The body as an archive
2021
Duration 15:25
Documentary credits:
Director: Marleine van der Werf
Camera: Jos Meijers
Geluid: Henke Jelle de Groot
Editor: Jos Meijers
Sounddesign: Sander van der Schaaf
More info about Motus Mori & their project:
Concept & Choreographer: Katja Heitmann
Concept & music: Sander van der Schaaf
Artistic assistance & dramaturgy: Moene Roovers
Performance & archive: Wies Berkhout, Lea Christensen, Ornella Prieto, Rebecca Collins, Manou Koreman, Eleni Ploumi
With many thanks to Bernardie, Mahat, Christos, Cees & Daphne for donating their movements.
The Body as an archive, Short documentary
In this documentary we created a portrait of the Motus Mori Institute. The documentary follows their journey in the methods that they created to collect and preserve human movement with a team of dancers.
In the period 2021-2024 Katja Heitmann creates an archive for the movement that is inevitably becoming extinct: Motus Mori Institute. This institute focuses on the collection, preservation, display and transfer of movement-heritage. Institute Motus Mori is a place for process. Every development is shared with the audience in public manifestations. This institute literally ‘moves’; in the years to come, it will be located in various cities, presenting the process of archiving in theatres, museums and public space as exhibitions, performances and rituals.
Rather than seeking definitive answers, the Dis_embodied Project stages experiential inquiries. Through artistic research-driven experiments, we create spaces where participants confront the instability of embodiment and reconsider the foundations of identity. If believing one does not exist can alter who one is, then the body is not merely a vessel but an active co-creator of selfhood. By investigating the limits and thresholds of embodiment, we aim to expand existing knowledge and invite new forms of dialogue between art, science, and lived experience—before the question of living without a body becomes no longer speculative, but real.