Bodies that Are Not One. Fat Practices on the Border

Bodies that Are Not One. Fat Practices on the Border is a study group which aims to explore radical politics around fatness that have intensified within the context of the Spanish State’s territories, making a series of fat utterances far-reaching and possible.

Across their sessions, the study group stresses the importance of addressing the forms of structural violence which are inherent in the colonial order and inseparable from the disciplining of bodies. Dissident, disproportionate bodies endure structural violence which is normalised and, therefore, the interrupted universal narrative around fatness becomes urgent and can serve as a cutting edge to consider processes of decolonising our bodies and lives. servir como punta de lanza para plantearnos procesos de descolonización de los/nuestros cuerpos y las/nuestras vidas.

From this perspective, the study group seeks a place of knowledge in the body to, from the border — as materiality and not as metaphor — set in motion a series of provocations where different fat practices (artistic, theoretical, political) seek to destabilise that which is imposed upon us as universal and true. The body invoked is neither individual nor self-sufficient. It is a body, incarnate, that flows beyond and is in/with specific territories. autosuficiente; es un cuerpo que desborda, encarnado, y es en/con determinados territorios.

These sessions, designed and coordinated by transfeminist and anti-racist activist researchers Lucrecia Masson Córdoba and Tatiana Romero Reina, feature the participation of Laura Fernández, a researcher, anti-speciesist fat activist and transfeminist dyke; Rioko Fotabon, teacher, creator and afro activist; Gabriela Parada, an activist for animal freedom from a decolonial, fat, bi-lesbian and migrant framework; and La Bala Rodríguez, a multi-format, lesbo-transfeminist artist and fat activist. The sessions will centre on performance exercises and the work of fat artists which, through their writing or performance output, assay leaks from the colonial project. In one way or another, these Fact Practices on the Border tie in with an escape from modern linearity and the humanist account which seeks to define the body as one sole thing. With these Bodies that Are Not One work is developed whereby flesh is slowly set in motion.