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The journal Performance Research invites contributions to thematic issue about the stretching, rendering and formation of the decentred, displaced, denatured or amalgamated body

The journal Performance Research is planning a thematic issue (vol. 14, issue 4, 2009) on “notions and practices that correlate with ideas on the … formation of bodies, their somatic dimensions and constitution”. Issue guest editors Ric Allsop and Phillip Warnell are looking for contributions along the following lines: Guest/ host relationships; the possessed body – disguise […]

The journal Performance Research is planning a thematic issue (vol. 14, issue 4, 2009) on “notions and practices that correlate with ideas on the … formation of bodies, their somatic dimensions and constitution”. Issue guest editors Ric Allsop and Phillip Warnell are looking for contributions along the following lines:

  • Guest/ host relationships; the possessed body – disguise and ventriloquism in performance; intimate distances or the distance of intimacy; implanted objects and technologically augmented functionality; ingestion and extraordinary forms of eating; psychic and physical fragmentation – the séance as a place of travel and channel: of departure, arrival, spectacle, transmission and reception between beings and worlds; archival extraction and mobilization (including re-enactments); the psychology of phantom and detached limb behaviour (beheadedness?); the aesthetics (and representation) of embodiment and its affects […]
  • Historical, medical, symbolic and ritual use, storage and preservation of organic material and its associated material culture (canopic jars, organ transporters); the symbolism and sacred role of body part removal: such as castration, removal of the tongue and eye; the camera as an external organ; visible supplements – the consideration of auras, halos, charisma etc; immaterial agencies and modes of contamination – radioactivity or viral forms […]
  • Spatial organisation and disputed territories (transplantation and bodily construction in horticulture and its forms, allotments, hybridisation); displacement and the ethics of place; aloneness and placelessness; the in-between, lacunae and production of space; post-colonial approaches to ideas and histories of plantation and the transplantation of cultures and peoples; temote presence and shared forms of perception; conceptual and geographic displacements of art works and institutions […]

Much of this could be pretty interesting for medical museum exhibition curators. Deadline for proposals are 26 January 2009. Contact guest editors on ricallsopp@mac.com or info@phillipwarnell.com. Or visit Performance Research‘s website and their guidelines for submissions.