Cartography of Self
Culture
An agreement (conscious or not) to see the world through the same lens.
The outlines of culture frame our actions and the quality of our aspirations. They are the invisible railing that shapes the ways we move through space and the possibilities we see in a landscape. Cartography of Self is an analog theoretical poetry and performative urbanism piece in which our own body and lived experience become the lens through which we listen to culture with our whole selves.
Collaborative Performance
Movement Research 04/26/23
150 1st Ave, New York
An hour-long collaborative performance inviting the audience to drop into the feeling of a flesh-and-blood self that is dealing with its context — the narratives and the spatial barriers that influence our range of movement. This iterative performance is dedicated to the body as a site of resistance. A combination of guided movement , free flow invite the audience to break from the regular scripts of space — and invent new ways to move and engage with surroundings. The performance ends with fifteen minutes of free creative time, where the audience draws or writes down their own process of culture change.
Theoretical Poetry
Cartography of Self is an entirely analog auto-ethnographic exploration typewritten and rendered in watercolor and bricolage. Based on a five-month-long somatic exploration with Mary Abrams in New York — I used sense perceptions to explore how culture moves me, and invent new images, words, and frameworks to capture a value system centered on a reclaimed right to privacy. Cartography of Self captures the process of unlearning categorical thought and leaning into discomfort. Searching through the pain in my body for hints pointing to those forgotten corners of our selves - the ones deemed “uselessˮ by a culture defining value as productivity.
