A Queer Phenomenology
Movement Score
Research action, 2017.
A research action in collaboration with Edinburgh’s Reading Talking Performing group that turned language from feminist author and scholar Sara Ahmed’s 2006 book Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others into a movement score.
Participants moved through the Talbot Rice Gallery, responding to a series of cues read into a microphone, accompanied by music. Divided into three “positions” and three “movements”, the cues took inspiration from images and ideas in Ahmed’s text, emphasising what was in and out of view, foregrounds and backgrounds, as well as oblique and slanted ways of extending and retreating one’s body in space.
The action was framed as research into Nemer’s doctoral study of museum audio guides, expanding and reimagining the kinds of embodied encounters museums might foster. The language developed for A Queer Phenomenology Movement Score contributed to the scripts of Trees Are Fags and I Don’t Know Where Paradise Is.
