The Atlas Project
A Project created by Sahra Huby
The Atlas Project is an attempt to expand our comprehension of the human bodies, questioning the ways they are represented and defined, and trying to deconstruct the idea of The body as a one and only limited entity, fixed in space and time.
Our bodies are various, temporary, changing, blurry, complex, interdependent, ungraspable,…and therefore cannot, in my eyes, be reduced to one rigid concept.
Observing how visual representation and language create knowledge, I choose to use those same strategies to propose a “counter-knowledge”, drawing new maps for other perspectives and creating new terminologies for a playful and multiple approach of the body.
As dancer and researcher, I use my physical and somatic approach to explore and investigate new body parts and concepts, questioning and multiplying the ways we understand and perceive the body, rather than giving answers or creating new dogma. The maps, drawings and concepts are in continuous changement, they are part of a practice of naming and making visible, not as a fixation but as a notation system of something in movement.
This website documents the steps of a research that can never be finished. This research starts with my own subjective and personal practice, using my experience as a contemporary dancer, and my story shaped by my privileges and culture as a white European person, identified and identifying as “female” and “abled”.
I use this body as a prototype, because it is my first and direct source of knowledge. I look at this body as an archive of experiences, as the mirror of the past and the present of a society. And maybe, hopefully as a place of negotiation for a possible future.
This body gets space, gets visibility, but it is just one of many other subjective and personal bodies, who might be not represented, not referred to, when thinking of “human body”. Who are these other bodies? What are the experiences of the other bodies?
This project grows with each body joining in. And also with you visiting this website and eventually sending me your own inputs and reflections, adding your own vision to the archive.
