MONSTERS'N'GHOSTS
Exploring Embodiment as a Creative Strategy for Celebrating Intra-Agency and Fostering Regenerative Re-Imagination in the Anthropocene
in progress (since 2024)
MONSTERS'N'GHOSTS emerges from the tension between ecological grief, irreparable environmental damage, and the need − as well as the desire! − to carry on creatively. Centering the body as the site where matter and meaning converge, the project mobilizes embodiment as a multifaceted artistic practice to unsettle regimes of detachment and denial and stimulate speculative worlding based on responsibility and care.
The project is originally inspired by the interdisciplinary collection Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene and further spurred by posthumanist and eco-feminist frameworks developed in Meeting the Universe Halfway, Staying With the Trouble and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, among others.
The works presented here (click on images to enlarge) reflect different approaches I am exploring in a non-linear mode of research-creation. They are expressions of an evolving project and prototypes of a growing body of work. Together, they aim to open spaces in which regenerative re-imagination can take hold and circulate.
The multilayered approach to artistic embodiment I am crafting invokes immersion, exposure, trans-corporeality, and transposition to highlight and honour "monstrous" multi-species entanglements, as well as "ghostly" consequences of past destruction and ongoing intra-agency. Foregrounding bodies − most notably my own − I aim to convey our shared vulnerability and limits of power. At the same time, these dynamic, responsive, and ultimately pleasurable bodily engagements gesture towards the potentialities that arise when we shed detachment and passivity by embracing uncertainty and taking creative risks.
Regenerative re-imagination refers to the creative, relational, and ethical process of conceiving and envisioning futures in which wounded ecologies and disrupted more-than-human communities can flourish again. The bodily gestures and interventions I develop harness the energetic tension between grief, anxiety, and urgency on the one hand and the pleasures and possibilities of dreaming up healthy shared futures on the other. They aim to render ecological permeability, interdependence and co-constitution palpable, inviting viewers to expand their imaginative capacities for inhabiting our planet otherwise.
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