This research project proposes that the diverse evidence of human rights violations is primarily carried and conveyed through gestures: from the enacted staging of terrorist spectacles, the interpretive performances of legal testimony and the embodied gestures of protestors, to the responses of survivors sometimes existing on the cusp of invisibility and silence. This spectrum of embodied evidence forms the basis of the research, which has been led by subjective experimentation through performance and installation artworks, as well as writing and an analysis of relevant texts and literature. The writing has been of a performative or documentary nature and academic, i.e. theorizing and contextualizing viewpoints in the written thesis. These methods of questioning reflect a search for structures that can address human rights violations through interpretive and empathetic forms of embodied movement. This is in contrast to the dominance of verbal and textual forms of evidencing, such as those legitimised in legal processes. The research shows that performance art as a medium can accentuate and enrich the territory of sensory and compassionate interpretation of events through interjecting doubt and risk as active elements within communication. This does not replicate or replace the traditional methods of gathering evidence, but can be understood as a parallel activation of aspects of content otherwise elusive to rational documenting processes. It was found that during performance improvisation artists work in progressive stages of separation from an underlying structure, what is primarily valued in the art form are the diversions and innovations that occur spontaneously, taking both artist and audiences into a space of unstructured or unpremeditated encounter. The quality of these transactions is the opening of doubt and its introduction in a constructive space of communication. Similarly, all social processes require inexplicable or irrational moments of risk-taking, in order to produce change in entrenched patterns of social interaction between groups and their environments. Within improvisation, eruptive and, indeed, disruptive opportunities are actively sought by practitioners and are understood to be necessary to the production of a true space of readjustment and reflection. The underlying concerns of the research were often adjusted and refocused in response to concurrent political events. Several areas of enquiry were explored, such as judicial procedures through both legal and quasi-legal forms, consideration of reconciliation processes and issues of mediatization. This spectrum of enquiry has created new perspectives on performance art with regard to questioning what the nature is of the political and social communication encapsulated in temporal acts. Additionally, it complicates the often unquestioned notion that legal processes are comprehensive, authoritive and rational, whereas improvisation practices are inaccessible, irrational and unverified. Therefore, through comparative reframing the research shows that improvisation is not disconnected from other social processes, but can be strategised and traced in ways that illuminate the equally flawed ephemeral and embodied processes at the core of legal practices. Despite the inherent instability within any conception of truth to arrive at a point of judgement beyond conjecture and doubt, there seemingly remains a compulsive drive to formulate some understanding of past events especially when these have been violent in nature. In this regard, issues surrounding the gathering and dissemination of intangible heritage resonate with those raised by evidencing performance art, in that both acknowledge the brittle and time-loaded quality of extracting something of the 'truth' engrained within embodied acts. The thesis argues that creative art forms are not gauges of truth, but potent elements in the broader social trajectory of movement towards consensus about the reality of what has happened in the past. Therefore, the 'truth' exists in a trajectory and can only be approached and extracted at different points during the society's movement away from violence: a watershed of hidden stigmatised issues slowly unravelling, clearing the space for further inquiry within the fields of the witnessing, memory, performance and the trauma thresholds of survivors of violence.

This submission for Doctor of Philosophy by Work in the Public Domain brings together a wide variety of creative outputs which sit alongside a number of peer-reviewed, published articles and writings and a published artists" book. These linked with one another via an accompanying text. Together, these elements form and chart a cohesive research-through-creative-practice trajectory. The contents are framed by an argument that the contents of the submission must all be treated as creative practice outputs. This argument is situated within affinities among Arlander"s (2008) and Kershaw"s (2009) appellation "artistic research", as related to Miereanu"s (2009) argument that artworks themselves contain specific knowledge that it is our job to engage with and decode; this suggests these know ledges are what art-making in academia has to offer the other disciplines. The body of the submission elucidates these knowledges by positing the works as varied, experimental manifestations of the notion of bioemotional activism in performance. The works test the tenets of bioemotional activism - conjugating principles from Gerda Boyesen"s biodynamic psychology, extended voice practice, and compositlonal/devlsing practices for sound, body and image - within a framework that extends them across media. It also extends them into dialogues with other artists and disciplines, including painting, video art, dance/choreography, street art, costume and other areas. The overarching concern is to explore the application of a haptic, bioemotional strategy for working with extended voice in performance composition and realisation to experiments with the vocally haptic, confrontations with engagements among voice visual art and tactile art, and confrontations with digital and other archiving technologies. In so doing, the works embody the results of how this approach to extended, extra-normal voice, when voyaging across what Mieranu calls "poly-artistic" (2009) territories, confronts technologies of mediation and in so doing, migrates from the realm of the lived body to dialogue with the absent and the gone; indeed, the "dead". The works included here thus elucidate the results of the experiments and demand to be read as forms of embodied theory.

The focus of this thesis is the experiential landscape viewed through the lens of a performative visual arts research inquiry. The project explores the dialogue between practice and theory through a series of research projects that focus on the experiential inter-relationship of body and place, incorporating still and moving imagery, sound, text and performance. The inquiry follows an understanding of the body as a site of cross-fertilisation and proposes that the oscillation between an experience of landscape and the reception of artworks (between engagement, understanding, articulation and artefact) aids reflexive creativity in the maker and encourages audience reception. Through exploration, examination and rigorous analysis, this practice-led study applies an affirmative criticality to the concepts of dwelling and becoming, and lays the foundation for a reappraisal of notions of home and identity in theory and in practice. Contextualising these theoretical concepts, indicative creative projects are outlined throughout. An extended review of Communion, an artwork first performed in 2008, is pivotal to understanding my expanded research practice through a conjunction of media and a series of collaborations. Personal projects are examined here alongside relevant artworks by other practitioners – namely Ana Mendieta, Roni Horn and Tacita Dean. Following a largely phenomenological methodology, embodied practice forms the basis of an argument that proposes that attention to the localised specificities of place is a productive means through which to reconsider our relationship with the experiential landscape. In this regard, offering new interpretations and understandings of the inter-relationship between a place and a self, and raising questions around issues of belonging and identity (personal, social and cultural). The discussion rests on an understanding that subjectivity is multiple and hybrid and that the potential of becoming is (arguably) important to more ethical, inclusive understandings of belonging on a range of scales, from the immediately local to the global, the personal to the socio-cultural. The enfleshed self and located place in this study are understood to be continually in process – sites of constant (re)negotiation; intimately connected, physically and psychologically co-constituted, and informed and performed by each other in practice. Chapter One lays the foundation for my discussion, outlining early research and giving an overview of debates surrounding practice-led research in the visual arts before detailing the position and particular approach taken in this project. Informed by a range of cross-disciplinary writers including art historian/curator Miwon Kwon and cultural geographer Doreen Massey, Chapters Two and Three examine issues of place and embodied practice and detail the phenomenology and temporality of place as explored, understood and (re)presented in this research project. Visual examples of relevant works by other artists are given together with personal artworks through which the terms location and dislocation are expanded. In Chapters Four and Five, I examine the concepts of dwelling and becoming in relation to notions of home, belonging and identity as explored in the context of two specific locations – both places I call ‘home’. Here, the words of Luce Irigaray, the artworks of Ana Mendieta and the observations of Edward S Casey inform practical research and the dynamic role of the body in the synthesis of practice with theory is highlighted. Again, examples of personal artworks are reviewed at length alongside those of other artists. In the final chapter, Chapter Six, I discuss the interplay between practice and theory with regard to the philosophical understanding and practical application of photography in this project. The concepts of affect and haptic visuality are examined and particular attention is paid to the oscillation between presence and absence – as experienced in the lived landscape and as reflected through the photographic image. Texts by Roland Barthes and Jean Luc Nancy inform empirical research and, in the dialogue between embodied experience and abstract ideas, the visual examples from personal projects (as well as other artists) are pivotal. Research in this doctoral project is progressed throughout via an interactive exchange between practice and theory where the lived and the learned both play important roles and together serve to deepen corporeal and conceptual understandings. The body is understood as a site of cross-fertilisation in the performativity of practice where a diverse range of influences and references intertwine and constantly merge to blur the boundary between practice and theory. In this respect, a performative writing style is employed in order to reflect the locus of research (the phenomenological landscape) as well as the performativity of the dialogue between the abstract concepts and concrete particulars that together inform this inquiry. This thesis further proposes that performative writing strategies are necessary in order to adequately reflect embodied research and that, in this respect, the project serves not only as a model for dissemination of practice-led research within the visual arts but across the disciplines.

Based on the distinction between Korper (physical body) and Leib (lived body) in its phenomenological sense, this thesis proposes a conceptual mapping between embodiment and disembodiment in Live Art. The thesis starts form the historical review on Growtowski and Artaud, and then engages with performance examples from Franko B, Mad-for-Real, Goat Island, La Pocha Nostra and Forced Entertainment, among others from the perspective of the audience and participant researcher. The thesis also includes two practice pieces from the perspective of the performer. The thesis asserts that as both the manifestation and application of phenomenological notions in live art, embodiment and disembodiment are inextricable to each other in the circulation between pre-expressivity and (para)-linguistic order. Based on this understanding, the thesis proposes a performative definition of Live Art and a method to create such art. The first half of the thesis explores embodiment as one sense of "Liveness" in Live Art. It explores the performative constitution of embodied self in its engendered actualization from indeterminate to certainty, and the performative strategy of such selves with other embodied subjects both in its aesthetic and social realm. Further discussion includes a general ecological aesthetic engagement, which has great affinity with the phenomenological notion lebenswelt (Lifeworld) constituted by embodied subjects and things. The second half explores the theoretical distinctions between materialized disembodiment and textualized disembodiment. The former pertains to the disembodiment of theperforrners and the latter pertains more to the audience. Thus. the thesis furthers the inquiry on the absence and presence of the body in live art, which also has a homology with the embodiment/disembodiment distinction. As extension of the materialized disembodiment and textualised disembodiment, the disappearing body is manifested in the practices under contemporary technological conditions such as cyborgs and hologram.

This thesis deals with the constitution of a practice that is characterized as a performative demonstration of a process - the "making of place". This is framed by the presence of a sonic performer who explores the potential of gesture, text, technology and place in constructing a creative relationship with everyday life. This practice-based research consists of a written thesis and 12 original performance works in areas of work that have been designated as walking, field recording and mobile transmission. What does it mean to perform sound? As an artist who began his career creating sound design and improvising with performance artists, choreographers and theatre directors, I came to understand that every aspect of the construction of an event matters: body, text, place and sound. It is this interdisciplinarity - alongside the move from conventional performance spaces to outdoors - that prompts me to propose a post-medium approach, considering everything that happens in and around sound as significant to its ' performance. This approach concentrates on the ethics of constructing a site-specific interaction between place, performer and sonic experience; that focuses on sonic performance as a relational site of encounter instead of reception; explores the intersubjective, multi-sensorial and creative potential of the subject; and considers the 'noise' of thoughts and existence not as a distraction from entering a sonic experience, but ultimately as an essential part of listening. Performing sound thus complicates traditional separations between music and sound art, as a result of medium specificity or context , and becomes a process in which the expression of performance is, at its core, a reflection of how to present sound. This reflection is crucial to very expansion of the notion of performance in everyday life.

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This thesis explores the notions of risk that are produced through four international festivals of contemporary experimental performance. The case studies are: In between Time Festival of Live Art in Bristol; the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow; Homeworks Forum in Beirut, and Oadao Festival of Live Art in Beijing. The focus is predominantly on the curation of these events, and the mediating role that the curator plays in the way works are communicated as cutting-edge and "risky". My research and conclusions are based on extensive fieldwork at each. Contextualization of the evidence is primarily offered through an analysis of the vorks programmed, interviews with participants (curators, artists and spectators), the fields of practice in which they sit due to their specific locales, and the international networks they engage with. The contextualization takes into account the wider socio-political situations of the places where they take.place, the influence hat these have had in terms of directing thematic focuses and experimentation with form. and the growth of the infrastructures which have evolved to support ways of vorkinq. I take more of an experiential approach than a theoretical one, but the potential for extrapolating theory from the evidence is suggested throughout, in particular in the Introduction and concluding chapter. In the section 'Risk as Form', covering the two British case studies, I focus on the way Live Art as a term has evolved through practice, which works across disciplines, and the drive to stabilize it. In the Beirut case study, 'Risk as Content', I consider the influence of Lebanon's civil war (1975-1990) on the work produced. In the concluding chapter, I position Oadao Festival of Live Art as an example that draws together some of the issues arising through the other three studies, and as a departure point for future research. ii

This document offers a theorized contextualization and analysis of the performance research I (Helen Spackman) have undertaken with and through LEIBNIZ, the fluid Live Art collective that I co-founded with Ernst Fischer in 2005. Extending Ernst's and my long-standing engagement with issues of alterity, 'home' and 'belonging', our more widely collaborative activities as LEIBNIZ have developed to specifically address the polemics of grafting personal with communal and political identities and the often problematic relation of such, both to civil and human rights and the wider ecologies of which we are each formed! forming a part. Our particular research interests reside in the ways in which the embodied and transient acts of performance and the im-material traces it generates and/or leaves behind might together serve as an accessible and vibrant means of exploring and articulating marginalized life experiences, concerns and aspirations. While issues concerning the documentation of performance as an inherently ephemeral art form have recently preoccupied critical debate within the intertwined fields of contemporary Live Art and Performance Studies to which our creative and critical practice as LEIBNIZ belongs, this dissertation examines the ways in which performance can itself serve as a vibrant and accessible means of both recording and generating experience with reference to the four LEIBNIZ projects (namely: The Book of Dust, The Ship of Fools, The Book of Blood: Human Writes and Ghost Letters) presented as case studies in this submission of PhD by prior output.

2019/20 zeigte der Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund die Ausstellung „Artists & Agents – Performancekunst und Geheimdienste“. Die von Inke Arns, Kata Krasznahorkai und Sylvia Sasse kuratierte Ausstellung ging zurück auf Ergebnisse des mehrjährigen Forschungsprojekts „Performance Art in Eastern Europe 1950–1990. History and Theory” am Slavischen Seminar der Universität Zürich. Seit nach 1990 viele Geheimdienstarchive der ehemaligen Ostblock-Länder für die wissenschaftliche Forschung geöffnet wurden, war es erstmals möglich, die Dokumentation von Kunst durch Spitzel und die Einflussnahme der Geheimdienste auf künstlerische Arbeiten zu untersuchen. Die Ausstellung versammelte z. T. noch nie gezeigte Beispiele künstlerischer Subversion und geheimdienstlicher Unterwanderung und wollte vor allem die Interaktion von Geheimdienstaktionen und Performancekunst zeigen, jener Kunstrichtung, vor der sich die sozialistischen Staaten Osteuropas am meisten fürchteten. Der Beitrag ist ein Auszug aus dem die Ausstellung begleitenden Magazin.

This document provides an elaboration of the critical, contextual and methodological rationale for a practice‐based PhD research project undertaken at London Metropolitan University 2009-2013. This four‐year project was an exploration in identity, space and location. It looks at the transitions, journeys and stories of migrant women. Specifically this exploration has been developed through the language of the cultural practices of Iban women. The Iban are an indigenous group of people from Borneo, predominantly living within the Malaysian state of Sarawak. Significantly the Iban practices have migrated from the jungle, to urban areas, and globally, and inevitably the identity of these practices has developed as the locations have changed, much like the women performing them. My father is Iban and my mother white New Zealander, and I grew up in both Sarawak and New Zealand before coming to live in the UK in my 20s. My performance training has been within a Western context, both in New Zealand and the UK. This project has been a personal exploration, which has wider consequences in developing performance practice and understanding the discourses of home, belonging, migration and identity. This has led to questions around migrating Iban performance and cultural practices to a western contemporary context. These questions have been investigated through the cultural practices of the Iban pantun (chapter three), the Iban ngajat (chapter two), Iban weaving (chapter four) and the use of space in the Iban longhouse (chapter one). This project was an interdisciplinary investigation; in each chapter I pull together performance theory from western practitioners and post‐colonial feminist literature with the Iban performance practice. This project has asked the question: "Can Iban cultural and performance practices be ‘migrated’ to a contemporary western performance context in order to explore experiences of women’s migration?" My research question was central to the practice‐based research I conducted, the methodologies developed through practice as research, and are central to all the work covered in this thesis. Within this context the practice is submitted as an outcome alongside this written narrative. Additional details can be found on the website: www.fromthejungle.co.uk.