Juliana España Keller, PhD, Arts and Philosophy

Areas of expertise

areas of expertise: sound performance and electronic Arts, performance art practices, intermedia & immersive sound and interactive media.

research topics: Feminist New Materialism, Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanities, Environmental Humanities.

keywords: 

making kin, the posthuman, critical posthuman knowledges, the environmental humanities, the capitalocene, eco-feminist & intersectional theory, social engagement, public spatial practices, visual arts and all forms of experimental sonic art practices.

Education

PhD, Arts and Philosophy, The Victorian College of the Arts, 

The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (2015 – 2020).

 
MFA, Sculpture, Studio Arts, Concordia University (2000 - 2003).

BFA, Painting & Drawing, Studio Arts, Concordia University (1997 - 2000).

Research interests

In an age in which we are increasingly conscious of planetary intra-connections –

on environmental, social and biological levels to name just a few –

and in a world increasingly divided on political and economic levels,

how do we communicate across borders and boundaries and give voice to communities?

Small actions create big effects, interdisciplinary interaction,

transdisciplinary practice/s that move away from systems of power that are vaster than any one individual.

How, perhaps might we maintain a sense of agency within this paradigm?

How might we tell stories about these vast systems? And what kind of planetary stories should we tell?

Juliana’s practice-led research is built on a relational architecture of iterative sound performances that position the art historical, the sociopolitical, transforming disciplinary interpretations of the body and technology as something that is not specifically exclusively human but post-human. Juliana speaks through a creative practice that unfolds as a sharing of experiences through these propositions. She also channels the intra-personal; through the entanglement of her own personal cultural experience and diverse background, where language, meaning and subjectivity is relational to what it means to be human and to what is felt from the social, what has informed her from a multi-cultural nomadic existence and perspective.

Through the medium of sound, Juliana investigates and emphasizes entities, ethics, social class and social political intervention in the process. This subjectivity illuminates how we move through the world, react to surroundings and respond to everything. It also proposes how the normative and hierarchical relations amongst human groups based on race, sexuality, social class and ability are always intimately entangled with the broader political and posthuman economies/ecologies of which we are a part.

The performance work establishes a scaffold for thinking about a range of ideas of what is felt through encounters with philosophy, sonic arts, feminist and posthuman thought. It highlights labored bodies entangled with posthuman contingencies of food preparation, family and social history, ritual, tradition, social geography, local politics and women’s oppression. The human and non-human relation to machines and machine learning is enacted through intra-active entanglement; it represents an active pedagogy practice for organising and responding collectively to, the local. 

A noisy kitchen is felt as a musical sounding in the everyday rhythm of lived intensities. Agency is conjured through the doing-cooking of the kitchen to create a sonic recipe as the becoming of the human-machine relationship to uncover the paradigms that shape-shift performance, cross-fertilizing with technology and futurities of social robotics by finding ways forward in untangling the discourse surrounding robotic machines, humanoids and AI.

In particular, it considers how feminist new materialism can be “put to work”, creating daring dissonant narratives that feed posthuman ethical practices and feminist genealogies. Juliana’s research reveals what matters—a feminist struggle invaluable in highlighting and responding collectively to the local with a systemic understanding material phenomena in an immersive sonic performative installation. Her research practice proposes to ignite and transform our social imagination and deactivate pervasive and dominating patriarchal ethico-politics and to decolonize as well as dismantle colonial perspectives and pedagogies.

The Sonic Intra-face of a Noisy Feminist Kitchen

This paper asks what is the value of transforming the kitchen into a sonic performative work and public site for art and social practice. A Public Kitchen is formed by recreating the private and domestic space of a kitchen into a public space through a sonic performance artwork. The kitchen table is a platform for exploring, repositioning and amplifying kitchen tools as material phenomena through electronic and manual manipulation into an immersive sonic performance installation. This platform becomes a collaborative social space, where somatic movement and sensory, sonic power of the repositioned kitchen tools are built on a relational architecture of iterative sound performances that position the art historical and the sociopolitical, transforming disciplinary interpretations of the body and technology as something that is not specifically exclusively human but post-human.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/9/245

Book Review: Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari. New Materialism. The mattering of the arts, crafts, and aesthetics. The Polish Journal of Aesthetics. Nr. 57 (2/2020)

This book review discusses the volume: Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari (2017), edited by Pirkko Moisala, Taru Leppänen, Milla Tiainen, and Hanna Väätäinen. This polyphonic title concentrates on Deleuzian-Guattarian research as well as elaborations on Spinozian metaphysics. The book’s multisensory expanse of subjects in feminist new materialisms encompasses, among others, music and sound studies, expanded listening, dance, dis/ability, semiotics, and ethnography. The work provides vital attention to concepts such as affect, becoming, and assemblages, including different ways of moving and conceiving across contemporary creative practices.

https://pjaesthetics.uj.edu.pl/pl_PL/archives/-/journal_content/56_INSTANCE_r1lnMup4DOPq/138618288/146139866