Gestures In Collaborative Auto-Fiction – Moving Each Other In Portraiture / Anastasia Novikova (2024)

This writing is based on my practice-as-research using thought-experiments that challenge solo authorship, notions of authenticity and modes of self-representation. In the first part of my thesis I am tracing power dynamics between artist and subject in performance, video, photography and painting with a focus on encounter and the co-creation of an image. Further I am discussing online persona development to account for the pressures in selfcommodification guided by algorithms. In all instances I am looking to feminist modes in both practice and theory, tracing affect and mapping the relational field, critiquing extractive practices. In this project my contextual stance is rooted in the Matrixial gaze after Bacha L Ettinger while my explicit thinking of body as text deploys notions of deconstruction based on ‘Polylogue’ by Julia Kristeva. Auto-theory in this thesis affords a variety of voices and writing styles to come to the fore while limbic resonance, in a felt-sense, constitutes the realm of the movement research created in collaboration with my invitees. In the practical part of the project I am probing my position as the initiator of a moving-image portrait session, reflecting on a methodology that sits between motivation and support. Hereby improvisation is considered a story-telling device in gestures and vocal sounding. Through interaction, in sentences-as-movement and inspired by the idea that there is a multiplicity of selves, personhood is seen to be relational, as drawn out by my interventions switching between roles of the camera operator and movement director. Rendering these experiences into a public sharing at Bonny Bird Theatre Laban combined my experimental findings. I arrived at a framework for live improvisation whereby I devise and coinform the performance using sounding and movement.