Shaping the precarious body as an autonomous republic: Interdisciplinary art approaches towards survival and healing for the displaced, nomadic female

Developing my autobiographical experiences as a precarious displaced 'nomad subject' (Braidotti 2011) and interdisciplinary artist, this practice research PhD will develop a methodological approach towards constructing art enabling the female migrant artist's survival and healing. Yana Meerzon's extensive publications on migration and performance (2011, 2012, 2015, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023), examine the experience of isolation, anxiety and 'rupture', resulting from the exilic artist's 'continuous border crossings, frequent changes of addresses, limited options in life, the feeling of always starting from scratch' (Natasha Davis, 2015: 65). There are numerous important writings and artworks exploring the representation
of migration, and ways to support refugees, including art therapy (see, for example, Ai Weiwei and Anish Kapoor's The Walk (2015); Alison Jeffers' Refugees, Theatre and Crisis (2012); Josephine McDonagh's 'Can Migrants Be Seen? Some Representations of Migration in Contemporary Art, Film, and Literature' (2022)). However, this PhD will create a novel methodology that can be adopted by female migrant artists seeking to produce innovative interdisciplinary art that rationalises, without fetishising, their experience, or indulgentlyacting as self-therapy. Building on Natasha Davis's artistic explorations 'that [look] conceptually and critically at the trauma of exile' (Yana Meerzon 2015: 65), this approache utilises a critical consideration of that trauma as a motivating force for the artwork, but may only appear on the edges of, or abstracted within, the content of the artwork. Y