Between Movements

Between Movements is a work that speaks to how the body carries meaning even before it exists, and how it can be questioned and expanded when in dialogue with space, materials, objects, and the camera. Inspired by theoretical authors from gender studies, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Audre Lorde, and Judith Butler, the work was originally created as a live performance and later expanded into video and a two-channel installation.

Each performance was dedicated to the feminist movements of the second and third waves, with the intention of engaging the category of “woman” not as universal or essential, but as historically constructed, contested, and continually redefined. The work proposes an exercise in questioning this category rather than stabilizing it, while recognizing the importance of tension within feminist theory and the diversity of its voices, positions, and lived experiences.

The project engages with Beauvoir’s existentialist theory that the female body is shaped by social norms and often lived as something that confines her to the world, rather than something that allows her to transform it. It also draws from Irigaray’s position that the female body has been erased, distorted, and reinterpreted through a masculine language and logic, rendered unintelligible within a symbolic system that recognizes the masculine as the norm.

At the same time, the work resonates with Audre Lorde’s understanding of the female body not as a prison nor as lack, but as a source of power, knowledge, and political transformation, where the erotic emerges as embodied power. It also engages Judith Butler’s understanding of the body as sedimented through repeated social norms, where gender appears natural and stable, yet is in fact produced through accumulated acts over time. Like geological layers, these repetitions create the illusion of a fixed body while concealing the historical and performative processes that materialize gender.

In response to these theoretical positions, Between Movements introduces the idea of fluidity in opposition to the binary rigidity of Western constructions of gender. Through the interaction between the body, sculptural forms, and the moving image, the work explores embodiment as a site of transition and transformation.

The final result takes the form of a two-channel installation, where I integrate my own presence as an additional layer between movements. Positioned between stillness and action, between inscription and transformation, my body becomes both subject and site. Through performance, video, and spatial intervention, the work creates a space where the body’s apparent coherence can be destabilized, allowing new possibilities of embodiment to emerge.