Not to be published or circulated; it is a draft text that is

probable to be altered during the lecture

Intact Bodies: Corporeality, Integrity, and a Bodily Notion

of Responsibility
By Sandra Noeth

Introduction
“Who are you, and where are you from?”
“I don’t come from anywhere but from your phantasy and
imagination.”

These two questions that Shahram Khosravi evokes are

probably familiar to all of us: they mark national and
territorial border-crossings but also less exposed, everyday
and mundane acts of encountering others; they come with
curiosity, openness and interest while, at the same time
keeping people, keeping bodies out of place - in place:
there, where they match our imaginations and expectations,
our values and norms, there, where they meet our phantasy.
I decided to bring them back at the beginning of this lecture
- and please allow me to thank Victoria Perez Rojo, Carmen
Fuentes Guaza as well as the entire team of Teatro del Canal
for this generous invitation – because they keep on
reminding that many demarcations, boundaries and
distinctions that mark our lives, whether material or
immaterial, whether tangible or intangible, are not just
given, ‘there’ and unshakeable, but made, constructed,
1
maintained and challenged – not least by performative,
sensorial and aesthetic means.

In the last couple of years, my curatorial and theoretical

research focused on the representation and experience of
borders in light of recent social and political processes of re-
distributing physical as well as symbolic space. More
specifically I was concerned with the role, status and agency
of bodies, of corporeality, in the process. Tonight, I would
like to introduce this research by drawing on an artistic
example, an artistic case study (1), that allows me to observe
and analyze the construction of borders and their
experience and to raise broader question about where the
agency of artistic practice might sit in this context (2). This
not only opens up to the intersections between the
aesthetic and the political, but also puts forward ethical
concerns that emerge when bodies are exposed to each
other (3) that I will address. In the last part of my
contribution, I will turn to the claim and the right of the
integrity of the body and end by questioning how artistic
practice and aesthetic experience intervene and participate
in granting the right to protection and care to some bodies –
and not to others (4).

I explicitly choose to speak of bodies in the plural here.

This serves - in resonance with the concept of corporeality
that drives this series of lectures - as a reminder that the
physical and imagined, the digitally and medially expanded
2
bodies that I will refer to in what follows are not bound,
closed off and essentialist entities. Rather, they exist always
in relation, at the intersections of the individual and the
collective, always in the becoming, always in movement;
they are marked by different and potentially conflicting
normative systems and ideologies, ranging from the
national, the biological to the psychological, and others.

Part One: Bodies, Borders, and Performance

My research on the role, status and agency of bodies in the
experience of the border reacted on several, intersecting
observations and reflections that I would like to briefly
sketch out in order to give you a context:
First, and without much surprise, it responds to ‘a world in
search of’: a world that
faces deep transformations in its orders. With regards to the
question of borders (and I am including here, next to
material, infrastructural and architectural borders, imagined,
immaterial, symbolic, felt ones, as well), it leads to a
paradoxical situation: while mobility and traveling have
become more and more accessible in a seamless, globalized
world, at the same time, moving and expressing ourselves
freely has become more and more restricted or even
impossible to many people. This not only concerns recent
geopolitical developments, but is also, to some degree
reflected in the realm of arts and dance and choreography in
particular: while nomadism, cosmopolitanism and the
flexible figure of the dancer, for instance, have been part of
3
the vocabulary of an internationalized art market for a while
now, recent travel bans, rejected visa applications and even
deportations that artists and cultural workers, in particular
those who don’t hold the privilege of a Western passport,
face in their regular work, speak another language, and are
flanked by an increasing level of censorship and self-
censorship that conditions artistic practices, as well.

Next to these observations from the field that I can only

touch on here, I was looking from a trans-disciplinary
perspective at recent theoretical literature both, from the
field of dance and performance studies as well as from the
field of border and conflict studies. An impressive range of
literature in dance and performance studies has indeed
focused the significance of body-based artistic practices in
relation to concepts such as protest, resistance or activism –
I will come back to this aspect later -, and new attention was
drawn to bodies as agents, witnesses and documents in
social and political research. - This resonates with of a
broader development in these fields of investigation that
gave in the last five to ten years increased attention to the
impact of so-called “non-state” actors, such as artists and
activists in the construction, representation and experience
of the border. However, the bodies that are evoked in these
studies from geography, border, war, and conflict studies,
can be organized in specific groups: predominantly, we find
studies on bodies in/as masses and groups, and often these
bodies are presented as anonymous bodies to be disciplined
4
and monitored. Also, we tend to see – and this reflects mass
media coverage of contemporary conflicts on migration and
borders – a specific and pretty narrow ‘repertoire’ of bodies
that appear at the border: harmed, weak, vulnerable and ill
bodies, e.g. bodies that are “flooding” a territory, coming in
“waves” or bodies that are stigmatized as carriers of
diseases, similar to animals or parasites (see Sophie Nield),
so a kind of imagery that opens up resonances with natural
calamities or historic epidemies that we need to protect us
from. What I would like to point to is that it is often the
materiality and the objecthood of bodies that are
foregrounded in these studies: representations that mirror
and influence how we imagine and accept to imagine the
other – as well as ourselves.

Here, a third aspect comes in that has driven my interest

in bodies, borders and performance in a first place, and that
seems almost opposite or at least complementary to the
standardized and stereotypical bodies that I just described:
my own corporeal, bodily experience of the border, as well
as the experiences from various encounters that I loosely
recollected from and observed on other border crossers.
Here, other elements come to the fore that suggest that
borders and movement are not antithetic: feelings of
tension and joyful anticipation that turn visceral; states of
lingering and dwelling at the borders that find corporeal,
somatic expression. Direct and digitalized practices of being
body-searched, placing our fingers on the biometric reader,
5
disciplining the breath and movements while being alert and
ready to improvise at any time. Sensorial and affective
moments—a sense of complicity, suspicion, and distrust that
mark our interaction with other people at the border. The
familiarity that recognizing the gestures of a fellow border-
crosser evokes, and the irritation that comes with
movements and facial expression that remain unreadable.
Artefacts and objects, passports and permits that equip us
with privileges, or deny us the right to access and move
across space. Mundane routines and habits, memories and
desires that align us with or exclude us from a given
collective. Shared values and norms, discourses and law that
frame our membership to a given group or community.
Moments in which we try to catch—or avoid—the attention
of our fellow border-crossers, speculating on the probability
of a successful border-crossing. The experience of the
border – without denying its realities – appeared here as
something embodied, rehearsed, and performed.

Bringing these impulses from the field of dance and

choreography, from theoretical research and own and
others’ border experiences together, my question was how
to observe, analyze and describe this dynamic? How to
activate practical and theoretical knowledge from body-
based artistic practices in order to revisit the role, status and
agency of bodies in this context? – I will not go deep into the
methodological aspects of my research today, but, in short,
I opened up a dialogue with a group of artists from the field
6
of choreography, dance and live arts that in one way or
another and to very different degrees addressed always-
specific borders and border experiences in their work,
mostly in dialogue with the Middle Eastern context - a
context where I spend much work and live time in over
many years, as well. Their performances and pieces served
me as artistic case studies (principle from organizational
studies); as an entry point into understanding the
dramaturgical but also political and social strategies at work
when constructing, implementing and maintaining but also
when critically reflecting on and challenging borders and the
respective – and always unequal – experiences that they
evoke. I brought one of these artistic case studies with me
tonight: the live, walk-in sound installation Contingency by
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, a work from 2010.

Part Two
Artistic Case Study on Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-
Rahme
Contingency is a live, walk-in, sound installation that is
performed in loops. It is mostly presented in visual arts
contexts or galleries where visitors are invited to move
freely in the space. Even though the artists themselves
would most probably not refer to this piece as a
“choreographic” piece, I chose it because I assume that
bodies and movement are key dramaturgical strategies and
elements that define Contingency on a conceptual as well as
on an experiential level. - The link to reality runs deep in
7
Basel and Ruanne’s work. With a background in
experimental film and sound, the artist duo often works with
archival material, with found footage, or with lived, personal
and present-day experience. In Contingency, they appoint
the Qalandia checkpoint as the origin of their sound
installation. One of the largest Israeli-controlled military
sites, the Qalandia checkpoint is situated between the
Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Al-Ram and Qalandia
refugee camp. It functions as portal separating the
inhabitants of Ramallah from the northern part of Jerusalem
and Palestinian cities further south. Significantly, for our
context, it is also one of the most documented sites in the
occupied West Bank, thereby producing strongly fetishized,
hyper-mediatized, and repetitive border imagery. The piece
is part of an earlier phase of their work in which they explore
colonial structures and borders, and I will show you a video
version of Contingency that the artists edited themselves;
it’s an 8-minute document:

SHOW VIDEO

Contingency was first presented in 2010, two years after the

artists’ return to Ramallah that they had left in order to
study abroad after the outbreak of the Second Intifada that
officially ended in 2005—a moment that they depict
retroactively as a radical rupture, as “a feeling of deep geo-
political fragmentation of sorts, a stagnation.” This personal
diagnosis reflects large-scale transformations that affected
8
the Palestinian community at this specific moment in time.
To give you a context, for instance, many Palestinian political
institutions and parties that operated in vital domains of
society prior to the Palestinian uprising against Israel now
gradually changed function. In a highly ambivalent way, they
transformed, in summary, from being an authority for the
Palestinian community to acting as a security regime (i.e. the
Palestinian Authority took over control functions, for
instance, that the state of Israel outsourced in the West
Bank/Area A). Basel and Ruanne reflect on how these
changes impacted the Palestinian self-conception that was
promoted on an official level and that shifted the political
and ideological frameworks on which collective Palestinian
identity politics rely: “All of a sudden you were not talking
about resistance and liberation, you were talking about
security and the state. Technocratic figures were projecting
consumerist images, as if it were some dream-state we were
going to reach” (quoted in Jones 2014, 110). These shifts
concerned the status of bodies, as well: rather than being
seen in their individual representational and corporeal
capacities for action. Rather, bodies, now, were gradually
turned into elements to be organized, disciplined, and kept
in place.

With regards to the relation between bodies, borders and

movement, I would like to point your attention to two
observation from the analysis of the case study:

9
a) Residual Effects: The Everyday of the Border:
In the production process of Contingency, Basel and Ruanne
transfer the experience of border-crossing from the real,
political, physical, and infrastructural space of the border
zone to the aesthetic realm. Over several months, they
recorded the routine soundscape of the Qalandia
checkpoint, mostly the waiting area, on location with
handheld devices: “Basically by secret, passing through the
checkpoint and recording with like really shitty recorders,
phone stuff, small recorders, it was very low-fi recording.”
These technical conditions resulted in a mediocre quality of
the original collected material and explain why large parts of
the human voices and utterances in Contingency seem
distorted and alienated already before the editing process.
From a Palestinian perspective, I interpret the artists’ choice
to develop the sound installation from a concrete border
situation as a meaningful decision that situates the
experience of the border not as exceptional but within the
realm of the everyday – to a feature, that structures
Palestinian lives on a daily basis. - This approach is
supported by the dramaturgical decision of the artists to
move away from the primacy of vision in Contingency, i.e.
from the generic imagery that is commonly associated with
border-related issues in the Palestinian/Israeli context (road
blocks, checkpoints, turnstiles, walls). Instead, by
foregrounding sound as a site of power and violence, Basel
and Ruanne direct attention to the immaterial effects of
borders, to their corporeal, visceral, and somatic
10
articulations. Borders, thus, appear in their perdurability and
persistence, as processes rather than distinct events. In line
with this, the artists speak of the “residual effects” of
borders; in my words: their accumulation, their remnants,
their continuous, lingering, and enduring qualities, their
impact and their after-effects, their unavoidability and their
danger, too. Here, the manifested and material realities of
any border collapse with its long-term effects: with the way
it settles down in personal lives, in the imagination and the
bodies of people. The focus on the structural qualities of the
border that finds expression here (border not as a distinct
event) shows also that borders exist in various extensions
and amplifications, and that they are not stable but
constructed.
In Contingency, the experience of the border, of control
and discipline, are primarily amplified on a sonic and
embodied level. Thus, borders are always already there long
before and long after the actual event of a crossing. In
connection to this, the artists mention how borders
condition one’s vision and imagination and how they entail
long-term traumatic and psychological effects. With regards
to the body, they state: “There is a very distinct feeling that
you have when you arrive to either an Israeli military
checkpoint, to the airport, or the bridge where, in a
moment, even your own body stops being yours. You really
feel that you lose autonomy over your body.” The
experience of the border, thus, is often displaced in time and
difficult to trace back and locate; it rearticulates memories,
11
stories, and acquired knowledge and is projected into the
future realm, conflated with fictions, projections, and
imaginations of the border yet to come. It also translates
into performative actions: into staging or rehearsing one’s
appearance at the border to enhance the probability of a
successful crossing. Significantly, the success of these efforts
is shaped by factors that range from the verbal presentation
of one’s cause to equipping oneself with indicative artefacts
or adopting specific gestures or looks, for example; it
ultimately depends on corresponding acts of
authentification through which authorities and fellow border
crossers, for instance, legitimize one`s performance.
What becomes clear is that limiting the analysis of the
experience of the border to its infrastructure or the moment
of physical confrontation between bodies is not exhaustive;
nor does conceiving of the border as a clearly detectable line
or distinguishable event in the first place sufficiently capture
its experience. Much more, these observations from
Contingency emphasize the very constructedness and
flexibility of the border, they suggest that border-crossing is
something that’s fluid, that’s moving (and even the
separation wall that separates the West Bank was built in a
way where it can be taken down very easily, there are pieces
that come together and can be taken apart -> mobile or
“flying” checkpoints). - These spatial politics are prone to
conflict and regularly result in mutual and often violent
operations to reconstitute and reclaim land by Israelis and
Palestinians alike. Secondly, the fluidity of the border also
12
concerns the bureaucratic environments and operative
practices at work. Notably, it alludes to rapidly changing and,
to some degree, arbitrary legal and organizational
frameworks (e.g. conditions for the issuance of permits) that
regulate border-crossing for Palestinians.

b) Docile Bodies: The Visceral Experience of the Border

By turning to the everyday of the border in Contingency, the
artist duo draws attention to the structural qualities of the
border and the ways in which it unfolds and operates.
Notably, they shift the focus to the bodily dimension of the
long-term consequences of the border. They state: “The
occupation is not something that’s external to me, it is
something that is incredibly internalized, not only in the
sense of how you feel psychologically. It is very bodily,
visceral.” This excerpt from an interview that I conducted
with the them foregrounds the gradual extension of the
border in time, space, and one’s mind and body, its
immaterial, symbolic, and imagined elements. Significantly,
Basel and Ruanne propose the border as an experience that
is distinctly internalized and visceral. The artists speak, e.g.,
about a “very bodily, visceral” experience that “really
touches on your skin”. Or, with regards to the feeling of dis-
appropriation that the border produces in their lived
experience, they elaborate: “You have to kind of disconnect
your mind and body just to just pass through, just function,
follow the machine. Keep no eye contact, follow orders”. In
this context, they use the term “docile body”: a body that I
13
picture as a controlled, taught, easy-to-manage, consentient,
and conformist one; a body that exists in awareness of the
real danger that is always present, from a Palestinian
perspective, in the physical act of border-crossing.
Moreover, alongside connotations of obedience,
passiveness, and submission, the idea of docility comprises
the ability—or lack thereof—to learn, to train, to rehearse,
or to stage one’s behavior; in other words, the degree to
which an individual or collective is actually entitled to
empower themselves at the border (see Foucault Discipline
and Punish, 1977).
The immaterial element that the artists evoke here comes
back in the interview where they distinctly comment on the
importance of absence—of absent bodies—for both the
actual crossing of Qalandia checkpoint and its artistic
articulation in the sound installation. They state: “so much of
the authority and the power of the soldiers now was
happening through the sound, it was happening through the
architecture of the space, the machinery of the space. But
even the architecture of the space was producing a kind of
sound, and then you had this disembodied voice”. This
statement needs to be contextualized within Israeli military
practices that were temporarily in use at the Qalandia
checkpoint at the time that the original sound material for
the installation was collected. In reaction to the Second
Intifada and in the course of implementing the post-Oslo
peace process, Israel continuously reduced and partly
suspended the corporeal co-presence of Israeli soldiers and
14
Palestinian border-crossers at certain borders. In other
words, this meant that there was no direct contact between
Israelis and Palestinians until the crossing was effectively
completed. However, the presence of the Israeli military was
assured even in their physical absence, by indirectly
exercising control via acoustic and visual means, mediated
through technological devices (screens and loudspeakers).
While remaining unidentifiable as individuals and literally
untouchable, the collective political Israeli body was
inescapable from a Palestinian perspective by the purposeful
use of absence. Against this backdrop, in Contingency, the
actual bodies that interact at the Qalandia checkpoint stay
visually absent, as well, while creating an embodied
experience of the actual border crossing for the visitors. This
dramaturgical strategy represents a paradoxical and
contradictory element that characterizes the real and the
aesthetic experience of the border alike; it yields important
indications for the subsequent theorization of the
experience of the border. The political, thus, sits not only in
the border-related content of Contingency, but also in its
sonic, corporeal, textual and symbolic movements of
address—of gesturing towards—individual and collective
bodies yet to come.

Part Three
The Agency of Artistic Practice and Aesthetic Experience in
Conflict-Driven Contexts This is just some aspects that
Contingency by Basel and Ruanne’s work open up. I would
15
like to take it as an example in order to discuss how we can
imagine the role of art, of artistic practice, in light of big-
scale or everyday, mundane, experiences of borders and
crisis (understood not as an event but as a continuous state).
With regards to scholarship in performance studies, I already
referred to studies that explore the proximity and
differences among art, activism, and real politics. In this
strand of scholarship, the relationship between artistic
strategies and forms of political action that are direct,
planned, and characterized by a pronounced sense of
efficiency have been of particular interest. Furthermore,
existing research has paid specific attention to the role of
the sensorial; to how bodies affect and are, in turn, affected
by their social and political environments. Moreover, and
especially in the Middle Eastern context, the symbolic forces
of bodies in collective claim-making have been researched as
a source of intervention and mobilization, i.e. how giving
meaning and presence to certain bodies corresponds to
etching them into collective memory and identity, and
equips them with the capacity to stand up or stand in for a
broader project or idea (see martyrdom, human starvation
and immolation).
These theoretical attempts to locate agency in conjunction
with the body raise more general questions about the
preconditions for the (collective) alignment of bodies. Art
theorist Bernadette Buckley, for instance, sees the “re-
arrangement of collective propensities” (Buckley 2014, 23)
as the basis of such a process. In other words, she argues
16
that the existence of a common inclination or interest to be
implemented grounds the very possibility for collective
action. Yet, as Judith Butler adds from a performative
perspective on bodies in relation, these common grounds
must not be homogenous or consistent. Acting together,
according to her, reserves the option of keeping up a level of
divergence and inconsistency, in her words: “To act in
concert does not mean to act in conformity: it may be that
people are moving or speaking in several directions at once,
event at cross-purposes” (2015, 157). In other words: the
possibility of building a collective project while maintaining a
certain level of a-synchronicity and heterogeneity in action.
The complex alliances between arts, activism, and formal
politics are reflected in terminological differentiations, such
as: “activist art,” “artivism,” “socially-engaged art,” or
“applied art.” – Here, I would like to refer to artist Lina
Majdalanie who, in her lecture performance, I Can Find
Something Shorter, If Necessary, points out how, under the
heading of relevance and actuality, tropes (and realities) of
socio-political urgency risk being confused with romantic
and unquestioned ideas of creativity (2009, 2018). At its
worst, according to her analysis of the field of contemporary
performing arts, urgency risks becoming the ultimate
legitimization for artistic work, situating it beyond
questioning and critique. In line with this and referencing
her own experience in the Lebanese context, she points to
the trap of reducing complex correlations and realities in the
Middle East to aestheticized and collectivized accounts of
17
trauma and conflict as one example of an unfortunate idea
of creating art as a commentary on “real life.” In response,
Majdalanie opts for the possibility of inaction and
disengagement as a self-commitment to reflect, to take time
and distance oneself from what seems familiar and evident;
as a self-commitment to inquiry alternatives to dominant
representations and experiences. For example, on which
bodies we are actually seeing on stage—the ones that
actually have the problems that are depicted, or others
acting on their behalf?

De-Normalizing Bodies: The Impotency of Images

Taking on her critical take on staying aware of the why and
the how that couple arts, society and politics, Basel and
Ruanne as well as many other artists that I talked to suggest
that the agency of art seems not to lies primarily in the
direct reaction to/change of border realities that artwork
might instigate. Rather, they suggest that agency lies in de-
normalizing and de-stabilizing hardening stereotypical,
normative or predominant images and representations.
Basel and Ruanne share a sense of politics that is grounded
in personal experience. Yet, while taking on the provisional
and the unsettled as a driving force for their artistic practice,
they reject readings that would characterize their artwork as
activism or reduce it to its representational capacities of
defending or affirming a certain cause. For instance, they
oppose hasty categorizations as engaged artists from the
Middle East, and critically reflect on the risks of aiding or
18
subjecting their artwork to “outside” objectives. Ruanne
develops on how they see their work as an artist duo: “It is
not about art and activism, or art and social practice. We
have so many issues with that. I don’t think that saying that
means that, you know, the body of work that you are
presenting cannot also do something, cannot also activate
things. But that’s something different. But I really take issue
with this idea that it’s activism in that moment. In Palestine,
people have serious distain towards framing things as ‘art’,
they are very suspicious of it. It incidentally makes it kind of
into a safe zone: “oh, it’s just an artwork”. This quote makes
clear that the artists reject any framing that would limit their
work to its direct effects on social and political realities, or to
work towards direct change. Rather, they prefer to speak
about the impact of what they capture as small activatings,
and Ruanne Abou-Rahme elaborates: “In our work, we were
trying to somehow de-normalize those border spaces, to
make them abnormal and strange again. To make the
experience of the checkpoint not as a kind of normal thing
that we have to do everyday.” They elaborate: “We have
seen the checkpoint so many times, and it’s a very well
documented space. But images of it are so repeated and
representational that they stop having any meaning. People
use the checkpoint so frequently that it becomes mundane
and normalised as a space. We were interested in the idea of
de-normalising it. How do you make it a potent space
again?”

19
On Dithering / On Hesitation
Similarly, literature scholar Joseph Vogl reflects on potential
modes of (inter-) acting and intervening in reality via
aesthetic practice in his essay, On Dithering/On Hesitation
(2014).Establishing an initial connection between aesthetic
systems and the everyday social environments with which
they dialogue, he develops the analytical concept of
dithering to capture this dynamic. Vogl, significantly, locates
the potential for action first inside the aesthetic system
itself, rather than depicting it as a reaction to an outside
objective, aim, or interest. In his text, he gives the concrete
example of Michelangelo’s statue of Moses and Sigmund
Freud’s interpretation of it in order to draw attention to
what he refers to as gaps or absences of meaning that define
the perception of the artwork: things that are not shown,
not said, not recognized as meaningful elements; things,
however, that might open up alternative interpretations of
an artwork and the realities that it pertains to, and thus,
alter the starting points of our interpretations and
judgements. In this sense, dithering, according to Vogl,
describes the capacity of an artistic work to evoke
experiences of dis-integration in the very act of perception—
small, cautious shifts or re-locations of meaning—that
might, however, ultimately lead to action. Vogl does not use
the term “agency” in his text, but uses the German term
“Zaudern” that might be translated as “dithering” or,
alternatively, “hesitating” or “leaving in suspense.” It
describes moments of indecisiveness that might constitute
20
either a conscious choice or an element of insecurity. In
invites us to invest in a practice of multiplying and
diversifying perspectives that questions common or
established interpretations of reality, the validity of
canonical knowledge, and probable speculation at large. To
engage in rewriting certainties. Or, as Gerald Siegmund
suggests in his reflections on the choreographies of 21st
Century wars: “Through continually shifting perspective, the
events appear in varying forms (verbal, visual, bodily)
precisely to prevent their becoming manifest and
materialized in one single form. What is prevented,
therefore, is the production of one single, valid and solid
representation of war events claiming to capture and display
the truth of the events represented. [...] The constant
shifting of points of view primarily draws the audience’s
attention to the construction of truth, which appears to be
endlessly malleable depending on personal or political
interests. War here becomes a metaphor for the destruction
of all certainties” (2016, 320). Such an approach is especially
relevant when recalling that agency, in the context of
Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, is historically and presently
strongly related to stark and highly politicized models of
“them vs. us” or of resistance and opposition, for instance.1
1 In relation to my context of research, it is import to remind us that the coupling of art with ideas such as

resistance or protest has been reinforced with the Arab Spring and the repercussions of 9/11. Also,
collectivized and stereotypical body images and discourses have been hardened in the process. Ramsay Burt
(2017a) describes existing stereotypes and phantasms of an “Arab body” in contemporary dance as a
European invention when reflecting on how artistic work from the Middle Eastern region is presented in
European contexts. Some artists, similar to Basel and Ruanne, opted for the absence of bodies (or their own
bodies) in their artwork: as a withdrawal from collective and stereotypical representations, but also, on the
flipside, as a reaction to censorship and repression.
21
 Vogl develops his analysis with reference to literature and
visual arts, but I contend that the figure of dithering—of
positing doubt rather than providing answers—applies to
body-based artistic works in a similar way. Importantly,
while suggesting that audiences, artists, and society
maintain a dynamic relationship in the aesthetic experience,
his proposal is not invested in conflating the aesthetic with
the political and social realms. Moreover, I understand it as
an invitation to address the inconsistencies, the overflow,
and the incommensurability of art in order to engage in a
process of multiple readings, to imagine things differently.
In my reading, this opens up a notion of agency that is not
necessarily directed toward or against a particular external
cause, grounded in a specific objective or theme, or rooted
in intentionality; that cannot be measured according to an
artwork’s ability to instigate change or represent “truth.”
Hence, to suspend monolithic and stereotypical
interpretations and judgements is to reflect on the individual
and collective assumptions and predicaments that construct
our aesthetic experiences. It also addresses an ethical
dimension that comes with bodies being exposed to each
other in the aesthetic as well as in the social and political
realm, that I would like to look at now.

Individual and collective bodies: Who represents whom, and

on what terms

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What becomes important here are the representational
qualities of bodies in social and political contexts—the
question of who represents whom or what, and on what
basis. In line with this, dance critic Elisabeth Nehring
contends: “The body has always been a suitable field for
projections. Of ideas, ideals, and ideologies. Of values and
norms, of wishes and desires. An arena for fights, a fertile
ground for stereotypes and clichés. A cliché can already be
an act of violence. And very often it goes hand in hand with
physical outrage. Isn’t the body not only observed and
controlled, but already violated by the sight, by all these
scoptic regimes? A resilient body is the one that denies logic,
clarity—and thereby interpretation. An interpretation
imposes meaning on the body. It wants the body to make
sense— personally, politically, nationally—whatever. It takes
the body under control again, objectifies, monopolizes, and
dominates its expression (2017).” The here-indicated
dynamic problematizes the idea that individual bodies, by
symbolic, imaginary, metaphorical, or corporeal force, align
with and represent collective bodies—the body of a
collective. This becomes concrete in the ways that the artists
evoke the role and status of the body in both historical and
recent upheavals, as well as in their descriptions of their
own practices, situated at the intersection of their individual
artistic projects and overall dynamics of framing bodies in an
internationalized art market.
Here, I contend that the field of art mirrors a much
broader mechanism of othering bodies, i.e. of creating and
23
fostering prejudiced and stereotypical representations of the
body to instil a widespread and mostly abstract sense of
rejection or fear in political and public debate. Recent
tendencies in mass media and popular discursive
representations of bodies in refuge and forced migration
might serve as just one example of how corporeality,
politics, and religion, for instance, are conflated in this
process in generic ways. Bodies, are trapped in collective
narratives, representations and experiences. For example,
when I presented the work of choreographer Danya
Hammoud as a guest curator in Berlin, an audience member
commented after the show: “She is Lebanese, right? The
performance was strong, but should have been more
political” (2017). The audience’s—and one’s own—aesthetic
and thematic expectations expressed here might result in
the persistent impact of a rather normative corpus of body
variations and corresponding realities that seem to be
reserved for Arab artists: always-potent, resistant bodies
that maintain a high level of velocity, or, on the contrary,
non-secular, immanently weak, rejected, and docile bodies.
Being addressed as and forced into representing a collective
is, in my reading, an act of politicizing and institutionalizing
bodies.
This dynamic is amplified in the Middle Eastern context
where bodies are embedded in society in a structural way.
With regards to the Lebanese context, e.g., Lina Majdalanie
explains with the co-existence of three unequal poles of
power that impact society and the status of bodies therein:
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“The official power of the State; the unofficial yet as-potent
power of the Ahliyya society which is first and foremost an
archaic structure still deeply rooted, sometimes tribal, but
also mainly familial and religious; and finally, the civil society
where individuals, including artists, position themselves
critically vis-à -vis the two other poles of power, knowing
that the civil society is by far the weakest and most fragile
pole of the three” (Majdalanie 2018, 61). What finds
expression here is the basic assumption that a body’s
belonging—its representation, experience and perception—
continues to be significantly determined by its basic
alignment with one or several communities or collectives.
This precondition does not ignore a body’s individuality and
singularity; it is also not static, but evolves over time. Yet, it
represents a feature that pierces through all domains of life,
linking social and political life with a person’s most intimate
moments. It finds expression on a corporeal and embodied
level, as well, as the following quote by artist Tarek Abi
Samra illustrates: !In truth, I always see myself through the
eyes of others. I am always watching my own features on my
imaginary screen projected behind the person speaking to
me. I carefully observe all the muscles of my face so that
their contractions correspond with what the person is saying
or doing. [...] All of this is exhausting. My body is a burden to
me. Its smallest movements must conform to some law of
unknown origin. I don’t dance. I hate holding someone’s
hand in public. In the street, I watch my gait from above like
a puppeteer. In bed, I watch myself fuck, even when I come.
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Alone at home, the screen is still there, affixed to one of the
walls, following me from room to room (2015, 83).”
Consequently, the immanent relationality of the body
translates into habits and laws, into taboos and projections,
and ultimately provokes backlashes to them, too. It provides
a texture for bodies to exist and move within, a kind of
support structure. At the same time, it creates a normative
frame and represents a symbolic, sensorial, and corporeal
act of intrusion that regulates the being of bodies in the
world. Similarly, the empirical material offers various
examples of the contradictory quality that marks the
passage between the individual and the collective: of
experiences in which bodies blur the line, for instance,
between the individual body of a citizen, an artist or
researcher, or an audience member, and the collective
bodies of the state or the law, for instance.

Part Four
Politics, Aesthetics and Ethics of Movement
▪ Bodies in relation put the politics and aesthetics of
being and acting together to the test and stimulate
questions about the norms, values, and ideas that bind
bodies together. Next to the social and political aspects
that are addressed here, ethics, understood as applied
and dispositional ethics (add Burt’s argument), are
negotiated in the aesthetic realm—in the aesthetic
experience, in the interaction between bodies.
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▪ Translated to the artistic practice and to Contingency
as an example, this places emphasis on the process of
decision-making rather than on the fulfilment of
predefined form or rules. Thus, the artist invite their
audiences to reassess the ethical premises through
their artwork, i.e. to negotiate imaginary, symbolic,
and material territories in a body-based process in
which competing interpretive frameworks are brought
into conversation. Thereby, corporeal, sensorial, and
symbolic experiences of vulnerability, a lack of
accomplishment, and failure are created and
negotiated in the aesthetic experience.
▪ This observation resonates with scholarly debates that
insist on the renewed centrality of debating ethical
understandings of lives in a moment in time that is
marked by profound and interlocking social,
environmental, and political transformations.
▪ Rosi Braidotti, from the perspective of post-human
philosophy, speaks of “hybrid, multicultural, polyglot,
post-identity spaces of becoming” (2006, 243) to
indicate how notions of identity and tradition are
affected by actual realities. Significantly, regarding the
agency of bodies, she relates the problem of political
agency to an impotency to adequately represent the
now, and states, “There is a shortage on the part of our
social imaginary, a deficit of representational power,
which underscores the political timidity of our times”
(2006, 243). What is important in the context of this
27
 study is that Braidotti opts for an ethical project that
begins with the body (and that takes into account that
borders are not only spatial but also relational and
above all bodily categories).
▪ “At the core of this ethical project is a positive vision of
the subject as a radically immanent, intensive body,
that is, an assemblage of forces or flows, intensities,
and passions that solidify in space and consolidate in
time, within the singular configuration commonly
known as the “individual” self. This intensive and
dynamic entity is rather a portion of forces that is
stable enough to sustain and undergo constant though
non-destructive fluxes of transformation. It is
important to see that this fundamentally positive vision
of the ethical subject does not deny conflicts, tension,
or even violent disagreements between different
subjects (2006, 238).”- Significantly, Braidotti’s
conceptualization does not imagine the body as a
bound or closed entity. Instead, she projects a body in
movement, capable of accommodating transformation
and conflict. Braidotti in connection to this, suggests
taking “suffering into account is the starting point” for
what she describes as the process of “becoming-
ethical” (2006, 243), and contends, “Such an enterprise
involves a sense of loss of cherished habits of thought
and representation, and thus is not free of pain. No
process of consciousness-raising ever is” (2006, 241).

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▪ From a different angle, bringing philosophy and
performing arts into dialogue, Arno Böhler and
Susanne Valerie Granzer also work towards an
understanding of ethics as a responsive dynamic rather
than a directive concept. It is in the interaction of
bodies that they see the political relevance of artistic
practice, and state, “One body is no body, because
bodies only exist in relation to other bodies. They inter-
act with each other, have a reciprocal effect on each
other” (2018, 190). Similarly to Braidotti, who develops
her notion of ethics primarily from the body’s
embeddedness in social and transformative realities,
Bö hler and Granzer ground their approach in the
body’s initial exposure and openness to the world: the
body’s exposure to all kinds of animate and inanimate
bodies, anchored in their very corporeality and
physicality, in the skin of the body, its breath, its
sensitivity, and its capacity to affect and to be affected:
▪ “One goes over to the other, influences others, other
influence bodies. Bodies are exposed, close to the skin,
exposed to each other, are living, breathing, psychic
bodies. For this reason they have an ethical dimension.
An ethical-aesthetical dimension. Insofar as they are
skin, they possess an ethical dimension: For from that
instance they are in sensitive contact with other bodies
and the problem how they want/should experience
and that contact with other bodies in their body
(Bö hler and Granzer 2018, 204).”
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 ▪ In this sense, the process of mutual validation and
recognition through which ethical principles are
negotiated both within and beyond the aesthetic realm
is not only directed towards the outside, but also
expands into multiple versions and articulations of the
body itself. In this entanglement, according to Bö hler
and Granzer, we face a “limit of self- awareness: a
body’s difference from itself is already inscribed in the
body itself, not only in the conscious reflecting on it”
(2018, 192).

Part Five
The Integrity of the Body and a Body-Bound Notion of
Responsibility
▪ Bringing back the ethical dimension is not to be
conflated with arguing for normative or judgmental
systems. Rather, grounded in the relationality of
bodies, in the exposure of bodies to each other, it opts
for a notion and a practice of responsibility that is not
primarily grounded in external rules or frameworks,
but in the encounters that we set up and participate in
in the social and political realm but also in the
aesthetic experiences that we create. In aesthetic
experiences that open up physical, imaginary and
symbolic negotiations of how to intervene and
participate in society (borders in the case study as one
example); how to set up spaces and conditions for
welcoming and inviting strangers and foreigners into
30
 the socio-political but also aesthetic realm; how to
counter essentialist and stereotypical rhetoric and
imagery, how to think of alternative modes of action
that are not primarily directed for or against
something, but that take into account the subtle,
contingent and dynamic lines of demarcation that run
though our lives.
▪ Finally, we stay with the question how to find forms of
expression, how to create aesthetic experiences, that
counter stereotypical images and representations, and
that manage to give visibility to so called structural and
slow violence.
▪ Inevitably, this entails the question of how we – as
artists, writers, citizens – can challenge these
dynamics, but also, how we contribute, cater and feed
them. That is, as Rosi Braidott reminds us, how we can
acknowledge our complicity in maintaining and
implementing some borders through our practices –
not as a question of guilt or obligation, but as an
invitation to enter in dialogue with the manifold
environments that are in dialogue with, anew?
▪ In this last part of the lecture, I would like to take on
these ethical concerns and combine them with some
still cautious reflections on the integrity of the body – a
so-called universal right, and a claim, that finds
expression not only in major legal documents such as
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also on

31
 an everyday level, in recent debates about civil protest
cultures, for example (LGTB; Me Too).

IMAGE OF HANDS

▪ Develop on the integrity of the body, historical, what it

holds
▪ Bodies unharmed, safe and sounds, etc. -> but what
does that mean, and which bodies have access to this
right?
▪ Develop on universalism/relativism; rights and
privileges, etc. (comment n the the potentially
suffocating effects related to the involuntary and
uncontrollable collectivization of bodies raised before)
▪ Acknowledging that representation and experience are
at the heart of politics and art alike: Develop the link
between how we imagine and represent “intact
bodies” in order to argue that this is not only an matter
of aesthetics, of aesthetic visibility. Much more, it
holds a political problem insofar as the systematic and
strategic non-representation of bodies has direct
consequences: not being visible, present and
experienced at the border—its related discourses,
images and mediatization—corresponds to depriving
certain bodies from official representation and
memory, decreases their political agency and claim-
making (see also Nixon 2011).

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▪ I will come back to the beginning where I argued that
when it comes to borders, for example, bodies are
often represented, in stereotypical ways, as wound3d
bodies. Next to accounts of physical violence that is
directed against individuals or collectives at the
borders, they equally address situations and
mechanisms that confront the integrity of the body in a
more implicit and symbolic sense: they witness of
visceral, somatic, corporeal experiences of
vulnerability, insecurity, and danger; of what medical
anthropologist Omar Dewachi terms “social wounds”
(2015). What Dewachi points to are experiences of
borders, displacement, and refuge that not only speak
of individual biographies but that are also
simultaneously and irreconcilably linked to the history
of a larger group; to ethnical or national communities,
for example. According to him, social wounds fulfil a
twofold function for the members of a collective,
providing an “interstitial tissue of the social; they are
what brings people together and what sets them
apart” (Dewachi 2015, 77).
▪ The analytical figure of the social wound suggests that
experiences that literal and symbolic attacks are never
just individual. Rather, this speculation reinstates the
question of how to protect and care for such an
individual yet always-collective body in the experience
of the border: what does it mean, then, for bodies to
be unharmed and intact under these conditions? My
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aim here is not to engage in a discussion on the
universal and idealistic claim of the integrity of the
body as formulated in the Declaration for Human
Rights, for instance (cp. Azoulay 2014) Much more, I
am interested in the relevance of the idea of the
integrity of the body in perspective of recent
theoretical debates that have influenced the field of
border studies, as well. Notably, I am referring to
theoretical discussions that place the problem of the
integrity of the body in line with its bare possibility for
survival. In this context, political theorist Achille
Mbembe (see Mbembe 2003; 2017 a, b) argues that
the (non-) protection of bodies has become a
significant strategy to control mobility and territoriality
on a global scale. In short, rather than disciplining
bodies or exploiting their labor, he observes that
bodies are regulated by systemically withdrawing care
from them. Here, the suffering and integrity of some
bodies is not interpreted as urgent—or in any case, not
urgent enough—to prompt decisive action. Thus, the
act of abandoning bodies in a literal, physical, and in a
symbolic, legal sense, corresponds to the act of
redeem from our political and humanitarian
responsibility. Significantly, Mbembe contents that in
this process, bodies are always addressed from a
collective perspective. In other words, arguments on
the non-belonging and the lack of collective affiliation
of some bodies are misused in order to legitimize the
34
 performance of inaction. Mbembe summarizes:
“People are expelled in a state of vulnerability that is
legally produced. [...] Borders are being mapped and
re-mapped and disposable people are produced”
(2017a). Ultimately, he interprets these developments
as a movement towards a world in which borders
multiply, in which they are mobile.
▪ Against this backdrop, artistic practice might be read as
attempt to counter and offer a way to contact these
dynamics of systemic non-representation; that might
raise aesthetic, and ultimately political, awareness of
similar processes of systemic non- representation from
the perspective of bodies.

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