Context
Current health and environmental crises heighten our awareness of the positioning of the human body within the global scale of disease transmission and climate emergency.
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for health and wellbeing, social inclusion and environment, and World Health Organization and UNESCO initiatives emphasise interrelationships between planetary and human health. Past cultures were also sensitised to the nuanced relationship between the individual human (microcosm) and the universe (macrocosm), engaged in activities of observation, measurement, mapping and scrutiny.
Exploration of these knowledges offers opportunities to reappraise parallel contemporary perceptions and experiences. Centred on Wellcome Collection's rich holdings relating to astrology, health and the body, the proposed will be a landmark project that will be Wellcome's first CDA in the creative arts.
The project focuses on Wellcome's medieval European manuscripts and printed books, unique materials that reveal ideas about how the movements of the planets and the phases of the sun and moon directly impacted on health.
Medieval astrological diagrams like Zodiac Man (e.g. MS.8932) show how zodiacal signs were associated with specific areas of the anatomy, affecting treatments like bloodletting. Unusual astrological conditions were seen to bring about illness, such as attribution by the German scholar Grünpeck (EPB/INC/2.b.2) of the arrival of the pox in 1496 to the ill effects of a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.
Astrology was also central to efforts to predict and prevent illness and environmental catastrophe. Folding calendars (MS.8932, MS.40) and astrological tables (MS.8004, EPB/B/283) provided key information about upcoming celestial conditions and their expected impact on the body, the weather and harvest yields.
(Image: MS.8932 astrological tables and Zodiac Man)
Research questions
- How can expanded art practice communicate the value of historical collections for understanding contemporary relationships to the body, offering audiences new understandings of their own health and wellbeing?
- How might the mobilisation of European ideas about the observational relationship between macrocosm and microcosm provoke interventions into contemporary discourses on alternative health, wellbeing, and the relationship between self and planet?
- How can such practice place historical European ideas of bodily health in dialogue with global communities, gendered discourses on the body, and changing definitions of illness and disability?
Methods
Situated in expanded art practice (encompassing, for example, writing, performance, visual art), multimodal approaches offer expressive provocation into discourses of contemporary health.
Expanded practice is shaped by contextualisation through contemporary preoccupations with the relationship between health and planet, for example creative writing (Sarah Perry, Enlightenment; Richard Powers, Bewilderment; Daisy LaFarge, Lovebug), dance/performance (Alexandrina Hemsley; Florence Peake; Lenio Kaklea), and visual art (Candida Powell-Williams; Samah Shihadi; Jenny Saville).
The candidate will determine the theoretical framing of the project but potential approaches include historical and art historical methodologies, medical and environmental humanities, autoethnographic practice, new materialism, disability studies, crip theory, and decolonial and feminist practices.
Outputs
The final submission will take the form of multimodal expanded art practice that communicates to public audiences through performance, publication or display. Outputs will also reach internal staff and researcher audiences at Wellcome.