I recently attended the workshop ‘
Body Mapping: the stories we carry’ with
Jotika Healing Arts, conducted as part of
UBC ARTIVISM: Politics of the Body event. The actual mapping session lasted an hour. This was of interest to me because of a parallel Body Cosmologies studio I am running at ECU. What emerged for me was that I see my body as relational—I see myself in relation other people, animals and events, and the love of being connected to them. A more detailed post on the emerging map will follow. This was an interesting opening. The last image is a really beautiful start to a map by a charming young person—I will simply refer to them as “J” (and photographed this with their permission). Such varied and rich directions and interpretations.
Body mapping itself is a tool that was developed from the
Memory Box Project designed by Jonathan Morgan in Cape Town to give voice to suppressed trauma for people living with AIDS, and HIV related conditions. Since then it has become a tool for therapy from issues ranging from traumas of war to sexual violence.
I am interested in using it as a visual and communication tool in the ongoing mediation of health care, and re-establishing more visual and non-linear ways of communication. Then I read about
Temple Grandin’s new book: Visual Thinking – “…Grandin draws on cutting-edge research to take us inside visual thinking. Visual thinkers constitute a far greater proportion of the population than previously believed, she reveals, and a more varied one, from the photo-realistic object visualizers like Grandin herself, with their intuitive knack for design and problem solving, to the abstract, mathematically inclined “visual spatial” thinkers who excel in pattern recognition and systemic thinking”.
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Then to add to this, an extract from this article
There is a strikingly similar definition of existence at the root of the western philosophical tradition. Plato’s The Sophist contains the following phrase: Anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or to be affected by another, if only for a single moment, however trifling the cause and however slight the effect, has real existence; and I hold that the definition of being is simply action. [δύναμιςδύναμις]” And in the eastern tradition, the Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna’s central notion of “emptiness” (śūnyatā) tells us that nothing has independent existence: anything that exists, exists thanks to, as a function of, or according to the perspective of, something else. —Exerpt from: The big idea: why relationships are the key to existence
