TT Journal, ISSUE 7, September 2024
by Ami Skånberg and Lucy Lyons
In this collaborative video essay we, choreographer and performer Ami Skånberg and artist Lucy Lyons unpack presence as performance. We discuss our role as ghosts, haunting the spaces in Zirgu Pasts, Latvian Academy of Culture in Riga, which we have occupied previously without realising we were ghosts.
We explore visually and through dialogue how hauntings and tracings make us present and reveal our presence through layers of time, process and understanding. Bodily presence and absence provokes our consciousness. Time travelling through walking and drawing slowly, loosing hands and feet, we become close to invisible.
The traces we make and the traces we leave reveal our presence, embedded within the paper, the fabric of the walls and the ether. The space has its own presence and we become part of it as we perform and leave traces within it. The artist in residence, the artist in space haunts the in-between-spaces. The spaces, as we look, draw and walk closer, become ‘curiouser and curiouser’ as Alice in Wonderland would say. We know exactly what she means.
We understand that the space is ever present, and it is we whose presence is fugitive, who become the trace.
Ami Skånberg, PhD in Dance from University of Roehampton, is a performer, film-maker and artistic researcher. Skånberg is a slow walker thanks to her studies and work with Japanese dance in Kyoto since 2000. She walks slowly in urban and other spaces as a ceremonial, subversive act. Together with Dr Lucy Lyons, she co-chaired Nordic Summer University Study Circle of Artistic Research. Skånberg is a board member of NOFOD (Nordic Forum for Dance), as well as the Peer Review board of Journal of Artistic Research. Skånberg is the current Head of M.A.D.E. – Master Dance Education at the Stockholm University of the Arts, and also works at University of Gothenburg. Her research interests are practice-led and concern Japanese dance and philosophy, screendance, gender codified movement practice, non-hierarchical treatment of global dance techniques, and auto-ethnographic accounts from within the practice. Skånberg co-curates Walking As Practice at Björkö Konstnod. email: ami.skanberg@uniarts.se
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2782025/2782026
Dr Lucy Lyons holds a PhD in visual arts from Sheffield Hallam University. Lyons uses drawing as intervention into different disciplines, researching how the activity of drawing leads to better understanding through “slow looking.” She was part of the research group at Medical Museion, Copenhagen. Together with Dr Ami Skånberg, she co-chaired Nordic Summer University Study Circle of Artistic Research. Lyons is lead tutor in SSC Anatomy and Art at UCL medical school and at QMUL in London. She is currently using drawing as an expanded practice beyond the medical field to create autobiographical multi layered complex drawings that dig into the archaeology of self. She is exhibiting new work – ‘Seven and a half’ at Liminal Gallery. Her research interests are drawing, anatomy and pathology, and she often works with medical research: @stuff.in.jars E-mail:lucylyons68@yahoo.co.uk http://lucylyons.org/