Research Statement

Introduction

Arkiv Avis Mor grows from projects, investigations and performances that I undertook between 2016 and 2023. The four strands of footage contained in the film are listed here in the order they first appear:

1. footage from a film project I began in 2018 about four generations of women in my family: my maternal grandmother, my mother, myself and my two daughters;

2. found footage from the online archive at London’s Natural History Museum showing the conservation of a whale skeleton; 

3. recordings of myself performing in a black box dance studio where, through improvised movement and my own commentary, I investigate what it means to move with a costume stuffed with newspaper;

4. footage from three live dance performances where I developed a single piece under different titles: The Whale Piece for a practical assessment for an MA Creative Practice in London 2016; Avismave (Newspaper-belly) at Horsens Teaterfestival in 2022; and Fire Generationer af Kvinder (Four Generations of Women) at Platform K in Horsens in 2022. 

Feeling some connection between these various strands, I have spent two years searching for a form that could contain the footage and bring out any connection. Arkiv Avis Mor investigates the relationship between the different strands as autobiography (or perhaps home movie), desktop documentary, dance for the camera, and performance. In this mesh of disciplines and genres the film is a form of autoethnography where the performative footage transforms the autobiographical family footage into a staging of my personal story (Russell, 1999: 276). The film does not give answers to how the strands are connected. Watching the film is an exercise in noticing how each part of the film speaks back to the previous, and for the viewer to consider if a surplus is produced or if each single component has been transformed (Willerslev and Suhr, 2013: 1). The film is a ‘think piece’ in which I grapple with the paradox of the dancer’s body as an archive in an ephemeral art form: the body as an archive of memories and experiences that can be accessed through the dance.  

Research Questions

My main research question has been around making sense of these connections: 

• How can a film give form to the relationships between the activities of mothering, dancing, filming, and researching?

• How can the activity of care intrinsic to mothering extend into my activities as an artist?

• How can filmmaking itself become an act of care?

• What is the bodily archive for a dancer?

As I will describe below, my process of investigation was very concrete. It yielded a secondary question, practical in character but informed by my reading of anthropologist Tim Ingold (2011), which I investigated as part of my dance practice:

• How can working with newspaper as both material (something with the potential for growth) and object (something fixed in its form) help me access my bodily archive?

Context / Significance

The seed for the piece grows from my background as a dance artist in the traditions of choreographing by Deborah Hay (2019) and somatic practice work in Andrea Olsen (2014). Hay creates dance pieces from generative prompts igniting the dancer’s imagination, Olsen investigates organic movement patterns through imagery, and both operate with instructions that instigate movement, a process-orientated and explorative approach also employed in the development of Arkiv Avis Mor. 

Each of the title words in Arkiv Avis Mor refers to an aspect of the research and, to varying degrees, the four strands set out in section 1.

Meeting the whale

On a day off from the course I was following as part of my MA Creative Practice at Siobhan Davies Studios in London in 2016, I went on a trip to the Natural History Museum (NHM) and stumbled upon the dissection of a blue whale skeleton in a pop-up laboratory in the museum basement. The skeleton was filled with newspaper from the time of its original conservation. Between the vertebrae, the 2016 conservators had found newspaper that had been brought in on the day in 1933 and used as an adhesive to make the whale bones hang together. Now the newspaper hidden inside the whale had become part of the animal’s archive, the newspaper was stored together with the whale bones. This encounter became the beginning of an investigation into newspaper and the archive of my own body. I was moved by the interdependence of the monumental whale and the disposable newspaper, between the exceptional and the quotidian. 

Avis / Newspaper

The newspaper inside the whale skeleton had, in its transition from the streets of London in 1933 as a preserved object situated in time, language and geographical space, become a material archive functioning as an adhesive. Pressed together between whale bones the newspaper itself was insignificant, an object with ‘no special qualities’ (Warner, 2014: 8). ‘When we treat things as objects it’s as though they’ve precipitated out in a fixed and final form […] to treat something as material is to treat it as potential to grow and become something other than it is in this moment,’ Ingold says (2011: 3). The potentiality of the newspaper as both object (an item made of paper and a source of information) and materiality (a material with the capacity, say, to absorb wetness from your damp shoes overnight) was fascinating to me. The potential of this opposition generated an exploration of stuffing my costume with newspaper in the performance tradition of the 1960s Judson Dance Theatre and Simone Forti (1974), and of contemporary dance artists like Florence Peake (2024). Filling my top with this object was like placing stories and histories on my body while still treating the material as a disposable and shape-changing substance. Exploring this dual character of object and material in my movement improvisation practice, working with and against the newspaper, generated a sense of ‘otherness’ and ‘alienation’: a sense of not recognising myself as my ‘newspaper body’ became hot, noisy, unruly, and restricting. It changed my body, its appearance, sensation and movement capacity, and recalled my experience of pregnancy two years earlier. 

Arkiv / Archive

Marina Warner writes, in a text I riff on in the film voiceover: 

A museum […] is a place where single objects are singled out for their singular qualities. That is the absolute opposite of an archive. In an archive you have serial objects, masses of them, all accumulated, not singled out for their special qualities, but precisely because they don’t have special qualities. (Warner, 2014: 8) 

The footage that opens the film showing visits to my grandmother with my mother and daughters is from a collection of mostly ‘not so special moments’ of eating, talking, playing and bathing. I have archived all my recordings on an external hard drive. There, they are preserved and (hopefully) protected in a form that reflects the conventional understanding of the archive as physical storage containing records of human activity in the form of historical documents, objects and artefacts or virtual data on a computer. In Arkiv Avis Mor, I juxtapose this archive of recordings with the archive as the place that holds my memories, namely my body. I also explore the tension between the archived recordings and the ephemerality of movement.   

Siobhan Davies in Table of Contents sets out with the intention of ‘socialising the past with the present in front of an audience’ (Davies et al, 2014: 4) through a dialogue between the performing artist and the archived dance material. For the dancer, the body’s memory is crucial to execute the dance but, in the moment the body performs live, the movement is fleeting (Whatley, 2014: 131) and ‘disappears into memory’ (Phelan, 1993: 148). In this way, the archive that conventionally signifies something stable and permanent can be understood in opposition to the ephemerality of performance (Borggren & Gade, 2013: 9). 

Mor / Mother

Since 2018, I have been filming my grandmother, suffering progressive dementia, with my mother and my daughters (the first born in 2014 and the second in 2019) during quarterly visits to my grandmother’s home three hours away. These ‘home videos’ were the core of my film project, recording the iterative and ordinary activities that filled the visits. The navigation of mothering and filming during these visits was challenging and sometimes resulted in odd camera positions, long takes with no action, or extreme close-ups of body parts when my attention was pulled away from the camera. The labour involved in minding camera and family at the same time generated a kind of aesthetic. Camerawork and motherwork fused into one, as Marso (2021: 730) has discussed in relation to filmmaker Chantal Akerman. For Marso, motherwork is a ‘set of techniques or practices rather than an identity’ (ibid.). The practices of motherwork, I found, were messy and ambivalent, as I was darting between responsibilities to care for my children, and my mother and grandmother, as well as the camera. Like in Akerman’s work with the camera, Arkiv Avis Mor encourages feelings of ambivalence about mothers and motherhood, opening for the potential of other ways to conceive of care. In the film I ask what kind of qualities we seek in mothering (Ibid: 733) by asking the viewer to notice whether ‘care work’ is what that viewer looks for when seeing motherhood.

Caring for the camera and my desire for its sensation in my hands (Bird, 2023), became a way of being creative while mothering. With the camera I could activate the creativity which easily slips from a woman’s grasp in favour of the imperative to ‘be good’ as a mother (Rose, 2018: 82). With the camera in my hands, I was able to resist the waning sense of self that a mother feels who must live only for her child (ibid.: 78). The film attempts to think with care as a multifaceted practice, in the caring for the camera, and in the camera caring back as my creative companion, with its odd framings and intimate close-ups.

Methods 

The methods employed for the making of Arkiv Avis Mor are deeply embedded in my dance practice. I have been concerned with staying true to my practice as a movement improviser and to let the film unfold similarly to how I experience improvising: with an intuitive and embodied logic. I was interested in a knowing that arises in doing or practicing as a form of tacit knowledge that is grounded in a material practice (Bolt, 2010: 29). I discovered how to work with the footage and what questions to ask by searching, re-searching and juxtaposing. The methods arrived in tandem with the research questions through “material thinking” (ibid.), making me aware of what I was interested in and how to investigate this. By way of this search, the more fully formed research questions arose and the methods, with which I could begin to respond to the questions, unfolded.

As the film took form, I gleaned from two sources that mix registers and discourses in interesting ways. The first, a novel, helped me to present and navigate the duality or opposition of artist and mother. During maternity leave following the birth of my second daughter I read Mit Arbejde (My Work) by Danish author Olga Ravn (Ravn 2020). Ravn tells a story of motherhood and postnatal depression in a formally unusual way, mixing first- and third-person narration, diary entries, essays and medical records. Mit Arbejde gave me a visceral experience of motherhood not (primarily) by ‘explaining’ it but by employing different registers of discourse that break chronology and replace the singular body the woman experiences before pregnancy with the duality of mother/child, but also the duality of first person ‘me’ and the third person ‘her’. 

The second source inspired the black box footage in which I dance in a white costume. This footage was recorded especially for Arkiv Avis Mor only weeks before I finished the film in April 2023. The idea to record myself in a black box studio came as a response to my work as interlocutor and dancer in my partner Alan O’Leary’s 2023 academic video essay Nebular Epistemics: A Glossary (Scholarship Like a Spider or Spit). In Nebular Epistemics, Alan reflects on videographic scholarship at a meta level by moving between performative moments in a studio speaking to camera, footage of conversation in a car, material from other video essays and clips of Zoom meetings, along with my own danced reactions in the studio. The video essay confirmed the expressive power of juxtaposing different registers that I had found in Mit Arbejde, and suggested how the different strands of my artistic and mothering activities could be combined in a film so that meaning (the sense of connection) was generated in the juxtaposition. 

Mixed in with my own voiceover in the film are the voices of my daughter, mother, grandmother and conservator Patricia O’Brien at the Natural History Museum. The voices reflect, inquire, sing and inform, switching between a self-reflective mode (‘This footage will go in my film’ 01:18), a descriptive mode (‘I have several times stuffed myself with newspaper’ 05:19), an analytical mode (‘Can the archive be released through movement?’ 08:10), and casual conversation (‘In the same way you have a mum I also have a mum’ 00:09). The exclusively female soundtrack takes advantage of an affordance of the audiovisual medium, democratising different ages and modes, and insisting on diversity in a form dominated by the male authoritative voice (Garwood, 2016). In addition, the subjective first-person voice is a common feature of autoethnography (Russell, 1999: 277); and a pronounced feature of Arkiv Avis Mor (as in Nebular Epistemics and Mit Arbejde, where it interacts with other voices in forms including Zoom meetings, film clips, diary entries and medical records). Each voice or mode in isolation has one meaning, but in the juxtaposition of clips, the components have the capacity to be transformed to more than the sum of the parts.  

Outcomes

Working in performance at the intersection of my formal dance training and improvisation (as a more ‘pedestrian’ and explorative form of movement), offers me a way to work artistically between technical skill and spontaneity. Arkiv Avis Mor balances between skill and a sort of dilettantism, between mother and artist, in an attempt to give form to the relationship between the activities in my life and the relationship with my own body as both archive and ephemera. This incongruence is integrated into the formal aspect of the film when my own presence in the different types of footage becomes a way of playing with roles of mother, filmmaker, dancer, researcher. The film does not explain but rather reenacts these relationships, leaving the viewer to connect the dots. 

I am very thankful to the people and places who supported me in the development of the performances in the initial stages of the work: Siobhan Davies Studios in London, Søren Raffnsøe Hultberg at Platform K in Horsens, Adelaide Bentzon at Horsens Teaterfestival, Jeppe Hemdorff Nissen at Bora Bora in Aarhus, Thomas Nielsen and Sabrina Koch at Komediehuset in Horsens and Zana Veliqi and Sidse Prehn Thomsen. Thanks to Martin Høybye, Stephanie Ellison and Maya Dalinsky for reading, viewing and commenting towards the later stage of the work. A very special thanks to the four women of my family, Ellen Hallager, Kirsten Hallager, Lisa Hallager O’Leary and Molly Hallager O’Leary for allowing me to film our time together and for their willingness to be part of the film. Finally, a big thanks to Alan O’Leary, my life partner and interlocutor for numerous conversations, viewings and readings of the work and endless support and encouragement.

References

Albright, A. C. & Gere, D. (2003) Taken by surprise : a dance improvisation reader. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Akerman, C. (2015) (director) No Home Movie [film].

Bird, K. (2023, June 7). ‘With a camera in my hands, I was alive’. NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies. [Online] https://necsus-ejms.org/with-a-camera-in-hand-i-was-alive/ 

Bolt, B. (2010) ‘The magic is in handling’. In Barrett, E. & Bolt, B. (eds.) Practice as Research. [Online]. I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd. pp. 27–34.

Borggreen G. & Gade R. (2013) ‘Introduction: The archive in performance studies’. In Borggreen G. & Gade R., eds, Performing archives / archives of performance. Museum Tusculanum.

Davies, S. (2014) Siobhan Davies Dance: Table of contents at the ICA, London. [Online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CsoXbuQYuE [Accessed 14 august 2024]

Davies, S., Buckley, A., Kaski, H., Krische, R., Morrissey, C, Sperling, M. (2014) ‘Introduction’. Table of Contents catalogue. London: Siobhan Davies Studios. 

Davies S. (2024). Siobhan Davies Archive. Siobhan Davies Studios [Online], Available from https://www.siobhandavies.com [Accessed 18 October 2024]

Forti, S. (1974) Handbook in motion. Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Garwood, I. (2016, December 4) ‘The place of voiceover in academic audiovisual film and television criticism’. NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies.[Online] https://necsus-ejms.org/the-place-of-voiceover-in-audiovisual-film-and-television-criticism/

Hay, D. (2016) Using the sky. London, England: Routledge.

Ingold, T. (2011) ‘Material movements and lines with Tim Ingold’. [Online]. Crossing Borders Talk 2011. PAL Movement and Meaning talk. Available from https://independentdance.co.uk/library/tim-ingold-social-anthropologist-pal-movement-meaning-talk/ 

Marso, L. (2021) ‘Camerawork as motherwork’. Theory & Event, 24(3), 730–757. https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2021.0041

O’Leary, A. (2023) ‘Nebular Epistemics: A Glossary (Scholarship like a spider or spit)’. Zeitschrift für Mediewissenschaft, ZfM Online, Videography, 12 June. https://zfmedienwissenschaft.de/en/online/videography-blog/nebular-epistemics 

Olsen, A. With McHose, C. (2014) The Place of Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press

Peake, F. (2024) Florence Peake. Available from: http://www.florencepeake.com [Accessed 18 October 2024)

Ravn, O. (2020) Mit arbejde. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.

Russell, C. (1999). Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw7bq

Rose, J. (2018) Mothers: An essay on love and cruelty. London: Faber & Faber

Suhr, C. and Willerslev, R. (2013) ‘Montage as an amplifier of invisibility’, in Transcultural Montage. 1st edition Berghahn Books. pp. 1-17.

Warner, M. (2014) ’Unhealing Time’. Table of Contents catalogue. London: Siobhan Davies Studios, pp. 6-14. 

Whatley, S. (2014) ‘Digital inscriptions and the dancing body: Expanding territories through and with the archive’. Choreographic practices. [Online] 5 (1), 121–138. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/chor.5.1.121_1

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows

Review 1: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

The purpose of this practice-research is to find a videographic receptacle—a video form—for multiple strands of practice-based research. Arkiv Avis Mor seeks to align these strands to draw out compelling synchronicities or resonances. These strands include:

a) The attempt to articulate the body as a material archive—one that records and is marked by motherhood.

b) The bodily archive also relates to the artist’s improvisational dance practice, where the ephemeral nature of dance complicates practitioner expertise. This expertise is expressed and then ‘lost’ in the moment of execution, while unconscious memories and emotions emerge through physical movement. The video asks: is the body a somatic or subpersonal archive of skills and memories?

c) The research questions emphasise the development of an ‘aesthetics of care’. Care does permeate the sequences resembling home movie fragments.

The question of originality in art research is always fraught. Undoubtedly, Arkiv Avis Mor is novel—there is nothing quite like it elsewhere. The video combines family footage of “four generations of women” with sequences of the author’s dance practice, conducted in ‘collaboration’ with newspaper, scrunched and sculpted into an impromptu costume (reminiscent of Erwin Wurm’s One-Minute Sculptures). The dances oscillate between claustrophobic intensity—the impulse to rid themselves of the newspaper costume—and an exploration of the shape possibilities it affords. Another strand follows the discovery that a whale skeleton at the Natural History Museum had been stuffed with newspaper from its original conservation. These elements are woven into a largely convincing and, at times, moving composition.

However, the research statement does not do enough to convincingly articulate the video’s contribution to ‘knowledge’ or ‘understanding of practice research’. It cites inspiration from a novel and a video essay, but without clarifying their originality. Similarly, how do they generate the novelty of Arkiv Avis Mor? One way to strengthen this would be to situate the work more securely within a specific discipline, first articulating its ‘limitations’ and then demonstrating how the video reconfigures them. It seems to me that the piece belongs within an autoethnographic film context. Catherine Russell’s Experimental Ethnography (Duke University Press) contains an excellent chapter on this, Autoethnography: Journeys of the Self. Engaging with this text could help frame the work within autoethnographic discourse and assert its novelty in relation to existing scholarship. Of course, this is only one of several possible contexts in which the work operates, but for publication, its originality needs to be explicitly established.

Additionally, the author seeks to develop what I take to be an aesthetics of care, with two of their research questions explicitly using this term. Yet, a theorisation of care as a filmic aesthetic is not fully developed. This is a missed opportunity, as care is clearly embedded in the work. I would like to see more engagement with this idea, perhaps through a deeper interrogation of the cited Marso text. Moreover, a vast body of contemporary art literature has explored care over the past five years. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (2017) has been particularly influential in this regard, and some acknowledgment of this discourse is recommended.

Finally, the Derrida citation is problematic. He is referenced in support of a standard definition of ‘the archive’, which does not engage with his critical perspective. Either the citation should be removed, or the research statement should offer a more nuanced explanation of Derrida’s position.

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

This short autobiographical film very effectively mediates some quite disparate topics in different locations and times. It interweaves a montage of the fragments of the everyday routines of a baby and child, mother and grandmother, with the preparation for and the dance performed by the author, sometimes superimposed with the image of a baby’s body, and tightly framed, close-up shots of skin and bodies rubbing together.  The filmmaker is author and subject, and her calm subjective voice and occasional direct address to camera, gives exposition and reflection that ties the fragments of narrative together. The tight framing gives restricted views of family members enabling us to imagine the off-screen space of her familial world. The effect is one of intimacy and lyricism through the children’s movements and faces and the dancer’s performance in the black box, stuffing newspaper under her costume followed by the slowly writhing body allows the spectator to imagine the paper pushing and pulling and perhaps inscribing the printed words and photographs on to the hidden skin of her body. The overall effect enables the spectator to contemplate their own growing up, relationships with mothers, eventual death and to reflect on the body as an ephemeral archive with its own subjective memories. The quality of the material newspaper with its use as generally disposable information and archive enables us to contemplate often different uses for the material of newspaper in the past.

The research statement provides a context. Descriptions of how the film was conceived are also partially echoed in the film. The description of the author’s dual role as filmmaker and dancer in documenting the development of the filmmaking process and ideas for the eventual film is illuminating but the distinction between autoethnography and the autobiographical is weakly analysed and supported by a theoretical context. There is  a good discussion of the complexity of newspaper as object, source of information and repository of information that may also be a material to absorb wetness and how filling her top with newspaper was both placing stories and histories on her body as well as evoking the notion of it as material that could be a shape-changing substance including possibly evoking her pregnancy. Good discussion of how making this film enabled the author to integrate the activities of a daily life as a mother and an artist. However, the interrelationship and distinction between the stability of object archive, subjective memory and the ephemerality of performance is insufficiently supported by an argument and requires analytical development. How the spectator perceives the film through a necessary act of imagination needs further analysis. The use of some of the familial footage could be perceived as a transformation that may have begun as home movie needs some analysis. Sobchak’s work on home movie would be useful.  The lack of discussion of the methodology for the creation and effectiveness of the voice-over needs analysis and would strengthen the research. The statement is poorly structured and needs some attention to guide the reader through the arguments. 

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response