What Is Research Now? — An Embodied Gesture
Presented as part of Counterfield, with Killian O’Dwyer and Callum Bradley
ReSkIN Seminar Series, 2024

This embodied gesture formed part of a collaborative presentation invited by the Research Skills Intercollegiate Network (ReSkIN) , a cross-institutional seminar programme for MPhil/PhD students in visual, cultural and curatorial studies across eight London institutions. As members of Counterfield, we (Killian O’Dwyer, Callum Bradley, and Marie Theresa) were invited to respond to the provocation What is research now?

Instead of offering static definitions or linear methodologies, we opened a collective enquiry through movement, breath, and spoken fragments. This gesture was not a presentation about research but a presentation as research. Informed by Counterfield’s emphasis on embodied knowledge and situated collectivity, our contribution invited participants into a shared space of co-becoming, where the question of research is not answered, but held.

The gesture reflected the core ethos of Counterfield: to activate research through embodied, relational, and situated practice. To remain with questions. To hold the porousness of knowledge. And to invite others to feel and think with us, not just about us.

This was not a performance for an audience, but an invitation to be with — to be present with research as lived, felt, moved.