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SESSION 3: OF LAND AND PLACE

1. Video Lecture

2. Embodied Exploration: Visualizing Sensation

The image or images can be anything and everything, let yourself be surprised.

3. Performance Exercises: Inhabiting Space, Mapping, Recording, as Artistic Research

1. Reenact Vito Acconci’s Following Piece: Dedicate at least 30 minutes. Follow a stranger until they enter a building or vehicle, then follow another. Embrace the uncertainty and playfulness of discovering someone else’s route and seeing the city without an agenda. Do some of the followings as raw as possible, just embodying and exploring the experience. As you repeat the action a few times feel free to start exploring with ways to document the action: maybe track your route, take some photos, record audio notes or a soundscape...

​2. Engage with a Natural or Dystopian Spot/SiteObjective: This exercise encourages you to interact with a place in nature or in the city through physical, sensory, and creative engagement. It invites you to approach a site not only as a spectator but as an active participant in the landscape. This can lead to insights about both the place and your own relationship to it.
Instructions:

• Select a natural location that resonates with you—this could be a forest, beach, lake, trail, or any other outdoor space.
• Find a specific spot that draws you in. Spend time in this place, focusing on the sensory qualities of the environment: the sounds, smells, textures, temperature, and colors. Allow the environment to speak to you in a way that’s intuitive, without immediately labeling or categorizing what you experience.
• Begin to decode the place through your body and senses. How does it feel to be there? What textures, shapes, and sensations stand out? Pay attention to how the space affects your mood and thoughts. How does it impact your body—does it invite stillness, movement, or something else?

 
Document your explorations: gather materials, write, sketch, take a photo or a video, create a configuration with materials from the site... Let the process, intention, and curiosity guide you.

4. Suggested Reading

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Where Is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, Performativity, and Exile
By Jane Blocker
Duke University Press

Reading reflections:

• How does Mendieta’s work invite us to think about land as a space without borders?
  • Reflect on how her blending of body and earth challenges notions of ownership, division, and national identity. How might her work suggest a more fluid relationship with land?
• Blocker contrasts the time of culture with the time of nature in Mendieta’s work. How do you experience or reconcile these different tempos in your own life or creative practice?
  • Consider moments when the rhythms of nature have felt at odds with or in harmony with human constructs like schedules, history, or progress.
• Mendieta often used earth to explore cycles of life and death. How do you relate to the materiality of earth in terms of renewal, decay, and impermanence?
  • Reflect on how engaging with natural materials or processes might shape your understanding of life’s transient nature.