Making Space: Breathe Wind Into Me
Anna Walker
Every year Fabrica makes its space available to artists to test new ground in their practice, opening up the possibility to use the space in imaginative ways and experiment with new ways of working.
Anna Walker's PhD, (completed May 2017), was an exploration of the tension between remembering and forgetting when recalling a traumatic event, in this instance 9/11. She employed an autoethnographic approach to remembering trauma, and 'methodological abundance' (Hannula, 2009) to explore the transference of traumatic affect upon an audience.
Over the last 4-years she has published 8 papers on the affects of trauma on individual and collective systems, shared her research at 9 conferences and exhibited her research on 12 occasions. She is an advocate of arts-practice research as a generator of new forms of experiential knowledge that moves beyond the linguistic. She was recently selected out of 400 applicants to be part of ‘Empty Pro(e)mises’, curated by the Director of EMST Katerina Koskina and Dr. Lanfranco Aceti. With a background in body and integrative psychotherapy, she is also renowned for her expertise on trauma, speaking most recently on a panel discussion at The British Library to address ‘Let's talk about the Windrush’ (15-09-2018) and selected from numerous applicants to be part of Impact18—Matter in Movement (November 2018) to explore digital solutions and artistic possibilities for current global issues of war, violence and trauma.
Currently Anna Walker’s research focuses on collective and intergenerational trauma and traumatic diasporas, i.e. the traumatic pathways created by migration/immigration. It is an endeavour to track the dispersal of historical and cultural fragments of traumatic diasporas, building upon Lisa Blackman's 'brain-body-world entanglements' (2012) and upon what Jeffrey C. Alexander regards as a neglected domain of social responsibility and political action (2016, p.3). At this early stage the research is one of enquiry and discovery: a thinking through making, staying open to the emergent properties of the intra-psychic as well as the intersubjective. The outcome of this research— a moving imagery and sound installation, will be exhibited as work in progress at Fabrica Gallery, Brighton, in January 2019, and at The Lotus Foundation, London, in March 2019.
About The Artist
Anna Walker, Ph.D., is an artist, storyteller, researcher, and writer. She has been investigating the repercussions of trauma in her arts-practice research for over 20 years. Through sound and moving imagery, she is interested in the body’s response to overwhelming traumatic and stressful situations and how the body reorganises itself to cope with or manage the trauma.
Currently, she is researching methods of expanding the concept of the breath to incorporate language and story, specifically the myths, legends and tales that have been around for thousands of years. She does this by bridging a combination of traditional storytelling, performance, and technology. Through the exploration of the stories of our ancestors and the balance of the auto-ethnographic with the critical, Anna utilises personal experiences to facilitate a greater understanding of memory, trauma and its wider cultural implications.
