Embodying the Social Ghosts: Exploring ‘Social Haunting’ through movement and sound

Hand drawn blue scribbles with the text 'who am I to tell them now what to do'

This project uses movement-based practices and improvisation to open up new ways to attend to the presence of troubling antisemitic pasts and possible better futures for me and for a small group of other Jewish people in Sheffield.

The research starts with the moving, feeling human body: as the point at which the affective and material force of antisemitic threats are received, but also the point from which solidarity and alternative ways of being together can emerge. The group aspect of the project takes place in workshops inspired by the process philosophy and event-based work of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, as well as a diverse range of artists that includes Meredith Monk, Nancy Stark Smith, Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark.

These sessions are defined by an approach based on improvisation, an ethos of care, and forms of attention and expression coming through movement. Creating new forms of dialogue within these workshops and putting what they generate into conversation with my art practice - using movement, sound and video - the project aims to disturb rigid frames of time, identity and memory to open up space in which to attend to what a haunting past offers, and demands of, us in the present.