Joshua Leon (RCA) - 2019-20 Students
josh.leon@network.rca.ac.uk

The Sitting: (after) If this is a Man

The Sitting: (after) If this is a Man is an embodied practice that entangles research and practice, through a concern for ‘liveness’. The work functions between the fields of institutional critique, diaristic writing, poetics and the exhibition within which theories on ontology, ethics, and deconstruction are encountered.

Rooted in Primo Levi’s memoir ‘If this is a Man’ and the Jewish mourning ritual of the Shiva, this research project builds out of an ontology of Jewish thought before growing into a theory of the dispossessed and displaced. Producing an original embodied methodology known as lamentology, which takes the lament found in the Shiva and proposes research and practice as an unfolding, continuous and on-going live event.

Primary supervisor: Chantal Faust, RCA
Secondary supervisor: Prof. Juan Cruz, Edinburgh College of Art