Speaking Parts and Talking Heads

Speaking Parts and Talking Heads

My proposal for Working With Waste centres on a new moving image works that ruminates on the digestive qualities of language and the shared vocabulary of reading & eating, digesting & understanding; processes we make, that in turn, make us. This research stems from my ongoing participation as project artist for The Scottish Gut Project (Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde) – the first interdisciplinary research project of its kind to examine the mind-gut axis from an arts & humanities perspective.My work takes the gut as both subject matter and process. I’d like to explore ideas of digestion, fermentation, composting, regurgitation, andmetabolism to develop a series of editing tools/prompts through which to activate, transform, and reconstitute the diverse range of materials I’ve been accumulating; archival research, text works, medical journals, shot footage, animations, oral histories, interviews. If metabolise also means to overthrow and breakdown structures, how might digestion offer up strategies for meaning-making capable of destabilising productivist and extractivist logics? Not solipsism, but sympoiesis? Participating in the group would challenge me both practically and conceptually, enabling me to gain support for–and insight into–my moving image practice. I am under-resourced in this type of support and would greatly benefit from mentorship and peer-based development. Contributing to this community of practice will be enriching and will offer a new vantage point from which to reflect on my work in this area to

Kirsty Hendry

Participant ·

I am an artist and facilitator who makes projects exploring labour, work, and the body. My work is often collaborative in nature–using co-production to develop structures that facilitate collective enquiry. Ideas often begin as texts—research drawn from a wide variety of sources that I distill and condense to become moving- image and performance works.I'm interested in 'the body' as a social construct and how this shapes cultural understandings of productivity, health, and illness, exploring the ways that science is already a form of fiction and how biomedicine translates broader cultural and political concerns and anxieties into its own technical narratives. To unravel the origins of these narratives, I engage with archival knowledge (itself a contestable space of

waste and non-waste) to look to older or seemingly 'obsolete' knowledges to rethink and challenge pervading assumptions and values.These concerns have informed projects such as Cursor, Self-Service, Reader's Digest, and Navel Gazing which have all examined how the politics of health are tangled with compliance, productivity, morality, and the gendered disavowal of bodily knowledge.