Rock/Body: Performative interfaces between the geologic and the body

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Rock/Body brings together researchers from the arts and humanities, social sciences, earth sciences, health, and practicing artists to investigate the performative interfaces between the geologic and the human body. It will move beyond the nature/culture divide geologically, by taking performing human bodies as both expressions of geological matter and forces, and prime sites of exposure and response to future changes in the dynamics of earth systems.Departing from the tension presented in the film "Billy Elliot" between the hard-labouring landscape of coal extraction and the seemingly feminine or emasculating middle-class and urban world of ballet dancing, the research network will examine the ways in which the labouring bodies of miners and quarrymen and the performing bodies of dancers might, when thought together rather than separately, constitute privileged sites for exploring how geology and biology might converge in concrete human bodies and affect their forms of cultural production. Further, and given the way in which a universalising "humanity" has been uncritically posited as dominant geological agent in recent scientific discourse, the project will problematise such universalising conception of humanity and open it up to existing scholarly debates on race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, and the ways in which differentiated bodies might be differently vulnerable to changing earth processes and possess different affordances when it comes to their ability to act as geological agents. To adequately address those issues calls for collaborative cross- and inter-disciplinary approaches supported by scholars, scientists, and creative practitioners who are seldom given the chance to exchange knowledge and methodologies with one another in a non-hierarchical manner. Thus, through such reconceptualisation of rock/body interfaces, the network will address wider questions at the intersection of the sciences, the arts, and the humanities. Namely: racial, class, gender and sexual difference in relation to the role of humanity as both geologic subject and agent; the political aesthetics of mineral depletion as it is found in both rocks (mined and quarried) and human bodies exhausted by high-intensity labour and performance; and perception of time and the ways in which the aesthetic might be a privileged site from where richer experiences and knowledge of deep time might be drawn, and new human affiliations with the geologic, enacted. At the centre of the network will be a series of three research seminars taking place in 2016 involving a total of 23 participants amongst scientists, humanities scholars, and creative practitioners. The first seminar on the theme of "Flesh/Minerality" will be held at the British Geological Survey in Nottingham. The second, on "Extraction/Exhaustion," and the third, on "Time/Duration," will both take place at the University of Exeter (one at the Cornwall campus; the other at the main Exeter campus).Although limited to the participants, the seminars will also face outwards via press releases, a publicly accessible interactive website and Twitter feed where visitors will be able to comment and discuss the proceedings of each seminar, and a free public exhibition of works by participating artists, including a specially-commissioned site-specific performance piece created in response to the network. Further to that, wider academic audiences will also have access to the activities of the network through an article to be written by the PI and Co-I and submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, and a conference panel to be organised and proposed to a major international academic conference. It is hoped that the network will foster the conditions for future inter- and cross-disciplinary research projects as well as new collaborations between academics and creative practitioners, thus extending beyond the duration of the grant.