Embodimenta is a transdisciplinary consciousness of embodiment.

I apply a rounded approach to the study of embodiment, and under the name of Embodimenta, I gather my artistic, humanist, scientific, and spiritual projects, which meet the urge of a paradigm shift in our times. Embodimenta moves away from the dualistic paradigm that separates the self from the world, and contributes to a reunifying paradigm towards which human consciousness is heading, in order to survive and thrive.

This shift requires us to revolutionise the understanding of what the body is and does. We don’t have a body. We are a body, and more accurately, we become a body. Our being is a living force, that reverberates and exists as a continuum with all other beings and energies present in the World and Universe. Our body is an open field of receptivity and responsiveness. Whilst connecting and merging with all the beings that we encounter in our life, our field turns into a universal body of relations that flow through space and time.

Embodimenta embraces the wonder of our human nature: an embodiment of the infinite, or an infinite embodiment, which remains always fluid and open to be woven, unravelled, and re-woven, in accordance with the transformations of our consciousness and responsiveness. The awareness of embodiment calls us for a re-enchantment with nature, to which we intimately belong. Nature asks us to sense our own body, to feel it, to listen to it. Nature asks us to awaken the innate intelligence of our body, which breaks through the illusions of separateness between subject and object, self and world, inner and outer, here and there. The ground-breaking paradigm of embodiment recovers an original consciousness of being. This awareness emerges as a common denominator between scientific, humanist, and spiritual breakthroughs, which have been disclosed and acknowledged, from the ancient times to the present day.

Embodimenta projects develop from cutting-edge studies and practice-led research. I employ different media: from performance, to visuals, writing, site-responsive, experiential, and healing practices. The ultimate aim of my work is to share the potency of embodiment, and enjoy the mystery of its infinity.

Research Areas of Embodimenta:

01. ARTS & HUMANITIES

Embodimenta draws on the studies of embodiment in Cultural and Medical Anthropology, which understand the body as a sense-making agent, that shapes knowledge, identity, and culture in the World. The paradigm of embodiment overcomes binary divisions of the mind, as an abstract subject, and the body, as a given object. The human body is not a bounded and fixed bio-mechanical object that comes in parts. It is our primary condition of existence, and a free resource given to us by nature, which allows us to process and make sense of life. Information cannot just be thought; it is an experience of our aliveness. Our body becomes this experiential process: by touching and being touched by the world, by receiving and responding to stimuli around us, inner and outer, self and world, enter reality together as a result of stimuli-response relations. Our body becomes the embodiment of stimuli-response information, through which we create the reality of our self and of the world around us. Our embodiment is the process from our indeterminacy of being, to the creation of a pattern of information, which gives us a shape of being out of our infinity.

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The application of this paradigm to the Arts unfolds the innate poetics within human embodiment. Art becomes a fundamental practice of awareness, where feelings, intuitions, contemplations, and visions of our nature cannot be explained, but only communicated through poetic expressions. Art sets the body free to enter the innate infinity of being. The body returns to that state, where self and world are the womb of one another, and where ventures into sensual, somatic, and kinetic experiences disclose infinite worlds within our flesh.

02. SCIENCE

The evolution of science leads towards greater understandings of the energetic nature of matter, and, therefore, of the human body.

At a quantic level, an electron is a fundamental particle-wave of the atom, and, so, it performs the inherent properties of waves; like waves, it spreads and diffracts indefinitely through space and time. Its physical existence manifests to us in a location of space and in a moment of time, among infinite other indeterminate probabilities in which its existence might also be, at the same time, and within the zone through which its wave radiates. In the same way, the body is a matter-force, a physical and energetic field, which performs particle-waves’ motion, properties, and behaviour. The acknowledgment of the human body as a quantic process also entails to reformulate human sentience.

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The outer world constitutes an environmental energy field, into which we are immersed, and which is charged with countless and indeterminate multisensory stimuli, acting at different distances from us, and with different magnitudes. Our body-field is a neural-biological intelligence, whose physical and spatial becoming takes shape along with a sense-making process. Our being is, at the same time, an electro-magnetic, multisensory, and sentient field: we are a force of receptivity and responsiveness to stimuli, and we propagate throughout the environment, far beyond the bounded shape with which we ordinarily identify our human anatomy. Reality lies in our ability to connect with these stimuli and process these into information. The variety of ways in which stimuli are felt, as accepted or rejected, avoided or desired, et cetera, determines how information is processed, and what dawns on our consciousness as the reality. Our embodiment is the process through which our body-field permeates the environmental field, and blends together with it, by becoming a whole informed field: a whole material, spatial, electro-magnetic, and neural-biological pattern of relations, formed in space and time. Our body becomes this World-Self life-form, World-Self resonance, World-Self sense of being.

The quantic nature of our matter-force is innately charged with resilience; it brings us the gift of our neural-biological plasticity, which unlocks an abundance of possibilities for our self and the world to become. Our quantic nature contains the freedom to re-attune our body-field with the environmental field, to reprocess our responses to the stimuli of the world, and to detect new stimuli amongst infinite other ones present in space. In this way, we reshape our embodiment of information and, so, our embodiment of consciousness, which generates births and rebirths of our World-Self body.

03. SPIRITUALITY

Quantic scientific knowledge meets the spiritual consciousness of the relational nature of being. The existence of the others is our own. The origin of the other is our own. The existence of particle-waves in space and time is only a potentiality until relation is made. There are no given existences. It is only together with, and through the presence of an ‘other’, that a particle can take a location in space, whilst oriented in relation with this ‘other’, and experience its transience in time. At least two forces of life are needed in order to meet, interact, and merge into life-forms that manifest space and time, out of the indeterminacy and infinity of being. Like a shape-making game, all entities and life-forms are multiple and possible manifestations of an original and undifferentiated field of being; as all entities emerge from this field, these exist in the world in continuity with one another, despite any apparent physical separation in space and time.

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In the face of this unity of being, we acknowledge the presence of a shared, immanent, and mysterious Spirit: an energy Source, or Intelligence, that, in order to realize its consciousness, it arranges and manifests itself through polarities of forces that originate from one another, complete and reflect each other. Yin and yang, feminine and masculine, emptiness and fullness, microcosm and macrocosm, darkness and light, below and above, birth and death, self and other, etc., realize, together and through each other, the consciousness of a Source, of an original infinite wholeness. Its Intelligence consists of a Universal Harmony, an order of principles of polarity and complementarity, through which all creation is arranged and bound together.

The dualistic and binary paradigm has separated self from world, mind from body, in the same way it has separated the soul from the body, and universal spirit from universal matter. Embodimenta recovers the body as embodiment of universal and spiritual unity. It reassesses the original concept of duality as a phenomenon of reflection of being, and not of separation. Only through the other we can manifest and become ourselves. Any other being is complementary to us; it reflects us, beyond the locations and times in which our existence manifests. Whilst embodying this awareness, we become a trans-generational weave of humanity, no longer a single human. We become a trans-species continuity between all life-forms that the Source has taken, whether these forms manifest here or there, in the past, present, or future.

From the Source (our Origin), we come into the world as an embodied soul, as an embodiment of universal energy, of universal intelligence and consciousness. Our process of embodiment is an experience of this consciousness. And as we know, experience can only occur through the senses, through physical and sentient existence. Thus, through our relationships with all ‘others’ that we experience in our life, we embody an experience of Universal Harmony. Through all our encounters, we come to embody information of the Source and of its infinite multiplicity of being. Gravity allows for our adherence to the world, so that our flesh becomes an experience of touch: an unthinkable, and yet happening, experience of touching and being touched by the infinite, by the Source.

BIO

Oriana Haddad

I was born in Milan, Italy, from an Italian mother and an Egyptian father, and I am currently based in Milan. I am a Performance, Visual, and Healing Artist, an Anthropologist, and a Movement Analyst.

My multi-disciplinary background began with an early training in ballet, followed by modern dance and theatre. I moved to New York, USA, for two years, where I trained in contemporary dance, at Movement Research. In New York, I received my Diploma in Body Movement Analysis, from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Advanced Movement Studies. This approach to movement consciousness uses a combined methodology and training, which include Rudolf Laban’s principles of Space Harmony, Irmgard Bartenieff’s physical re-education method, and Body-Mind Centering studies in non-verbal communication, and in developmental and somatic movement research. I returned to Italy, where I gained my BA in Ethno-Cultural Anthropology, from the Alma Mater University of Bologna. In these studies, I focused on issues of perception of the Self, as rooted in cultural, social, and psychological patterns. Then I moved to London, UK, for ten years, where I received my MA in Anthropology of the Body and Health in the XXI° Century, from Goldsmiths College. Through these studies, I deepened my knowledge of conceptions and interpretations of the human body in bio-medical sciences, in western and eastern philosophies, religions, and cultures of the world. Through the years, I worked on formulating a holistic paradigm of embodiment, of the body as process of becoming, in its physical, kinetic, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual dimensions. To my research I also added practices and experiences of energetic and shamanic medicine. I trained in Taoist practices dedicated to the embodiment of universal harmony and body-mind-spirit health. I have become a Chi Nei Tsang practitioner, by studying this ancient Taoist healing technique with Grand Master Mantak Chia, founder of the Universal Healing Tao System, in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

I carry out my transdisciplinary work as an embodimentalist: an artist, researcher, and healer of human embodiment. I develop theoretical and experiential projects, which explore the relationship between body and space, body and health, body and knowledge, body and society, body and migration, body and identity, and seek to open up more potential fields, where research with and through the body is possible.

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