I, the Nomad: Exploring Un/Bodiment, Multiplicity, Difference and the Self

Abstract

This practice-led research project adopts a framework informed by nomadic theory and intersectional feminism, and it employs autoethnographic methods and multidisciplinary creative studio methodologies. Through sculpture in the context of a visual arts practice that draws on my Romani-Romanian heritage, this project aims to investigate the self and create new knowledge about female subjectivity. It creates a safe space of reflection upon my personal and collective histories as modes of difference. It examines the cultural stigma of being Romani and my familial denial of this aspect of our cultural identity through my lived experience of childhood trauma. It surveys agency over my body, and the ways in which my relationship with my body is negotiated. It merges explorations of identity construction and multiple becomings, and reflects upon the transience, contingence and fluidity of the subject. It highlights contradictions and restrictions of nomadism and migration, past memory, presentness and absence, belonging and unbelonging, nurturedness and relatedness to which audience and readers can easily connect. It opens up new questions on the dimensions of my autobiographical narrative, collective history and Romani-Romanian cultural knowledge that remain irretrievable yet paradoxically retrievable, and how this impacts my creative practice.