Tangible Territory is a platform that offers a space for various voices to meet and discuss themes relating to the role of the body, the importance of place and embodied experience, in giving meaning to our every day experience of life and art. By extension, it also reflects on some of the transformations initiated by technology, globalisation and now also the pandemic and to it related questions of embodiment versus disembodiment, being simultaneously here and elsewhere, present and absent in our bodies and our surroundings.
In the long run, the aim of this endeavour is to build an open community, where certain key values are celebrated, explored, promoted. These include the importance of the whole body in making sense of our human condition, the role of imagination in offering scenarios beyond those that exist and the effects of place/space on our internal realities.
‘Tangible Territory’ is not a real physical location, but a place that lies in the liminal land between the real world and its representation (or evocation) on the screen, between our own unique experiences, informed by our senses and the interior world of our memory and imagination. Hopefully a transformative, living space, where we can meet, interact, grow: An imaginary, yet actual space, because, as C G Jung tells us, everything that acts is actual.
For now, Tangible Territory consists of a TT Journal, as well as Sensing Place residency.
Tereza Stehlikova is a Czech/UK artist, researcher and educator. She is engaged in a cross-disciplinary research, investigating how moving image can be used to communicate embodied experience, by exploring multi-sensory aesthetics and embodiment. Tereza is currently writing a book Exiled from Our Bodies: And How to Come Back to Our Senses for Routledge’s Sensory Studies series. She is also a founder of Sensory Sites, an international collective based in London, generating collaborative exhibitions, installations and research projects that explore multi-sensory perception and bodily experience. She also launched an online arts journal Tangible Territory, featuring essays and articles by established artists/authors from the world of arts, science, philosophy, all centred around the role our senses play in creating meaning in art and life. Stehlikova regularly presents her research at international conferences and her films and performances have been shown at a variety of film and art festivals around the world.
Tereza is currently head of visual arts department, University of Creative Communication, Prague. She holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art, where she researched the tactile language of moving image. In the past she has been a senior lecturer at University of Westminster, as well as a PhD supervisor at the RCA. Her PhD thesis on role of tactility on informing our experience of film, can be found HERE. I also run occasional sensory workshops in London (for more info please visit HERE)
A selection of Tereza’s films can be watched here: https://vimeo.com/terezastehlikova
More about her projects here: https://cinestheticfeasts.com/