Murat Adash

Edges of bodies: Camouflage, Correspondence and the Choreography of Alterity

This practice-based research project reconfigures a novel conception of the phenomenon of camouflage to both exercise and theorise new relational models of subjectivity through choreographic practice and writing.

Camouflage is here understood as a spatio-temporal act—a process through which bodies are negotiated in correspondence with their surrounding environments, processes that are intrinsic to choreography as well. Camouflage, at heart, rehearses the problem of distinction: between self and environment, subject and object, and being and appearing. It operates at the threshold of a corporeal localization, osculating at the contours of where bodies meet their surroundings, and ultimately surfaces as an interweaving of an interior-exterior, real-virtual, and visible-invisible intersection.

David Huwiler (courtesy of Utopiana, Geneva)

Building on this alteric reading of camouflage, this project probes the various ways how the chameleonic term may not only queer the visual sphere by sparking another kind of “here-ness” that is inherently changeable, but also highlight the porosity of boundaries and thus become a technology to embody the material thresholds of multiple possibilities of realities. Both camouflage and choreography are morphological processes that rehearse new formations of figure-ground relationships. Choreography organizes bodies in times and spaces around thresholds of visibilities and offers methods for bringing bodies together in novel ways: both human and non-human, as well as bodies of knowledge. These are the very negotiations that are pertinent to camouflage too, and as such the overall objective of this thesis is for them to interlace.

Accordingly, this project expands camouflage as somatic knowledge, not in terms of concealment and deception, but rather as a mimetic, interspecific and sensuous potentiality through which a different being-of-the-world, and ultimately new worlds, can be embodied and opened up. It reaches towards multi-natural becomings and phenomenologies of permeability, softening the edges of the subject as a distinct entity acting against the world, and, by shedding light on a new way of being, demonstrates that embodiment is always already an extension of oneself, an accession to an exterior world.

Furthermore, this thesis introduces the term correspondence as a relational device animating intra-subjective exchanges between bodies, entities and forces: to co-respond is to participate in and be in movement with a much wider animate sociality.

The practice component of the thesis develops a series of choreographic works under the title of Correspondance. The wordplay alludes to the notion of correspondence as a dynamic, living and ongoing relationship between things, i.e., the ability to co-respond to a world that is always moving. The Correspondance series develops camouflage as a performance strategy to generate a series of choreographic inquiries that engage camouflage choreographically.

Alongside the practice, the written component of the thesis constellates the terms camouflage, correspondence and choreography in order to articulate highly multidisciplinary fields of inquiry by weaving together a trans-disciplinary web of fields that bring together minoritarian and marginalized bodies of knowledge including Amazonian indigenous cosmologies, queer and feminist theory, new materialisms and post-humanism, ecology, philosophy, zoology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, critical theory and dance and performance studies.

Together, both practice and writing crisscross and interfere with one another to generate new artistic, somatic and discursive forms of knowledge. Both practice and writing demonstrate that it is in movement, that choreography establishes a relational correspondence with the environment, a mobile architecture that allows for an embodied ecology, or inversely, an ecological embodiment, namely to camouflage.

Supervisors

• Dr Edgar Schmitz
• Dr Bridget Crone

Website

• muratadash.com