Borderwork (Rehearsing Proximity) - Katarina Zdjelar

My research revolves around feminist legacies, practices of dedication and the notion of rehearsal. It takes the form of a theoretical, educational-pedagogical investment and a number of moving image works. 

I am interested in a kaleidoscopic approach to female intimacy that simultaneously concerns and sits on the fridges of both anticolonial and queer discourse. My research includes historical elements into these models and experiments as well as contemporary potentials. It draws inspiration from living remains and legacies of non-aligned movement and visual art practices but also theorists such as Sara Ahmed, Janice Raymond, Federica Bueti and bell hooks. Among other references, these writings serve as a tool to unlock and define the potential of female friendship as a politically affective state of being and not only according to the intimacy of a personal relationship.

This ongoing research has been enriched by enrolling to a complementary program at Goldsmiths London ‘Masters of Sex: Feminisms, Sexuality, and the Archive’ and more recently in a series of workshops that explore the potentials of somatic practices on a deeper level.

My current interest focuses more concretely on feminist solidarity and its potentials, its methodological, as well as aesthetically-charged, material and social possibilities. I have recently become more interested in the notion of touch – in its symbolic as well as material doings. I am exploring the therapeutic potential of touch, learning about the nervous system towards a different understanding of pressure points and how they can be activated through affection and love: through the practice of pleasure rather than the purely medicinal. How can the treatment of the physical bodies act on the wider social body? 

How can the notion of touch be made tangible in the medium of feminist filmmaking? What would it do? Through a process of reading and writing, I am working my way towards exploring the screen as a surface like skin and the potential of adding elements of liveness and improvisation as touch in relation to film. I’m interested in collaborating with performers, philosophers, poets and people who use voice and bodily presence as a vehicle and medium to explore these questions. 

To recall Karen Barad’s opening paragraph from On Touching–the Inhuman That Therefore I Am: “When two hands touch, there is a sensuality of the flesh, an exchange of warmth, a feeling of pressure, of presence, a proximity of otherness that brings the other nearly as close as oneself. Perhaps closer. And if the two hands belong to one person, might this not enliven an uncanny sense of the otherness of the self, a literal holding oneself at a distance in the sensation of contact, the greeting of the stranger within? So much happens in a touch: an infinity of others – other beings, other spaces, other times – are aroused.”

Year

2024