Phantom limb(((o)))_Statement

phantom limb(((o))):
An exorcism for the embodied past
by Ila and Syaheedah Iskandar
CONTENT
+ Where did it started?
+ Where did we go?
+ Where are we now?

Where did it started?
EXCERPTS FROM PROPOSAL
phantom limb(((o))) is an ongoing collaborative research project between Syaheedah Iskandar and ila
that excavates embodied knowledge, histories and narratives surrounding the Nusantara through the
mediation of the moving image. The phantom limb used here describes a disconnection of limbs from the
source origin (the body). If the body is used as a proxy that represents the archipelagic region then it is
possible to describe that disconnection as contributing to memory loss, whether individually or collectively
as a community.
Ila’s performative use of her body demonstrates these intricacies as well as address these phantoms that
are trying to locate themselves not only within the region but across time and space, in multiple worlds
of the unseen. In an attempt to recognise the body as being cut from ancestral knowledge and space
(Nusantara), ila illuminates the paradox of being in a diaspora space (Singapore). phantom limb(((o)))
addresses this bodily dissonance – being in a space where we are a part of but are also excluded from.
We will also be exploring micro-activations from home which include provocations/prompts for the body
that can be extended to other performers and movement artists to perform remotely. These microactivations
are an expansion of Ila’s two works. bekas (2019) positions the body as the abject against
locations that have been reclaimed and tanah//air (2020) responds to a prompt on how the body performs
stubborn residues that resists change and clings on. In tandem, these works and our project approach is
looking at alternative trajectories relating to regional histories, cultures and ancestral knowledge. These
micro-activations will lead to a collective exorcism: to remove the phantoms of the past but also to make
apparent these limbs and extremities that remain attached.
KEYWORDS
Embodied knowledge(s), ancestral knowledge(s), gestures, phantom limbs, instinct, oral traditions
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Where did we go?
INITIAL DEVELOPMENT
Discussion Points
How can embodied knowledge be explored, and how does it impart onto the body’s motion
through centuries of effect? How does the body respond to these research excavations, will the
limbs appear, or at least become more apparent? What is the primal body without the baggage
of time, and cultures?
In the beginning, there were challenges in trying to bridge both our understandings of “embodied
knowledge” and how to articulate to an audience or a reader a terminology that is subjective. We started
discussing on some familiar cultural gestures we do. As a way to also expand the discussions outside
of the Nusantara framework, we decided that it was imperative that we do not focus on cultural gestures
alone.
As an attempt to unpack “embodied knowledge”, we used this micro-residency to focus on the research
of gestures. We wanted to re-think and make visible certain gestures we do - how, why, when, where
do we do them.
The idea was to integrate our senses into these discussions, what we see and how we feel when we
make these gestures – in that act of unveiling, we highlight again, what is unseen.
Research Plan
As a way to unpack what embodied knowledge can entail, and what it means individually, the
gestures that we are exploring will look into cultural, instinctual, unique and hidden gestures.
1 Brainstorming personal responses | We started with ourselves, and what gestures intrigued us.
We also discussed gestures we do that went beyond cultural connotations.
2 Inviting public responses | Amidst these gestures that were personally interesting to us, we decided
to put them up on our social media accounts to get responses/feedback/comments about these
gestures. We also encouraged our audience to respond through videos, gifs, photographs. Apart from
text, we wanted to see the potentiality of the contemporary visual to articulate these gestures in the
belief that action speaks louder than words, encompassing all its nuances.
3 Exercises | From this research, we think about the natural gesture and the performing of that gesture:
“what is a natural gesture to me, could be an unfamiliar action for you”. In this train of thought, we are
creating gifs to “perform” both natural and unfamiliar gestures as a way to narrate the subjectivity of
embodied knowledge. These gifs will be produced as part of the residency. It will also be included in a
post-residency video essay, as a continuation of our long-term research. >>>> This part became a
challenge as we realised the visual limitations of gifs in its inability to translate the nuanced processes
in performing these gestures. As a medium, it was appropriate in showcasing mainstream gestures that
have collective resonances, rather than individualised gestures that are unique to ourselves.
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3

RECALIBERATING OUR PROCESS
After acknowledging the limitations of what we wanted to do, we decided to brainstorm individually to
understand better what the process meant for us individually. From there, we highlighted the common
threads that we both saw through our mind-maps and how they can feed onto each other:
For Ila: The attempt to understand the meaning of gestures that people do to control or heal the body
depends on one’s upbringing and conditioning. To canonise such individualised gestures are difficult
because of its tactile and organic nature of learning these gestures.
For Syaheedah: Gesture are made from the public and private understanding of it, and both contributes
to the overall lived experience of the person becoming that person’s embodied knowledge.
Interior >> exterior
Inner >> outer
Immaterial >> physical
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Where are we now?
AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL
Using the ideas of a safety instruction manual that is typically available on flights, the following
instruction manual was our way of unpacking and bringing consciousness towards embodied
knowledge through gestures. Based on the materials that we have collected, we used
gestures that were shared with us in our surveys.
Apart from highlighting the distinctive and personalised nature of these gestures, the
instructions attempt to systemise the “absurdity” of these gestures which may be irrational to
most, is rational to the user.
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1.0 HOLDING A SNEEZE 1.1 Raise the index finger on
your right hand.
1.2 Bring it to your lips.
1.3 Place it on the curve of
your upper lip also known as
the Cupid's bow.
2.0 HOLDING THE URGE
TO POOP
Option 2
2.1.1 Take your right hand
and hold the end of your
shirt.
2.1.2 Take your left hand and
hold above your right hand
2.1.3 Turn your right hand
clockwise.
2.1.4 Turn your left hand
anti-clockwise. Say the
mantra in your heart: "Twirl
twirl my shirt, my poop is
knotted"
Repeat as many times as
you need to.
2.2.1 Place your thumb on
your tongue.
2.2.2 Lick your thumb.
2.2.3 Place your licked
thumb into your
bellybutton.
2.2.4 Insert it deep inside
your bellybutton.
Repeat two more times
from 2.2.1.
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3.0 PUTTING YOURSELF
TO SLEEP
Option 2
3.1.1 Raise your right hand.
3.1.2 Place it on your left
shoulder or any preferred
part of your body.
3.1.3 Move your hand
upwards.
3.1.4 Move your hand
downwards. Keep a steady
rhythm and repeat until you
fall asleep.
3.2.1 Put your legs close
together.
3.2.2 Push it against the
surface you are on.
3.2.3 Place your body to the
side and rub your right leg
on the surface in a
clockwise direction.
3.2.4 Rub your left leg on
the surface in a anticlockwise
direction. Repeat
until you fall asleep.
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4.0 STOPPING HICCUPS 4.1.1 Hold a glass of water
with both hands.
4.1.3 Take a drink of water
in that position.
4.1.2 Bend your body at 90
degrees.
Option 2
4.2.1 Pronounce Fan out
loud.
4.2.2 Pronounce Ta out
loud. Repeat from 4.2.1
onwards until hiccups
disappear.
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AFTERWORD: the strange gestation of gestures
Salam temanku tersayang,
my dearest friend, Syaheedah,
Now that we have finally shared the same time zone in the last few months, it seems so strange to be writing this
to you. I could ask how you are doing but we've checked in with each other just hours ago. As I sit here writing
this to you on my cold cement floor, I acutely notice that I am rubbing my feet together: a gesture that serves two
functions which is to keep me warm and awake. I remember too, at this moment that you rub your feet against
the sheets to fall asleep. In the last few months of us trying to unpack and categorise different gestures, I have
become more aware of my own gestures and of those around me. Throughout the entire micro-residency I keep
thinking about the Centipede's Dilemma:
A centipede was happy – quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, "Pray, which leg moves after which?"
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.
This poem also is a reference to the centipede effect, which is a psychological syndrome that occurs when a
normally automatic or unconscious activity is disrupted by consciousness of it. I ask myself now, has the
knowledge that a gesture that has been passed down from my mother to me (which is to lick the index finger
when I am unable to eat the food you are craving for or find time to eat the food prepared for you), which I found
out that I have been doing wrongly (I am supposed to touch food/drink and put a little bit in my mouth). But what
is right and wrong when all that matters is that I believe that it works for me, maybe? There seems to be no
disruption as some of these gestures are so natural, it feels like muscle memory. Maybe that is what embodied
knowledge is, something that has formed inside the body that I don't second guess it. It comes out in how I sit,
when I am angry, when I can't sleep; these gestures gestate inside me, coming out of me even before any words
could form in my mouth.
Remember when I asked you about the first time you learnt how to jeling? And who taught it to you? I think about
my three year old daughter, Inaya giving us the slow eye roll when she was only a few months old. How much of
these are something we've learned and how much of these have always been there? I keep thinking too, how do
we learn these things? How is this knowledge shared if it was taught? I keep thinking about the attempts at
performing the gestures that other people have shared with us and feeling silly. I tried to control my bowels by
licking my thumb and inserting it really deep into my belly button but all I felt was an even greater urge to empty
them out. I remember laughing when I shared this disembodying experience with you. Maybe I need to do it over
and over again. But I knew at that moment that it was something my body rejected and it just didn't work for me.
But why gestures my friend? How did we get here from thinking about the body and its phantom limb(s)? In our
proposal, we addressed a kind of bodily dissonance – being in a space where we are a part of but are also
excluded from, but in these months I realised that the dissonance is also inward, that even what remains natural,
for some of us at least, has lost its origins. I may be able to trace back jilat jari to my maternal grandmother, but
where did she learn it from and how much of the knowledge that it used to carry is lost, and is that loss even
damaging? Maybe the body knows what it needs to know and that the knowledge in which it carries remains
amorphous, forgetful and forgiving.
stay open and keep close,
ila
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Salam kawanku tersayang,
My dearest Ila,
When I first expanded the theories of my own sense of embodied knowledge, I used your practice as one of the
entry points to discuss in my dissertation. I do not remember when the idea hit me exactly, but I remembered
feeling excited, like a bulb in my head going off. The following steps of articulating these concepts into words was
not easy, and many times I found myself second-guessing its irrationality. Perhaps it was the reminder that I was
in a time zone that has not been kind to our ancestors, that irrationality opposed the very foundation of
"Enlightenment" thought, the prelude to all colonial legacies.
It was in this time zone that I understood the repercussions of visuality being a dominant sense – the need to
"see" beyond the limits of our sight – which as real history tells us, has engineered their obsession to dominate
lands that do not belong to them. But it is also in this timezone above that I found how to articulate its opposition,
the unseen, the knowledge(s) that continue to veil itself as secrets, entrenched with locked meanings (or even no
meanings) within the confines of our body. In my attempt to understand my own psyche as being disconnected to
our ancestral lands, I argued the need to look inward, to use them as tracings to our past. For me, embodied
knowledge became a romanticised idea (for better or worse) that I could one day read the stars at the back of my
hand as I navigate the seas.
When you so graciously invited me to collaborate with you on this residency, I honestly never imagined the
processes to end up this way. I got far more than the initial hypothesis. That through working with you, and in
your emphasis on how we feel, I realised the extent of my own introversion towards emotions – relying mostly on
what I could see or rationalise. I had become complicit in codifying embodied knowledge. Perhaps my selfimposed
social isolation (before circuit breaker) after returning to Singapore played a role in exacerbating this, of
trying to rationalise my surroundings. Either way, it was still fruitful because it was in that discomfort, that the
realisation of my own threshold between the public and private became more pronounced.
In the beginning, I choose to focus on cultural gestures. Cultural gestures were easier to unpack because of its
public meaning, but when you insisted to unpack gestures as a whole and to view it as part of embodied
knowledge, I admit, was a path I was hesitant with. I thought it might broaden it up to the point that it would be
hard for us to define what we were doing exactly. But maybe simplification is not the answer, that to avoid
simplifying is to avoid systemising – and that in itself becomes an act of unlearning. In extending your hand to the
private, you made space for personal meanings to also have a say in embodied knowledge. By allowing it to be
said in public, the private gestures become conscious as we are made conscious of them.
The centipede effect is a perfect analogy. I think there were points where we both felt unsure but I guess, it is
also in that uncertainty that we found its virtue – its complexities, intimacies and dare I say, absurdity. To answer
your question – why gestures? Maybe it is the first step of unlocking other embodied knowledge(s). By giving
consciousness to its everyday counterparts, that something else will begin to stir inside all of us.
Dengan ikhlas,
With love and kindness,
Syaheedah
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