Supervisors: Dr Nicky Coutts and Dr Chantal Faust

Institutional email: mayra.ganzinotti@network.rca.ac.uk;

My practice-based PhD explores methods for knowledge production using voice, language, movement and rhythm. I aim to reconceptualise how empathy may form new relationships between the viewer and the Other, what these relationships may be and in what space, and to reimagine a space for potential communication and meaning between bodies outside of patriarchal structures of language. In the proposed geological epoch precipitated by human activity called the Anthropocene, the boundaries of the human-environmental relationship have become blurred: the human acts as a geological agent collapsing human and natural history. Technology ungrounds us and blurs the perception of time and space, removing us from the natural world to a state where we no longer know whether we are objects or subjects (Steyerl). Working through the idea of groundlessness, I seek to reconnect us to the geological surface and understand how the geological acts a layered action of our history. Through the interdisciplinary process of studying geological strata, rock and minerals, and reinterpreting the found textures as movement and gesture, I will generate a score from the readings of a geological surface to reignite the lost geological experience and interconnectedness, recognising in its performance and documentation that nothing is inert in any one moment and explore how ideas and objects intersect. This exploration is undertaken, not only through historical theoretical research, but also through my artistic practice; the score is employed as a prototype for moving image, performance and meaning production. Using a methodology that collapses the binary between theory and practice, I intend to find a space in which alternative forms of communication exist and construct a system of knowledge as a form of knowledge production to understand the relationship between language as well as how we as humans inhabit and communicate with the environment that surrounds us.