2025-2026 COOP study group ~ Body as Memory
Tutor team:
Guests:
tba
Partner Institution:
If I Can't Dance I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution
Student participants:
Andrea Illès, Ayse Idil Idil, Carlos Azeredo Mesquita, Dory Ikonen, Henriks Zegners, Ilja Schamle, Leo Hugendubel, Nika Pecarina, Olfa Arfaoui, Patrick Freriksen, Rikke Lundgaard Ebling, Sophie Dandanell Refsgaard
Student led reflection:
Chronicles
Program:
The COOP in collaboration with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution will continue exploring the practice of listening and forefronting the somatic, experience, and practice as paths for being in, engaging with, and contributing to, the world. It will build on the fundaments laid by the previous two COOPS, “The Word and the Wound”, conceived and led by Snejanka Mihaylova and Frederique Bergholtz. In both COOPS, Angelo Custodio played an important role, and we are happy to welcome him as one of the lead tutors for this years COOP.
The image that goes with the blurb is a fragment of the score of our last performance, titled “Hearing Interval; there is a place for you” that took place at the roof terrace of the State Gallery of Contemporary Art – SPEL in Nicosia as part of the COOP SUMMIT 2025 and was developed and performed by Anna Buyvid, Agnese Krivade, Alva Roselius, Agnese Spolverini, Bel McLaughlin, Hannah van der Schaaf, Javier Rodriguez Perez, Mia Tamme, Nada Gambier, and Patrick Freriksen: our last years’ COOP participants.
For the coming COOP we have invited Angelo to compose a warm-up for the group, with attention for body and voice, and to keep developing this warm-up over the course of our confluences. The warm-up thus will be a fundamental part of our COOP and during the confluences it will be daily practiced. In our COOP we will keep exploring the world of sound and with the first COOP’s focus on the warm-up and breathing, and the second one on singing and finding (the) interval, our tentative interest is to look at composition in the coming COOP.
Another recurrent element will be the attention for practice, with time and space dedicated to share work amongst us. The guests we have invited for the workshops, all have invested in attentiveness to processes in practice, the importance of the experiential, and have found ways to find the courage to keep working.
Our COOP will be part of “Body as Memory”, If I Can’t Dance’s field of inquiry for the coming four-year programme. What follows is If I Can’t Dance’s general reflection on the theme: it is a start to formulate our own entry points and as a COOP to find our own movements within.
In “Body as Memory”, If I Can’t Dance aims to explore the body as a carrier of memory. How do memory, experience, and knowledge develop through the ‘container’ and ‘vehicle’ of the body? How are individual and collective stories transmitted through the body? And how are pasts, presents, and futures anchored, stored, processed, interpreted, suppressed, and transformed - in short, created - in bodies? Within the “Body as Memory” field of inquiry, we are interested in somatic memory - how are memories stored in the (human and non-human) body? We want to explore forms of transmission - how are moving bodies within for instance diaspora bearers of (mis)memories and what role do (the performance of) music and sound play in this? And we also want to look at the interaction between human and natural bodies: how is memory stored in, for example, land (cultivation) or water (use)? With “Body as Memory” we aim to intervene into Western modes of knowledge production that continue to operate through the assumption that being at a distance is a condition for knowing. The idea of a disembodied, decontextualized and neutral knowing subject has alienated us from the world, from ourselves and from each other, leading to the denial, erasure, and amnesia of other ways of being, sensing and making meaning of lived experience and the world around us. Performance brings back questions of embodiment, relationality, affect, reciprocity and interdependence between subject and object, making this binary incomplete and inadequate. Performance in theory and practice is rich in research methods when it comes to situating knowledge in the body, lived experience and in being in-relation. In this regard, performance is inherently undisciplined and inter-disciplinary, and continues to learn from the teachings of feminist, gender, and queer studies, indigenous ecologies and cosmologies, decolonial thinking, critical race theories, and disability justice. Within these perspectives, embodied knowledge exists and is transferred between bodies, both human and non-human, from the past, present and future. We are interested in tapping into the body as memory through for instance notions of repertoire, acts of transfer, scoring, rehearsing, storytelling, modes of attention, technologies of perception, and corporal literacy, in order to re-member, re-learn and re-value other worldviews and stories that can teach us how to reinhabit and reperform the world.
So far the thematics. We would like to leave you with a quote by Trinh T. Minh-ha, from the wonderful book “Bodies of Sound” edited by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin (Silver Press, 2024):
Stoffel Debuyssere: You tend to consider the interval not as a gap or a distance but rather as a possible correlation or relation. How would you define your interpretation of interval? Since you were talking about Edouard Glissant, does it resonate with his poetics of relation?
Trinh T. Minh-ha: If we try to put them together, certainly. But I also see a difference. For me the interval is that space between, it’s really an emphasis on between. […] [For me the interval means] focusing on something that neither fits squarely in one place nor into another place. Something you haven’t recognized yet with a name, something yet to name. You can always come up with a name, there is nothing wrong with that. But that name would continue to open itself up again and again. A word like ‘feminist’ for example. How do you work with that term so that it doesn’t merely close down, but also keeps on reopening to begin anew: what might be a feminist aesthetic, a feminist strategy, a feminist flim? […] working with intervals is a way of remaining constantly open. And to return to Glissant’s poetics of relation, it is a way to relate, to be in relation. When someone asks’ what’s that interval? Well, you don’t know yet. Until you work with the between and let yourself be led somewhere. The interval is what remains unoccupied and transformative. […]
