Celia Vara

My doctoral project (Fina Miralles’ Relacions: Kinesthetic Knowledge and Corporeal Agency) draws from kinesthetic experience to explore the performative acts of the Catalonian artist, Fina Miralles, in the context of the Franco regime. I saw in her simple bodily acts the possibility not only of a kind of bodily knowing, but also a feminist liberatory possibility emerging in the context of the repressive gender order of the dictatorship. My dissertation was experimental in its methodologies: I made use of my own performances, re-created some of Miralles’ performances in the sites where they took place, I did extensive archival work, as well as a kind of “deep hanging out” with the artist where kinesthetic empathy was a key aspect of the research. This pilot video is a work in process with some of the archives from fieldwork that will end in a documentary about my experience on feminist embodied research.

Pilot video for the project “Fina Miralles Relacions’: Kinesthetic Knowledge and Corporeal Agency” from Celia Vara on Vimeo.