Bodies Proximity and Place

Bodies, Proximity, and Place

The body in proximity to space can relate to–

temporality / transfers / stability / precarity / entrapment / inability / crisis / admittance / mobility / the

ephemeral / relations / risk

Proximity is:

1. Closeness and the conditions by which we find ourselves in tandem with others;

intimacy; touch; haptics

2. Nearness in place or space, time, and thought

3. The body and place, vicinity, and situatedness

Or—

where we find ourselves tied to those we perhaps never choose—placed within a space without us seeking it out, where the body is confined, trapped. When encountered momentarily in the present, performance can offer an opening into what Denise Riley coins as ‘the world of many selves’: The body as plural can also be many selves within a self, a multifaceted relationship to others. What can be local and far, physical but shared? Space is not reducible to physical distance; it also implies the impossibility of simply being-together or being-as-one.

How does being near others constitute an understanding of the conditions under which they live? How

is the body performed and felt in relation to place?

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The poetic and artistic can collapse these established realms of proximity to others and ourselves—where the ‘social’ and ‘intimate’ become intertwined. States of longing and belonging, dissociation, and otherness also can highlight where a place to exist in harmony, or safely, is absent. It is from this circumstance we find ourselves rendered in a state of grief. How can writing perform this grief, creating its own sense of place through language?

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The body, proximity, and place can be far-reaching and boundless.

This series intends to question these complex questions through different experiments with language, art, cultural phenomena, and writing as practice. It welcomes submissions that are not necessarily resolved but may touch upon ideas of—

‘approximation’; ‘physicality’; ‘community’; ‘memory’; ‘nearness’; ‘suffocation’; ‘distance’; ‘temporality’; ‘vicinity’; ‘care’; ‘protection’; ‘imagining’; ‘otherness’; ‘entrapment’; plurality; place; space; belonging.