My doctoral project (Fina Miralles’ Relacions: Kinesthetic Knowledge and Corporeal Agency https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/984673/ examined the work of Fina Miralles, a Catalonian artist born in 1950 under the Francoism repressive system. It looked at how she developed an intense personal and artistic work regarding the body between 1972-1976 –the body, being the specific place where this restrictive system marked its traces, but also the space where an emancipatory pedagogical system could be developed through corporeal dynamics. What was emancipatory or liberatory about her bodywork process? In the process of this research I asked myself: How can I engage with her bodywork? How can my methodology be coherent with a research question that centres on corporeal dynamics? Could I develop a tactile and corporeal sense of her practice in and through my research? The pilot project documentary I present for CIVARTES2020 includes some extracts from the super-8 film (1973-1976) by Fina Miralles. This feminist media work in progress incorporates filming from fieldwork and re-performing the artist work by the researcher. These research-creation processes challenge the traditional identification of characters or the delineation of story, and focuses on the body and other non-human characters. In this sense an embodied way of researching Fina Miralles’ performances is at play. This has political implications since I cross traditional theory/practice lines in documentary making by offering a practice that calls into question both the subject and object of knowledge in the process of producing feminist media.

Short Bio Celia Vara has a bachelor on Philosophy, Education and Psychology and a Master in Gender and Equality. She is a researcher, professor and visual artist. Since 1998, she has been working in a pioneering research and treatment centre on gender violence. She has participated in numerous researches and projects on feminism media and art in Europe Canada and the Caribbean. Her master thesis (“Feminist Video Art in the 70’s in Spain”) won in 2013 the 1st Prize-Award in Gender and Research by Jaume I University in Spain. She has had numerous residencies and individual and collective exhibitions in Dominican Republic, Canada, Cuba and Spain. She holds a PhD in Communication at Concordia University (Montreal, QC) where she developed in and through fieldwork and archival stage, ways of “doing” research based on embodied methodologies, research-creation, practice as research (film and performance) and kinesthetic empathy, proceeding from a situated feminist approach.

ENLACE A VIMEO: https://vimeo.com/336108068

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