Of Things Not Seen: The Body as Witness and Participant

Organized by Esther Siddiquie and Gee Wesley. Contributors: Sepake Angiama, Phanuel Antwi, Melissa Blanco Borelli, Gabi Ngcobo, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Mohanad Smama, Paul Maheke, Sandra Noeth, Tia-Monique Uzor, Arkadi Zaides.

Of Things Not Seen: The Body as Witness and Participant is a week-long student and public convening scheduled for July 7–11, 2025 at the MO.CO Panacée led by Gee Wesley. Through a range of interdisciplinary contributors, this symposium explores how the body is rendered as evidence within systems of disciplinary surveillance, legal justice, and cultural circulation. Contributors will probe the evidentiary uses of the body—as corporeal memory, physical residue, biometric information, or photographic traces—throughout the realms of art, culture, and governmentality. This symposium looks at the limits and possibilities of evidentiary systems and their relationship to embodied modes of testimony and bearing witness. In a time of ubiquitous surveillance and data collection by state actors and digital platforms alike, this symposium asks how our understanding of bodily evidence shifts when bodies appear as data, are described through narrative testimony, or are commodified through image circulation. How can we reclaim our bodies from extractive visual economies that capture, monitor, and track our lives? From ethnographic documentation of Indigenous and African movement practices compiled by colonial administrations to cultural debates around the copyright, commodification, and appropriation of vernacular dance practices through viral social media; what happens when the body intersects with strategies of enforcement, modes of biopolitical control, and metrics of social risk? At stake in this symposium is how the performing body can help us apprehend unseen and unseeable traces of the past. Together, contributors will negotiate the blurred boundaries between witnessing and other registers of observation that often govern evidentiary systems of authority and justice.

Of Things Not Seen: The Body as Witness and Participant is the eighth annual Study Cycle Symposium organized for Low Residency MFA in Dance at Bennington College in collaboration with the Performance Epistemologies of the Global Majority Summer School (affiliated with Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and Northwestern University).

The symposium is free and open to the public with prior reservations. To reserve, please email lrmfadance@bennington.edu.