Contribution short abstract:

Could I build up a tangible and material sense of Catalonian artist Fina Miralles performances in and through my investigation? Filmed embodied and ethnographic research provided me with genuine tools to develop an interdisciplinary methodology that generated knowledge in a corporeal manner.

Contribution long abstract:

Catalonian artist Fina Miralles presents a mode of exploration that is tactile and kinesthetic under a political system (Franco dictatorship 1935-1975) that muted bodies and possibilities of expression. I reflected on the manner I could engage on analyzing those corporeal dynamics. In this proposal, I explain how perceptual and embodied methods provide genuine tools to develop an interdisciplinary methodology that generates knowledge in a corporeal manner. I will discuss how embodied ways of researching performance through ethnography and filming during fieldwork challenge the critical distance of “the good eye” in art history. The corporeal strategies were: the re-creation of some of their work where it took place (documented with photographs and videos), my own performative actions, archival work in Catalonia, the use of a camera during fieldwork, filmed interviews, the curation of filmed performances as well as an intersubjective encounter with the artist. All these strategies put together a space for sensorial empathy and a somatic point of view to access the artists’ performances and analyze the phenomenological perspectives of their motions and gestures. My work is grounded in situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988), which includes my background as a psychologist and my condition as a Spanish woman born in the last year of Francoism. I argue for a feminist embodied and ethnographic research, and propose ways of “doing”, explaining different strategies as possibilities to generate knowledge in a kinesthetic manner drawing mainly upon “embodied methodologies” (Ben Spatz, 2017) and “kinesthetic empathy” (Deidre Sklar, 1994; Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, 2012).