Apurahat ja residenssipaikat

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Subtle Corporealities: Propositions of Resistance for Creative Practitioners

Subtle Corporalities on taiteellista tutkimusta, joka etsii hienovaraisia keinoja keholliseen ilmaisuun epätasa-arvoisessa maailmassa. Hankkeessa luodaan yhteistyömahdollisuuksia iranilaisten taiteilijoiden sekä Suomessa toimivien esittävän taiteen osaajien kesken. Siinä tarkastellaan esittävien taiteen ja runollisen ilmaisun mahdollisuuksia käydä keskustelua vaietuista aiheista. Kokeilemme taiteellisin keinoin, voiko hiljaisuuden avulla rikkoa hiljaisuuden, ja voiko tarinan kirjoittaa kirjoittamatta sitä. Hankkeessa pyritään erityisesti yhteisöllisen työskentelyn kautta venyttämään normien rajoja, ilman tunnustuksellista kirjoittamista ja merkittävää henkilökohtaista riskiä. Hanke välttää näkyvyyttä, äänekkyyttä ja paljastamista – näiden sijaan tarkoitus on luoda tilaa ja parantaa sekä suojata marginaalissa työskenteleviä taiteilijoita.

Firstly, we ask this not to be published on the Kone Foundation website for safety reasons. Maryam's name should not appear in public at the moment anywhere, as she has been blacklisted by Iranian authorities. If Kone wishes to publish a description, Susanna will write (in Finnish) something that can be published, but here we want to share openly.

The aim of Subtle Corporealities -project was to develop strategies of resistance through partial visibility and audibility. We wanted to think together with Iranian artists about different forms of artistic work in a repressive society. Because of the pandemic and the political climate in Iran, much of what we had planned became too risky to implement. Thus, we focussed on our collaborative work, presenting together at conferences, publishing an article together, and working on our individual projects while meeting regularly online to share our knowledge. Our main achievements include

1) Developing the workshop concept aRound Table. Unsettlement due to the pandemic and the persecutions in Iran made us develop an alternative format for reaching out to artists in Iran and elsewhere, a virtual space of aRound Table inspired by Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘around-ness’ as an inclusive positionality, that allows circling movement around things, going far and getting close, becoming stranger and familiar at the same time; this alternative mode of orientation.

2) Maryam Bagheri Nesami's PhD completion in May 2021. She had to put an embargo on the thesis to limit the open access to her work and gain control over who is asking for access. Also at the last moment, Maryam decided to only keep the heading of her thesis title: Politics and Poetics of Solo, and censor the subheading (Choreopolitical negotiations of a dancing woman from Iran) which she believed might contain some red flags for the surveilling authorities in Iran.

3) Susanna’s creative non-fiction book Ruumis/huoneet to be published 8 September by Kustantamo S&S. The book negotiates visibility and invisibility, risk and safety, through language and narrative braiding. It presents a history of violence which refuses the label of confession and confessional literature. The book is an anti-documentary, and archive of repetitive time and haunting, which would not have taken such form without our regular conversations about what subtle resistance means and what it can look like. Maryam's thoughts are presented in the book, as she appears as a character in the book 'my Iranian friend'. The book is a manifestation, and example, of using literary strategies, language and form, to create the page as a place of justice.

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