Sandra Noeth - Böcker

What does it take to cross a border, and what does it take to belong? Sandra Noeth examines the entangled experiences of borders and of collectivity through the perspective of bodies. By dramaturgical analyses of contemporary artistic work from Lebanon and Palestine, Noeth shows how borders and collectivity are constructed and negotiated through performative, corporeal, movement-based, and sensory strategies and processes. This interdisciplinary study is made urgent by social and political transformations across the Middle East and beyond from 2010 onwards. It puts to the fore the residual, body-bound structural effects of borders and of collectivity and proceeds to develop notions of agency and responsibility that are immanently bound to bodies in relation.

Breathing is an unavoidable, vital act, yet it cannot be taken for granted, as the experiences of the pandemic, profound changes in our environment, but also structural, racist discrimination make clear. In the physical act of breathing, we are symbolically, materially and radically thrown back to our own bodies and connected to the bodies of others.In conversation with artists and theorists from different fields, the contributers to this volume explore different acts of suffocation and release. They show how the protection of bodies is unequally and ambivalently distributed and how it can be an act of resistance. It is an insistence on life, a demand for existential, political, symbolic and ethical recognition.

Shielding offers a collection of conceptual approaches through which bodies, intentionally or involuntarily, become shields. Bodies take on an ambivalent status in the process: they serve as protection or a buffer and express resistance. At the same time, they turn and are turned into weapons when they intervene on the ground and politically, in war, conflicts, and through activism. The contributors address the idea of bodily integrity, both in a material sense and with regard to the symbolic and ethical relations that a body entangles. The book engages with ongoing debates around the re-evaluation of corporeality and embodiment in contemporary socio-political contexts.