How to Begin, Again. Relational Embodiment in Time Arts & Anthropology

This paper proceeds from ethnographic fieldwork with the Chicago-based performance art group Every house has a door. I analyse the performer’s aim to engage with the past in a sensuous and embodied manner and I discuss the practice of cross-temporal collective relationality, which challenges notions of embodiment as being limited to an individual “body proper” (Farquhar/Lock 2007). While forms of relationality are central to artistic research and performance, I remain critical of their immediate political potential. I explicate this argument by discussing Every house’s practice with respect to contributions in relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 1997, Bishop 2004). Emerging out of my critical engagement with Bourriaud, I propose an understanding of relationality which is neither built on individual personhood nor immediately politically desirable. Instead, and emerging from fieldwork with Every house, I suggest that embodied relationality can be understood as foregoing individual experience. While this kind of relationality can be emancipatory, its normativity has to be explained with care