Image by Tanya Shyika
anarchivic relief: a practice-as-research choreographic object, 2021
by elisabeth motley
Created in collaboration with Visual Artist Tanya Shyika and Developmental Editor Cory Nakasue.
This visual and autoethnographic book engages with the values, artistry, and politics of my experiences with recurring brain disease – encephalitis. It prioritizes neurodivergences as proficiency and positions embodiments commonly associated with seizure, psychosis and cognitive, and physical disability as original creative processes of the body-mind. This project disrupts the knowledge production of my medical archives through textual and visual subversion, modeling alternative ways of embodied knowing. It is a crip art object, which works to pry open neurodiversity inclusion in order to lay bare the regimes of superiority propped up by ableist practices.
It argues for the recognition of (valuable) difference.
Collaborators
Tanya Shyika is a Ukrainian visual artist, illustrator and designer, based in Brooklyn, New York. She studied Illustration and graphic design at the Berlin University of Arts (UdK) and Pratt Institute and has a background in printmaking.
Cory Nakasue is a movement educator, therapist, and artist, writer, and astrologer. She has worked in theatre and dance as a choreographer, director, and dramaturg in the US and UK for over 25 years. Her work is centered on the themes of form in relationship to context, archetype, and systems theory. She’s studied performing arts composition and theory at Middlesex University, California Institute of the Arts, and University of California, Riverside. Mentors in the fields of neurology, psychotherapy, and phenomenology have informed her teaching and therapy practice.
