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    More: Participants 2021-2022

    Josephine Baan

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    Abstract

    Rehearsing Realities: embodied learning, performance and incoherence as queer world-building

    With this PhD research, I want to investigate the ways in which queerness, incoherence, and embodied learning can be employed to develop an educational approach that stems from the field of performance. The aim is to develop performative embodied learning practices that can foster community, enlarge shared social responsibility, and offer space for collective imagination and the creation of new worlds and ways of relating.

    Contemporary education is very much situated around knowledge production that is coherent, quantifiable, measurable, and self-explanatory. With embodied learning, I refer to a knowledge that stands in opposition to this, and is obtained through physical encounters and experiences. The aim is to center the body as a site for learning and make way for forms of knowledge production that derive from intuition, emotion, belly-feeling, playfulness, joy, intimacy, affect, friendship, experience, and encounter. The root of the practice is to find a mode of communication and encounter that is non-verbal, a language of the body.

    I approach queerness as a way of thinking and doing that can invade dominant narratives and grant space to non-normative ways of living, working, and being together. Lauren Berlant describes incoherence as a method to be harnessed in order to foster political non-sovereignty, and suggests โ€œtraining oneโ€™s own incoherence.โ€ I want to research what a practice of โ€˜training oneโ€™s own incoherenceโ€™ could look like, and what a political currency of incoherence and illegibility could be.

    Part of what I wish to investigate is the ways in which movement of the body is related to the movement of ideas, and ultimately to the emergence of social movements. Performance provides an excellent vehicle for this, as it enables possibility to meet in physical space and connect ideas to movements, individually and collectively. It also invites us to โ€˜playโ€™; playing at being someone, something, or somewhere else, approaching imagination and the malleability of the world in a playful manner. To guide this research, I have dreamed up a speculative, itinerate โ€˜schoolโ€™ which I refer to as The School for Collective Embodied Inquiry. Gathering under the moniker of โ€˜Schoolโ€™ allows to question what a school is or can be, what learning is, who the teacher is, and how knowledge is produced.

    The School for Collective Embodied Inquiry stems from a desire to provide space for a learning environment that is body-based, intuitive, and collaborative, yet holds at its core the wish to engage with (and provide answers to) wide-ranging social issues. The School aims to offer space for the collective imagining, rehearsal, and embodiment of realities, narratives, and worlds that are different from our own. The goal is to develop workable scenarios, scripts, scores, models, methods, tools and practices that can be implemented within a range of communities and learning environments. It acts as a place for gathering, encounter, collaboration, and collective research, and will emerge in different locations and environments.

    Poster โ€œThe School for Collective Embodied Inquiryโ€, Jo Baan, contribution to Klima magazine, Issue 5, June 2022.

      Bio

      Josephine Baan (also goes by the names Joseph, Jo, or any variation thereof) is an artist and educator whose practice engages in art, education and collaboration as ways to forge creative resurgence. Theyโ€™re interested in the complexities of collectivity and in the possibility of establishing a solidarity that does not homogenise, but affirms difference. Their current research investigates the political currency of incoherence and illegibility within performance practices, asking what aspects of performance might work towards establishing a liberatory practice or abolishing the constraints that one is born into. They are also engaged in developing a performance-based pedagogy which incorporates embodied learning, incoherence, and queerness as tools for collective worlding.

      Josephine performs with their body and voice and makes installations, props, scripts and choreographies that explore the spaces and relationships between the flesh and the word, human and non-human bodies, and change and preservation. Materially and performatively thinking between things, beings and situations, they consciously switch perspective to influence roles and readings of power and control in relation to affection and gestures of care. They use speculative fiction and storytelling as tools to invade existing narratives that naturalize normative states of sex, gender, race, ecology, and the hierarchies between them.

      Their practice is closely linked to their work as an educator, which is influenced by radical pedagogy and non-hierarchical collaborative methods. They are a founding member of Rotterdam based educational collective sohere, and between 2019 and 2022 they co-ran Zurich based  School of Commons; a grassroots initiative dedicated to the study and development of decentered knowledge, with a focus on practices of self-organised learning and commoning. They are especially dedicated to creating safer, more inclusive, and more accessible environments for learning, working, and living together.

      Selection of recent exhibitions and performances:

      • 2022 Fugue State at Tanzhaus in Zurich, CH
      • 2022 Burner at LIFE, Rotterdam, NL
      • 2021 Werkschau 2021 at Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, CH
      • 2021 Weathering at SIC in Helsinki, FI
      • 2020 The Opposite of a Cynic [Tongue] at Nieuw & Meer in Amsterdam, NL
      • 2020 inter:archive at OnCurating in Zรผrich, CH
      • 2019 Here Not Here at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, IT
      • 2018-19 MOTH at Museum KKLB in Beromรผnster, CH
      • 2018 A Brief History of Becoming Rock at Art Rotterdam in Rotterdam, NL

      They obtained their MFA Fine Art Degree at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2015.

      Portrait Josephine Baan
      Work Josephine Baan