You Move Me

You Move Me is an audio-visual installation made by three artists of different disciplines in collaboration with the people in two different European towns; Žagarė, Lithuania, and Northampton, UK.

In each town, people were invited to take part in workshops with the artists, exploring ideas of every day, gestural movements. Together they have created a new choreography, which has been performed and recorded in each participant’s own domestic setting. You Move Me is a meditation on gestural movement, portraiture and what it means to move together as a group. It is a celebration of people living in different geographical locations and how they are connected through movement. The work explores collective and individual identities, our quotidian actions and how we occupy our domestic spaces. It brings private identities into the public realm. The work is an inquiry into the idea of similarities and difference and the concept of synecdoche, which makes visible our idiosyncrasies by bringing similar elements together. Something unique and mesmerising happens when individuals move in unison; our attention is brought to the unique and distinctive nature of each person.

You Move Me extends from a wider body of work developed since 2013 by Laura Murphy and Gemma Riggs, whose collaborative research explores the framing of the moving body. The core artist team for You Move Me is formed of video artist Gemma Riggs, choreographer Laura Murphy and theatre-maker and sound artist Melanie Wilson. They have been joined by a number of interdisciplinary collaborators including experimental psychologist Jorina Von Zimmerman who has helped them explore the concept of social synchrony and its implications from a behavioural perspective. Also contributing to the project are artist and writer Mary Paterson, artist and activist Susan Ryland as well as projection designer Richard Moores.

This publication features the the artists plus invited contributors to write original work that expands the themes of the artwork itself.