How can liberatory literary practices like écriture féminine and the poetics of relation be translated into creative methodologies for liberatory spatial practice? How could this translation lead to the deconstruction and reimagination of spatial narrative structures?

REIMAGINING THE SPACE.BODY is an interdisciplinary workshop where participants use a relational feminine framework to explore embodied spatial storytelling through the deconstruction and reimagination of spatial narratives in the UNESCO World Heritage Colonial City in the city of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Participants will engage with and subvert the Colonial City’s spatial organization, hierarchical structures, symbols, and narratives through collective imagining and speculation in space.

The program uses an experimental methodology to explore embodied spatial storytelling as a language that reimagines the spacebody: a reciprocally-generative act between body and space. It combines Hélène Cixous's écriture féminine—a speculative literary practice conceived to reimagine narratives, syntax, and language from the perspective of an empowered Other—, and Édouard Glissant’s decolonial concept of errantry in “The Poetics of Relation”, a form of focused wandering that resists colonial structuring of space and experience through openness to the unexpected, the shifting, and the relational.

Participants will use errant dérives and multisensorial documentation—such as body-mapping, countermapping, sound recordings, photography, and movement studies—to explore embodied spatial storytelling in the Colonial City, locally known as “the Zone”, and to deconstruct and reimagine its spatial narratives. These studies will evolve into interdisciplinary installations and performances through a process of material and movement experiments, design, and fabrication that create dialogues between space, body, and movement.

By examining and experimenting within this site-specific context through this écriture féminine- errantry hybrid methodology, REIMAGINING THE SPACE.BODY will equip participants with tools they can apply to their personal practice within the Caribbean world and beyond.

KEY FEATURES OF THE WORKSHOP AND LEARNING GOALS

Participants will use this hybrid methodology to reimagine the spacebody through 1) critical and speculative engagement with historic architectural, spatial, and visual materials, 2) processing and documenting embodied experiences in space, and 3) using embodied spatial storytelling for narrative deconstruction and reimagining.

Material outcomes:

• A collective multisensorial digital map and archive with individual and group discoveries
• Collaborative site-specific installations and interdisciplinary performances
• Projects participants can develop further within their creative practices
• Public showcase of performances and installations

Learning outcomes:

• Interdisciplinary creation and collaboration in fields of spatial design, fashion design, choreography and movement, performance, film, and sound
• Embodied spatial storytelling and design through a relational-feminine lens
• Critical speculation and experimentation
• Spatial scoring and storyboarding
• Critical and speculative lecture series