Enfolding is a performance research project focusing on archival inquiry into themes of lamentation in early 20th-century female choreography, where movement practices emerge as countercultural expression, using textile costumes as integral elements of the choreographic language, emphasizing and revealing movement itself as both material and instrument of an inherently choreographic action. The ongoing performative work explores (e)motion in time and space, where the boundaries between sculpture, dance, and bodies become blurred. The project began as a series of non-spectacular, in-situ performances in collaboration with choreographers and dancers Cinzia Cavalieri and Sebastian Ureamuno at York University (2018), exploring gesture and the embodiment of grief, and engaged with the contemporary dialogue between dance and the visual arts.

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Choreography has been a consistent element in my practice, as a movement-based framework and a generative way of thinking-making in relation between bodies, objects, materials, and temporalities. The motif of grief moves through the body, taking form as abstract gestures that inscribe themselves across space and image. Grief, like movement and sculptural form, extends beyond representation, where bodily trace carries its own meaning, shaped by a kind of creation that resists being fully named.

The choreographer, dancer, and teacher Martha Graham framed emotions as embodied sociocultural phenomena, articulating the shapes our bodies take to express different emotions as reactions to the social world. Graham developed a unique dance technique that emphasized emotional expression and the use of contraction and release, where movement could convey grief, joy, passion, and everything in between. On Lamentation, she wrote, "as to form, which is the heart, there is manifest an economy of gesture, an intensity and integrity of mood, a simplified external means" (1930). She described the textile costume as indicating the tragedy that obsesses the body, the ability to stretch inside your own skin, "to witness and test the perimeters and boundaries of grief, which is honorable and universal."

These performances, dances, and events were documented through video, still photographs, and film, configuring the relation of body and sculptural form through improvisatory choreographic encounters with textile objects constructed as a Möbius loop, rendering a threshold between bodily gesture, textile materials, and the filmic medium. The screendance film featuring bodily movement and gesture is registered in my imagination as a presence of sculptural form.

The title alludes to the metaphorical resonance of the Möbius strip in the writing of corporeal feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, who proposes it as a model for overcoming the dualism of interior and exterior body, the body as a surface, an externality that presents itself to others and to culture as a writing or inscriptive surface. “The body is a two-way conduit: on one hand, it is a circuit for the transmission of information from outside organism, conveyed through the sensory apparatus: on the other hand, it is a vehicle for the expression of an otherwise sealed-in, self-contained, incommunicable psychic.” The Möbius image thus becomes a choreographic proposition, enfolding a continuous gesture through which embodied grief moves into visual, sculptural, and filmic inscription.