Close up of ripped paper with stone as part of the workshop installation
This summer, artist Yen Noh, film scholar Erica Biolchini and dramaturg Nienke Scholts begun an exchange corresponding to their resonating research interests and desires for collaborative forms of healing, pausing and (un)learning that can hold space for different modes of being with illness, exhaustion and other systemic wounds.
On September 9th, they brought their correspondence into an open space at BAU, inviting participants to join their dialogue through modes of reading and resting, feeling the body in the awareness of language, food, and breath. The session sought to explore collective ways to affirm forms of exhaustion (manifested as illness for some), which often operate in our body and minds as individual issues, sticky with social stigma, towards being with illness as a possibility, an alternate way of being, a continuous movement and process—a bodily alchemy.
Yen Noh is an artist, writer, and educator whose practice engages with artistic and social aesthetic pedagogy. Noh is concerned with possibilities for a radical unsettlement of the self, through which extraordinary social relations can be opened up. She participated in the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice 2021-2022 and currently explores ways in which (chronic) illness becomes a pedagogical method and practice as part of the process of her own recovery.
Erica Biolchini is a lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She researches how relational art in its experiential rituality activates modes of perception ‘psychedelic’; spiritually revelatory and bodily worlding. Her work was published in the ‘Deleuze and Guattari and the Psychedelic Revival’ of the Deleuze and Guattari Studies Journal and in ‘(Eco)Traumatic Landscapes in Contemporary Visual Culture’ of Iluminance: Journal of Film Theory, History and Aesthetics. Erica is one of the founding members of the Fuck Healing (?) Collective.
Nienke Scholts practices dramaturgy in collaboration with (inter)national performance artists (2007<); Veem House for Performance (2013–2019); through her research as fellow of THIRD/ DASresearch at AHK
(2018–2022), and as ARIAS’ programme coordinator (2019 <). She created the publication series Words for the Future (‘17) and the audio piece This Walk is a Pause (‘22). Her research Pausing Together, on dramaturgies of work in artistic practice, focuses on the (re)generative potential of exhaustion, darkness, and pausing.
