Alpen

Alpen explores the relationship between movement, time and place within the experience of living with persistent pain. It focuses on the small continuous adjustments that moving through space with pain requires, as people adapt to their ever-changing capacities and the lack of adjustment found in the ableist environments they are required to move through.

Alpen emerged from work conducted during a collaboration between Anna Macdonald, who specialises in somatic and digital arts practices, and Ceri Morgan (Professor of Creative writing, Keele University), who specialises in geopoetics and creative writing practice. The project (www.circlingartproject.co.uk) brought together the investigators’ distinct arts-based practices in order to develop a new interdisciplinary methodology that will expose and re-imagine individuals’ embodied experience of the journeys associated with chronic pain conditions, focusing on the act of walking.

Alpen began with a series of meetings with a woman (Emma) living with chronic pain, that focused on walks she took regularly, walks she had taken in the past and would like to take in the future. The work responds to the changing sense of scale pain generated for Emma, the nature of chronicity and the complexity of walking with others. It involves a series of static shots of Emma tracing her regular pathways around her kitchen, which are overlaid with sounds of mountains, and snowboarding (an activity Emma used to regularly enjoy).

Alpen shows something of the intricacy of Emma’s movements: her rolling shifts in weight from side to side, the way she moves her hand to stool to knee on stool, spreading weight through multiple points of support as she moves round and round her kitchen. It points to the creative and highly skilled way that someone with chronic pain navigates and conjures space, and the intense creativity and somatic intentionality of the movement of relapse and recovery, positioning and re-positioning, within the movement of those who live with chronic pain. This work led to further thought concerning the way the constant reparative shifting of weight or position, often demanded by pain, can generate an unsettled embodied affect (a kinaesthetic irritation) in others because it draws attention to pain. Not being able to stay in one place signals an unreliable body that keeps changing its plans, having a change of heart, having to lie down and drawing attention to itself by taking up (from a non-pain perspective) too much space. Continuous adjustments like these can create, what film theorist Mary Anne Doane describes as 'an overly present body’ (1985:206), that is too much where it is.

• http://circlingartproject.co.uk/