Andre Bocchetti 1, Erin Manning 2
1Federal University Of Rio De Janeiro - Rio De Janeiro (Brazil), 2Concordia University - Montréal (Canada)
Sujet en anglais / Topic in english
A body is a crowd. The corporeal individuality, human or non-human, organic or not, can be thought as the result of a historical and ontological composition. What if we could, then, map, tell and fable such stories of the materialization of a body?
The session aims to bring together those interested in problematizing the materiality of the body, based on the debate on theorizations, investigative processes and experiments that can support it. From anthropology to the arts, from philosophy to education, bodily unity has been discussed in its modes of production: Tim Ingold once thought of “a body” as a heap, Judith Butler as result of citational practices, and still is possible thinking of it as a crossing of modes of existence in conversations with Etienne Souriau or Bruno Latour, to name just a few examples.
The materiality of bodies therefore carries the possibility of leading us to stories of ontological crossings that deserve our interest. Even because the mapping or even the fabulation of such stories has enormous political importance. Telling about the multiplicity that makes (and unmakes) a body, in its ever-paradoxical permanence, means open spaces for understanding the operations involved in the modeling of bodily reality itself, whether densely stabilizing the limits of a body or opening it to the creation of other modes of embodiment.
In the processes of materialization of the corporal unit are added historical and ontological movements on which are implied the most diverse somatic, social, and ecological relations. Therefore, we invite the participants of this session to think of a body as an entity with its own forms, representations, sensitivities and kinesthetics, but always connected, although in a contesting way, to the worlds and networks of meaning and practices that at the same time constrain it and provoke its inventive possibility.
