand-writing spoken words of films and texts within the Radharc archive and the archives of the Library of Ireland, which insisted when inhabiting the ‘Feminine-to-Come’.

‘Feminine-to-come’, and the Poetics of Filmic Breath

Embodied Research and Movement Workshop

As part of Counterfield and thinking with researcher Sara Simić, (MA degree in Women and Gender Studies at Central European University | Researcher: women artists, oral history, and feminist film history | Trainee at Centropa)

2 October 2023

(Text from the event)

Movement and Embodied Research Event

Goldsmiths, University of London, RHB 300

Welcome drinks from 5.30pm | Main event starts at 6.30pm

Soon, we will weave the spaces as we speak. Together, we breathe these words, inhaling and holding them, if only for a second, before we have to exhale again. We do not determine the space that surrounds us, between us, that passes as shared air, if only for a moment.

We breath, we move, we feel.

Co-facilitated with dialogues that weave the spaces of collective research practices. Activated around themes of ‘being moved’, bodily knowledges, filmic breath, rhythmics of shared breath and suffocation, when the wayward feminine is least felt in archives.

This welcome event invites members to think and move with the research collective Counterfield. ‘The feminine’ we invoke at the beginning of the event is rooted in our (the convenors) shared understanding, which acts as a threshold for the feminine-to-come. During this co-facilitated workshop, we welcome you to collectively explore and feel Filmic Bodies of Breath through activating our bodies while thinking of these modalities.

We invite you to think/feel collectively again, setting in motion dialogues with new filmic bodies by Marie Theresa, to join in spaces that are constantly being remade by unfolding conversations. The filmic bodies question the modalities of the ‘tangible invisible’ shared breath that are positioned by Luce Irigaray and the potentialities to open to autonomous feminine subjectivity and sociality to emerge within these relationships.

We ask you to move with us, but movement isn’t essential. If you are interested in exploring the connection between our bodies and the moving image and find out more about the research collective, Counterfield, you are welcome to join. The event will culminate in a panel discussion which teases out the links between our shared practices but also with the members that join the event, as we think the futures of Counterfield.’

This is our collective archival practice, to open to the potentials of ‘the-feminine-to-come’.

Let’s pause, and listen to these words in our body.

Filmic body that weaves in and out of this workshop - Feminine-to-Come

Indeterminate Transmissions – ‘Hydro-Feminine'

The workshop, ‘Feminine-to-come’, and the Poetics of Filmic Breath tangled with ‘Indeterminate Transmissions’ and in-person movement workshop co-facilitated with Daphna Westerman, Jiaying Gao and myself as part of counterfield’s series five workshop series, ‘Activating Indeterminate Encounters’.  A meditation on the search of ‘other feminine’, the ‘Feminine-to-Come’, that is a 'hydro-feminine' through the poetics of 'Filmic Breath'. 'Filmic Breath' thinks with how the filmic body itself breathes, in its digital, analog and post-lens (found footage) forms. These workshops moved through public spaces and with students of the module Ocean as Archive on the Masters in Contemporary Art Theory. Opening each time with the departure from my film ‘'Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine' by Marie Theresa Crick.

'Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine' sought to weave amongst the rhythmics of shared breath and suffocation, feeling with selected reading materials inspired and navigated through the modality of the Masters in Contemporary Art Theory module, Ocean as Archive. 

The filmic body cultivates the Irigarayan air, which was inspired by her text Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (1991/1980) and its relation to shared air in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (15 May 1999). This film questions the modalities of the ‘tangible invisible’ breath that are positioned by Irigaray and the potentialities to open to autonomous feminine subjectivity and woman-to-woman sociality to emerge within these relationships. 

The texts that hold the structure of the filmic body, move in and out with the feminine breath of Anyanwu in Octavia Butler’s, Wild Seed (1980), Sila in Yvette Christianse’s Unconfessed (2007), in Piya Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Adaora in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) and Manoka in Mohale Mashigo’s Intruders (2018). Whilst reading these fictions, I pulled out the words that most spoke to the movement and textuality of archives of the ocean in my imagination.  Acting as anchors throughout yet resisting a linear narrative and at times, the space to be read at all; feeling with breathing and suffocation.

The film seeks a fluid modality, a lyrical dialogue to feel with the rhythm of the polyphony of breath, that ruptures and defies distinction, mirroring the depths of the ocean; Irigaray’s ‘Feminine’ represented as a fluid that resists containers. These characters become the anchors of this film and offering the hand of entry into the film from the beginning. As the breath slows in parts and mainly towards the end, so do the voices of the characters. Feeling with the textuality and materiality of breath and working alongside Laura U.Marks the Skin of the Film. My search for the ‘feminine-to-come’ was activated in many threads that began to tangle together, including taking part in Ocean as Archive and conversations and the response to this film from Dr Lenka Vráblíková.

Filmic body that weaves in and out of this workshop - Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine

The film mirrors breath and the feeling of suffocation by using a filmic language which connects the ‘cuts’ in editing to the beats and pulsations in the reading materials. The bodies and voices of the feminine voices and all bodies that inhabit the reading materials may not have visibility, but I wanted them to be sensed by the creation of movement in the water that I filmed.

I sought an abstract of filming, using my Canon 5D Mark IV and iphone, to film textual clips that hoped to capture the presence of bodies moving off screen, whilst the light tangles with the particles left to dance on screen, showing the relation to different bodies and the ocean. I allowed my breath to affect the camera whilst filming, letting the camera move with my breath.

The decisions of the ‘cuts’ were made by mapping in many forms from the counting of syllables and punctuation in the parts of the poems, texts, spoken work and so forth, that I chose, to the duration and types of camera angles, of the pulsation of the colour blue and movement between underwater and above to the appearance and disappearance of an ocean snake. Thinking with Han Ok-hee’s 16mm film Untitled 77-A (1977) – ‘A cut is how one image meets another, forming a relation. Creation and destruction inseparable’ (Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg pp18). In post-production, I played in many registers with the filmic breath; length of ‘cuts’ mirroring the breath in the reading materials and sharpening images when the breath quickens and decreasing the readability when it slows – a soft and grainess. Finally, the edited sound played with the intensities of differing breaths. 

The film seeks to cast the viewer as an interlocutor, entering at different points at will, feeling with the ebbs and flows of the water on screen, just as Achille Mbembe hopes his readers will do as they move at will through Necropolitics.

Marie Theresa Crick is a PhD researcher in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research seeks a reorientation of the conditions of Irish Catholic maternal migration of the silent displacement of women from the Republic of Ireland to London in the 1950s, due to premarital pregnancies. Thinking with the women who got married in secret in London and had daughters. Aiming to position a ‘Feminine-to-Come’, a radical within but ‘not yet’, to offer a reorientation of what was transmitted by this migration of another register, the ‘unknown knowns’ of banishment through bodily autonomy and hopes for different futures. Asking what is enabled by a re-imagination of forms of ‘shame’ within mother and daughter relations, to illuminate ‘the livedness’ of the everyday in the Irish Catholic maternal imagination and its futurity. Looking to the potentials for thought, opened by the absences created by the critiques of Irigarayan scholarship. Rereading Irigaray’s motif of air through embraces with filmic breath and practice. Marie Theresa speaks with the polyphony of voices of working-class women from the Irish countryside, who were watched by the Irish Chaplaincy in London and framed by conditions of being Irish Catholic in England. The states of bodily, spatial temporal and relational unsettledness of the Irish Catholic maternal, that is fertile and sexual, seek a radical reinvention of the mother and daughter relation, through a rereading of Luce Irigaray’s shared air as it converses with my film and embodied research practice.