Foreign Bodies is a sonic and somatic exploration of bodies: bodies in motion and bodies in migration; bodies managed by internal and external forces; bodies navigating boundaries set by others; bodies negotiating boundaries they set for themselves; bodies in flux; bodies in synchronicity; bodies in resistance to management and control.
Initially, Foreign Bodies emerged in response to the paranoia about migrant flows into Europe, as well as into our former home countries of Australia and the United States. What really interested us was, and continues to be, the way that movement shapes our subjectivities and how our subjectivities shape both the way we move and the way we are allowed to move. While some bodies can move freely across borders as tourists, others risk their lives to migrate. This reality has become so normalised that it’s easy to forget that there is nothing normal about it at all.
Foreign Bodies also seeks to interrogate the notion of the foreign, whether it emerges from a xenophobic narrative which hates and fears the foreigner, or whether its formed from the perspective of allyship which may nevertheless exoticise or make exceptional the Other. We want to identify and think through some of the ways in which we produce the unknowable subject within our own communities and even within our own bodies.
Using field recordings – which are moments in time materialised as audio – we create artworks that initiate conversations around authority, boundaries, consent, and proximity. We move by train, bus, bicycle and hitchhiking to witness, volunteer in and experience–migrant camps, transit points, communes and artists colonies.
These questions have taken us further than we imagined, to investigate the different ways human beings construct an Other, whether that be a fellow human, an animal, plant or stone.