Panel (Festival)

What we perceive, and how we think, depends on where we are and how our body is positioned... a horizontal body is in a cognitively and affectively different place from that inhabited by vertical others. 

Felicity Callard, Epidemic Time: Thinking from the Sickbed, 2020 

This panel follows Callard’s proposition that a horizontal body perceives and thinks differently to an upright body. Drawing on the focus on politics and poetics created from the position of lying down in the context of (chronic) illness in the exhibition Horizontal, the panel will engage the lived and professional experiences of artist-writers Anajara Amarante and Katharina Ludwig and a clinician/healthcare practitioner. Moderated by Nora Heidorn, the Assistant Curator of the exhibition, the conversation will address the tensions raised by thought and creation from bed. In Western philosophy, rationality and agency are associated with uprightness. How must we redress these assumptions in light of the work of thinkers and creators who change the world from their beds? How does the body-mind system respond to long periods of recline, producing changes in sensation and perception? In an overworked and exhausted society, what are the economic and political tensions of taking work to the sickbed, or of making works from and about the sickbed, thus turning illness back into productive experiences and cultural goods? How might reclining be practised as a form of resisting?