LAURA CEMIN

WORKING GROUP
Laura Cemin (FI) - director, performer and co-author
Jenny Berger Myhre (NO) - sound artist and co-author
Roberta Segata (IT) - photographer, cinematographer and co-author

Chen Nadler, Tashi Iwaoka, Daniela Pascual - performers and performance co-creators

“Losing your Motherbody” is a multidisciplinary project developed by performer and visual artist Laura Cemin (FI), visual artist Roberta Segata (IT) and sound artist Jenny Berger Myhre (NO).
It will be shared in the form of 3 public workshops, an exhibition and a live performance in HAM Gallery, Helsinki in May/June 2024 and finally an artist publication with related digital music album.

The project explores questions of translation, sociolinguistic identity, and bodily memory. It’s idea was born from Laura’s personal experience of forgetting her mother tongue, as a result of more than 7 years living abroad. What is disappearing are not only words or grammar but mainly gestures. What she started losing is not her mother tongue, but her "mother body". Through this work, we will explore the idea of a possible "mother body", its qualities, its evolution, and the adaptation processes it undergoes in different social and cultural environments.

The project brings together a variety of cultural reflections - from conformity and being an outsider, to attitudes towards volume and expressiveness - alongside a profound investigation into the forgotten, amnesia of a body that inhabits a new language. It seeks to be a poetic exploration of what it means to live in another language and looks at the adaptation processes that the body undertakes when moving to a new country. It is however strongly rooted in research into sociolinguistics, collective systems of transnational mobility, and political theory, which examines how language both forms and reflects our reality.

Through public workshops and rehearsals, we will engage with people who don't live in their country of "origin" to investigate the changes in body language and gestures typical of our native cultures and languages, caused by living in a foreign country. We will kinesthetically explore the chameleon effect* – an adaptation process that takes place unconsciously while living in a foreign cultural and linguistic composition. Absurdity and humor mixed with clichés will be used to reveal the impossibility of "inhabiting" multiple languages, the friction one feels in having multiple identities coexist in the same body.

*Every person arriving in a new country is intrinsically hyper-visible and recognizable in appearance, language, and habits; over time, the body unconsciously transforms and subsides to adapt to a new landscape and its own conventions, a process referred to as the “Chameleon Effect”. ———————————————————————

This project will unfold in three main activities:

1.WORKSHOPS

• In Helsinki, Finland in November 2023, where Cemin, Segata and Myhre will facilitate a public workshop for foreign-born locals of various generations and backgrounds. During the workshop,we will introduce simple conversational input alongside physical activities such as games and group dances, to share both verbally and bodily the experiences of living in a foreign language and how body language has changed during the process of adaptation and integration. The process will be documented through text, sound and images.

• At Oriente Occidente in Rovereto, Italy in February 2024, where Cemin and Segata will conduct a movement-based workshop as well as interviews with locals from various backgrounds and age groups, collecting both italian gestures that have fallen out of use and newer additions to the Italian “gestural alphabet,” possibly sourced from social media. The possibility of relating not only with natives of the area, but also with individuals who have moved and relocated in the territory, will offer multiple perspectives and will enrich the research. The process will be documented through text, sound and images.

• In Bergen at USF in August 2024, where Cemin and Myhre will connect with the local immigrant communities and facilitate a public workshop. In addition to propose movement-based tasks to the participants and explore the body language of their native tongues, we will introduce vocal exercises and work with language and sound.

2. EXHIBITION WITH LIVE PERFORMANCES

In May and June 2024, we will present an exhibition at HAM Gallery, Helsinki. The show will encompasse a 2-channel video installation with spatial sound and live performances that will activate the space. 

• The video will be filmed in Helsinki in November 2023. 5 indiviuals, which are not professional actors or dancers, will be selected among the workshop participants and asked to appear in the film. The footage will be filmed both in a film studio and in public space.
  Parts of the video footage could be also filmed in Rovereto, IT in February 2024.

• The live performance will be developed between January and April 2024. Cemin will perform the piece together with 3 local performers who are originally from elsewhere. There are Chen Nadler (Israeli dancer based in Helsinki), Tashi Iwaoka (Japanese performer based in Turku) and Daniela Pascual (Ecuadorian performance artist and researcher based in Helsinki). The performances will take place 4 times during the course of the exhibition. Using movement and voice, the performance will mix elements of a lecture with ficticious group dances and will aim to simultaneously evoke the sense of familiarity mixed with disorientation often felt when “living” in a foreign language, and therefore in a different cultural composition.

3. ARTIST PUBLICATION + DIGITAL MUSIC RECORD

Between July and September 2024, during a residency at USF, Bergen (NO), we will utilize the material gathered (including images, video stills, and textual notes) throughout the research and production phases to create an artist publication.
Cemin will be an artist in residence at USF for the whole 3-month period; Myhre and Segata will join her for 2 weeks to plan, develop and organize the material collected, and will later continue to work on the project remotely.

Cemin will be responsable for the textual portion of the publication and its design, Segata will take care of the visuals and Myhre will create a digital album with the material collected during the workshops and live performances.

This final activity and result of the project wishes to be a long lasting trace of a long process, and expand the reach of the research both in terms of space (the book will be distributed in many independent bookstores across Europe) and time (the printed matter will continue to circulate also after the project has concluded).

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The initial research on the topic was developed in residency at Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder - Trondheim (NO) in Feb-March 2023. A work-in-progress was shown at BABEL gallery over a week-end in March 2023.

Following, some images of the WIP showing.