CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Sollazzo, Arianna |
|---|---|
| Title | The corpo-Graphies of water: reading the relationships between bodies through salty water. How Visual Art Helps To Understand Bodies Of Salty Water |
| Summary | This thesis will describe the logics through which bodies of salty water trace their oceanic corpo-graphies , a term taken from Suvendrini Perera and from which I drew inspiration, which I used to describe the paths traced by these bodies in the closed and salty water system. Bodies of salty water are bodies of water that follow logics related to salt properties – cicatrizing and drying, healing, and killing, an element inseparable from water in its liquid state. This concept takes its shape following Astrida Neimanis’ idea of bodies of water – bodies out of politics able to subvert biopolitical power by challenging political and social boundaries - described in her homonymous book (2017). Neimanis outlines the image of bodies of water as bodies bonded together in a renegotiation of their relationship with nature through several modalities, following what she calls hydrologics - logics through which bodies are capable of change and evolute in the closed system of water. Bodies of water concept come through a posthuman reading of Luce Irigaray’s Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (1991), who outlines her posthuman phenomenology. Given this theoretical background, my argument will present how Neimanis’ bodies of water and my image of bodies of salty water can be read thanks to contemporary art, facilitating ways of understanding them. My analysis will be based on a close reading of three artworks, one performance, and two installations. I will analyze how specific characteristics of performative and installation medium - as unpredictability and hybridity - and the choice of the subject investigated concerning the exhibition site, can show the properties of salty water and connect viewers to artworks. Acknowledging the importance of contemporary art as a medium to better comprehend theories through images, I will analyze artists that use artivism - art that intervenes in struggles and debates - and research, as their working tools. The notion of bodies of salty water and all the implications that underly will be presented through the juxtaposition of theories of feminist new materialism and posthuman feminism - referring to Donna Haraway's image of the salamander/cyborg as a creature similar to bodies of salty water and thus capable of regeneration, of visual and performance studies. |
| Supervisor | Eszter Timár |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/sollazzo_arianna.pdf |
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