Photo care of Touch Praxis
Developed with Touch Praxis collaborators Nina Sarnelle and Selwa Sweidan. Convened in collaboration with Praxis Oslo.
Residency dates: 4 September - 25 September 2023
The Open Call (May 2023)
Residency 24, Held, invites a multidisciplinary group of artists and others to explore touch as a creative medium.
The residency offers up to five Oslo-based artists and one international resident the opportunity to work for three weeks together with Sweidan and Sarnelle on collective research and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Sarnelle and Sweidan’s work is informed by participatory, decolonial methodologies in which ‘every body’ is engaged in processes of making and knowing. Guided by thinkers such as Karen Barad, Édouard Glissant, Petra Kuppers, Erin Manning, Hortense Spillers, and Hypatia Vourloumis, Sweidan and Sarnelle use touch to feel their way through complex issues of consent, inclusion, power, entanglement, and otherness. The residency aims to bring together a diverse group of practitioners who engage with fields such as multisensorial spectatorship, environmental toxicities, queer theory, racial & disability justice, or practices of collectivity/consent.
This intensive residency offers participants scope to develop both group and solo work. The group will collectively plan a schedule at the residency’s outset, including daily group meetings and activities (such as discussions, rehearsals, visits to relevant spaces in Oslo, networking events, communal meals and leisure outings) alongside unstructured time for independent reflection and research. In the first week, residents will participate in PRAKSIS’s customary “Meet the Residents” event, informally introducing themselves to the rest of the group and the Oslo arts community.
The Project Partners
About Touch Praxis
Selwa Sweidan & Nina Sarnelle are artists living in the stolen Tongva/Kizh land often referred to as Los Angeles. They aim to organise the residency responsively, creating a balance between openness and structure that works for all within the group: it will contribute to the archive of touch knowledge that resides in the bodies of their expanding community of collaborators and participants, as well as reaching out to others through text, video and public performance. As facilitators, they look forward to sharing their primary research in this area, including their work on functional touch modalities (sex work, physical therapy, intimacy choreography, and more), text and video-based resources from their library, and performance practices borrowed from Fluxus scores, bodywork, ecosomatics, Viewpoints, critical play, LARP, embodied consent modalities and clown. They will bring to bear their extensive experience in recent years of facilitating workshops, publishing, exhibiting, and residency and conference participation in relation to the residency theme, and they plan to share the method of embodied conversation/demonstration that they use to conduct “touch interviews”.
For more information click here
About Selwa Sweidan (she/her)
Selwa Sweidan (she/her) is an artist and researcher into emerging technologies. Her work probes computationally mediated ways of thinking and feeling through embodied and collaborative approaches. She creates biodegradable objects, movement scores, open tools, speculative films, and physical computing artifacts. Between (DATES) she has co-curated exhibitions and symposia including Beyond Embodiment, Performative Computation, STACKED Expo, Super Radiance and Clustering. Her writing has been published in the Internet Policy Review Journal, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Journal and the Design Research Society, and exhibited at the Bevilacqua la Masa Foundation, Venice Bevilacqua Gallery, Center Pompidou, Paris, HomeLA, Spring/Break Art Show, Los Angeles, and University of California, Irvine. She holds degrees from Smith College, Massachusetts and ArtCenter College of Design, California, and is currently an Annenberg PhD Fellow at the University of Southern California.
About Nina Sarnelle (she/they)
Nina Sarnelle (she/they) makes research projects, participatory performances, music composition, video and sculpture; her work interfaces with sites of neocolonialism(s), ecological destruction and labor exploitation in strange and intimate ways. They earned a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and recently had a solo video exhibition at the New Museum in New York. Her work has also shown at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Getty Center, Los Angeles, Ballroom Marfa, Texas, MoMA, New York, and internationally, including venues in Istanbul, Berlin, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Mumbai, Vienna, Genoa, and Beijing. Her work has been featured in Frieze, Art in America, Vogue Italy, Huffington Post, SFMoMA, Creators Project, FlashArt, and Hyperallergic.
About Praxis Oslo
Praxis Oslo is a laboratory for the study of dance and movement that works to strengthen the experimental dance and performance community.
The Residents
Events
Touch Praxis work has previously been supported by Abrons Arts Center, Los Angeles Performance Practice, NAVEL, School of Making Thinking and University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
Land acknowledgement: This open call was co-written from unceded Tongva/Kizh land, also known as Los Angeles, California, USA.
Timeline
Open Call: 3 May - 29 May
Interviews: 5 - 9 June
Final selection by 23 June
Residency: 4 - 25 September
