Performing ghosts, emotion and sensory environments

Abstract

This chapter explores how performance and photographic art that reflect feminist and ecological values contribute to political understanding of the human and the nonhuman It argues that body-based performance can draw attention to how the environment is always phenomenologically perceived through the body’s sensory and emotional processes. Performances and photographs by Australian artists Jill Orr and r e a (Gamilaraay), in which ghost-like humans with ambiguous social identities haunt darkened and fire-affected nonhuman spaces, deliver complex postcolonial perspectives. In this interpretation, an eco-phenomenological approach builds on ideas of feminist ecologies and the concept of a shared natural world envisaged by ecofeminism, as it points to the possibility of unravelling the power relations of dominance. While emotionally felt responses towards the nonhuman potentially provide a galvanizing force for protection of the environment, performance and art facilitate awareness of troubling emotional contradictions and of the body-self’s patterns that underlie human dominance.