The project explores encounters with stillness (Sharpe, 2023:241) through the body’s engagement with somatic practices and raw and reclaimed clay. It is framed by Black Feminist Thinking as ‘presencing’ (De Finney, 2014:30), (Lewis, 2016), and ‘fugitivity’ (Spillers, 2003), (Gumbs, 2017), as a catalyst for ‘blackened knowledge’ (Sharpe, 2016). It is through an embodied lens of radical decolonial knowledge-based systems held within our bodies, and accessed as pre-colonial and Creole spiritual practices, that these interactions not only become practices of grief-work and incorporeal activism but also develop practices of care.
The practice-based research methodology is formed through a series of performances and group workshops, enabling a practice of uncovering how racial trauma is held and felt within the physical, spiritual and ancestral body. Clay sculptures hold trace movements of the body, becoming sculptural sites/earthworks of ‘blackened knowledge’. A Relational partnership is formed between the body and clay through engaging with clay during varied states of its malleability. This requires gestures of care to be performed between the body and clay through different modes of material understanding that enable an intimate relationship to be formed as co-collaborators.
The projects’ practice modalities cultivate an internalised landscape of decolonial engagements and embodied understanding through solitary performances and group workshops. The project will explore decolonial healing practices found within UK Black and Brown diasporic communities. Interactions with the corporeal body and the body of the earth, i.e. clay, will be examined alongside artists’ responses to both past and present-time positionality of the diasporic body. A decolonial praxis emerges through unearthing and greater understanding of the ways ancestral, intergenerational and present-time racial trauma are held and distributed within Black and Brown bodies, conjuring an internal environment of undoing.
