None to nur 3.0: the skin, the feminine by No Iskandar Bin Othman
Can losing be beautiful? Must losing be beautiful? Combing fissures of loss within sacred spaces from my MA Thesis, None to Nur 3.0: The Skin, The Feminine attempts to artfully extrapolate a new tapestry of the female identity by necessary retelling of lived experiences through poetry, performative gestures and text, both spoken and unsaid. The study disentangles the metaphorical void through exercises of participatory collaboration with my students, as they respond through the philosophical strands and material archive dislodged from my own work wherein tropes such as “unmosquing” and “carrying the sacred house within you” became complexes of imagination. These preoccupations echo Rosi Braidotti's Nomadic Theory (2011) that summons us to “organize from our locations, our here, the fleeting present” of that urgent migration- to womb wounded feelings into corporeal home-bodies. This critique/creation methodology within this paradoxical, mutating, nonlinear age, draws me to the positionality of the errān -sprawled into symbolic wanderings within the feminine corpus-
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both exposing and gathering insights into its diverse fragments, fractures, disruptions, multiplicities, solidarity. I remain curious: where does the thirst of such tenderness borne out from- divine immanence, a radical resistance, an act of survival, a multi-belonging? What gaps will be stitched up, what other wounds will the body relearn, unlearn and participate in through these exhalations? Through these excavations, a conscious and intentional reflexivity of the ‘I’ as the auto-ethnographer, the pilgrim poet, the artist-educator emerged, allowing for cyclical subjectivity and fluidity of voices and memory to scatter without refrain. The encounters had turned out to be rather ritualistic in ways the body hold words as chants, as deep meanings- fragments loaded with visual, aural, conceptual threads for my auto-ethnographic installation. The process is akin to floating islands with amorphous borders, enabling me to shift the margins of embodiment and disembodiment- giving power to gendered imagination.
