one of the research proposals I’ve been thrown up in the air is to do with Gesture and how looking on the level of Gesture and not the Body -which can be categorised in nefarious or helpful ways- might be an interesting level to blend the capacities of humans and nonhumans in place-making. See if it lands for you
I want to embark on an artistic research project centred around the term 'Ecology of Gestures' that will contribute to the intersection of postcolonial memory culture, sustainable architecture and future technologies.
My interest in Gesture stems from comparative ethnographies at dairy farms, where I investigated dairy cow communication under the supervision of linguist Dr Leonie Cornips.
At farms, I learnt to reconcile indigeneity with the knowledge and practices of the farmers, cattle and soil that are just down the road wherever we may be in the Netherlands. Furthermore, travels to my ancestral lands in Pakistan and India fixed my focus on bodily gesture as a means to trace transgenerationally sedimented ways of knowing and expressing which survive diasporic migrations and the traumas we strive to forget. Drawing my attention to the local varieties in embodied gestures has proven invaluable for me to make explicit which gestures are native or home grown, and which have been transplanted by colonising forces.
Another dynamic which erases or transplants gestures is the inscription of bodily movement or tactics into machines. This is where we discover the role of architecture and design in accelerating a forgetting of gestures.
My guiding question: How can we remember or retain gestures that bodies no longer perform due to changes in architecture and technology?
Why gesture?
'Gesture' is explicitly to do with the movement of bodies, how they move. Because I have come to understand many things as being embodied or bodily, my definition of gesture is broad: the gesture of opening a car door, the gesture of dressing a certain way, of speaking with a cliche or corporate jargon, of measuring and processing data in certain ways, of asking a question and the gesture of writing poetry which moves words in unfamiliar ways. Then extending the concept to nonhumans permits us to consider any repeating or shared movements performed by any living bodies.
I think gesture is an excellent way to tell histories of bodies in major shifts due to modernity or colonialism. Culturally speaking, dance and performance studies understand this well through their cataloguing of and performance of distant or fading dances. Architecturally speaking, I notice how the automation of small bridges over canals means that the guards-hut besides each bridge is no longer required or staffed I wonder about which gestures, performed by either the staff or the mechanisms of the bridge itself, or the multispecies community that gathered around the hut still remain. From my fieldwork I noticed how the interspecies intimacy of hand on udder to produce milk is nowhere to be seen in the Netherlands.
In this sense a 'multispecies cosmology of gestures' could be a synonym for ecology, where the interactions between organisms with different environmental needs and reciprocal relationships can be modelled as a repertoire of gestures which all together produce the bodies in any ecology as well as the arrangement we find them in. The locality of a place becomes due to the assembly of the ways in which the bodies can move there. The introduction of a new technology or other intervention can be examined through its displacement or replacement of the gestures that were there. Hence, the role of a human designer is to make selections of which gestures will remain or be erased or be transplanted depending on the materials they use and the needs that bear on their design decisions.
Could we consider gestures as a material that we consider during design decisions?
And from the perspective of sustainability and a technological totalitarianism which infringes on the natural and ancient capabilities of a place: