27
Lost in intervals: 
falling in between spaces 
and tenses
Kirsi Heimonen
28
Gloomy corridors, the whiteness of the walls, metal bars, isolation rooms,  
anxiety, gratitude, names of medicines hover around and enter my corporeality  
as I read memories from mental hospitals during the dim days of November.  
The handwritten and typed fragments are being slowly yet firmly engraved in the 
flesh, both their curved lines and content impress themselves on corporeality. In 
the gathering darkness, I fall in between tenses, locations. The curves of my ribs, 
the back of my breastbone and the bowl of my hip are filled to the brim with  
the 500 pages of the text: movement and time freeze, I experience a falling into  
an unknown reality. Has even the stillness fled, become absent? Walking outdoors 
brings my corporeality back into the moment, and the fragments of memories 
are set in motion and settling in their chosen dwelling spaces in the spatiality 
of corporeality. Breathing finds its easy routes again, and with each step the 
pavement and the trees around connect with particular memories; the resonance 
is a loud and clear. Here and now, then and there, I am at the corner of a street 
and somewhere in another’s past events, scattered in between them. Selected 
fragments hang suspended, move in this corporeality, continuously remolding its 
contours and spatiality. Those excerpts from others’ memories continue haunting 
me and insisting on artistic actions and writing. How to breathe the multitude of 
temporalities and spatialities in and around me? What will come out of this?
This essay discusses the nature of temporality and experimentation in 
moving and writing in an artistic process that forms part of a multidisciplinary 
research project focusing on Finnish people’s memories and experiences of 
mental hospitals1. The above description unfolds the sense of altered spatial-
-temporality and strangeness that occurred at the beginning of the process. 
In this research journey, corporeality is understood as processual and 
relational: it becomes a spatial-temporal milieu, an atmosphere or a passage 
through which events are channelled. 
For an artist-researcher whose background is in dance, choreography 
and somatic movement practices, using written memories to perform artistic 
1 Engraved in the Body. Finnish People’s Memories from Mental Hospitals is a multidisciplinary research 
project funded by Kone Foundation (2017–2020). The memories were collected in 2014–2015 and 
stored in the archives of the Finnish Literature Society (SKS).
Kirsi Heimonen
29
research was something new, though the topic itself was not2. Here, I will  
try to reveal something about this artistic research process based  
on written material by referring to the making of a short film, Here, Somehow 
(planned to be shown in 2021), and about writing via an artistic process in 
which the Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), a somatic movement method,  
plays a crucial role. With its stress on the nature of the process, SRT as a 
practice is not only a medium in the making of art but has also become a 
medium of artistic research though which transmission between the known 
and the unknown takes place (Kirkkopelto 2015). This medium continuously 
challenges and alters one’s view on oneself and one’s ways of perceiving, 
sensing, thinking and breathing, and it disorientates the notion of  
spatiality interlinked with temporality. 
The beginning of this artistic research project was a strange one, as 
I became invaded by a feeling of being lost during my reading of these 
memories. The sensations and affects I experienced shook my corporeality, 
rendering it unstable, and the knowing and willing I started to disappear. 
Hence, the notions of subject and temporality were both blurred, and a fixed, 
self-contained subject was replaced by a becoming subject intertwined with 
materialities such as others’ writings and the physical buildings of mental 
hospitals and the grounds in which they were set. The phenomenological 
approach taken in this essay, in which lived experience is valued, discusses 
mostly with writers like Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc 
Nancy, whose ideas by resonating in the reader may make the phenomenon 
more accessible. However, the artistic process and its temporal and 
experimental nature remains the focal point. 
What exactly are these memories mentioned above? They comprise  
over 90 pieces of writing by Finnish patients, relatives, staff and their 
children, and they range from the painful to the grateful, cover the 
different phases of psychiatric care from the 1930s to the 2010s that 
this multidisciplinary research project seeks to shed light on via different 
2 I worked as a dance artist in a social and health organization for 12 years, where I encountered,  
among others, people with mental problems and members of staff who questioned the possibility of art  
to affect, influence or make a difference to the lives of them and that of the institution outside  
the therapy context.
Kirsi Heimonen
30
discursive dimensions and methods3. As described above, I felt drawn to the 
lived experiences of patients in these places. The way in which the patient is 
intertwined with the human and non-human environment of psychiatric care 
and the kind of corporeality institutions produce through the time spent in 
them, became my main foci. Thus, I exposed myself to their writings, which in 
turn have pushed me to the boundary of not-knowing, an obscure threshold 
of temporal multiplicity, in which the read fragments of reminiscences from 
different decades and institutions guided the artistic process. This research 
path involving memories, artistic actions and writing through corporeality 
has been an exploration that has entailed both drifting and following clues, 
all part of the erratic nature of creative discovery (Borgdorff 2011, 57). 
The above description shows something of the ways in which, as 
proposed by Sara Ahmed, one orientates toward others’ memories and 
is surrounded by them. According to her, “towardness” is a mode of 
directionality in which one is oriented toward something, toward objects 
which are “other” than oneself, “not me”, and which allows one to extend the 
reach of one’s corporeality. The idea of orientating around something refers a 
circling movement, it is like being at the center of one’s action, where one not 
only faces, but is faced by things (Ahmed 2006, 115–116). These two modes 
of orientation are incorporated in my approach, a corporeal attunement 
starting from reading memories and then fleshing them out in the acts  
of making the short film and writing. Throughout this research project, others’ 
memories are taken as an “other” that cannot be possessed or controlled,  
a position in line with Levinasian ethics, in which the otherness of the other, 
the appreciation and responsibility for the other, exists (Levinas 1996; 2006).
The way in which I attuned to the research material — written memories 
of mental hospitals — is informed by the practice of SRT. Long-term 
engagement, 16 years, with SRT has intensified the vulnerability of my 
corporeality and allowed memories to haunt me and enabled me to slide  
into spaces and temporalities in which it is possible to perceive things  
3 Five researchers with backgrounds in history and art and in visual, cultural and literary studies, who 
focus on the bodily, spatial, affective, and multisensory aspects of memories are involved in the project. 
See Jäntti et al. (2020). 
Kirsi Heimonen
31
that are beyond conventional research methods. In SRT, the notion of letting 
go, which entails giving up one’s habits and conventions, ranging from having 
tensed muscles to ways of thinking, brings an alertness that leads one not 
only to question one’s actions but also into a darkness where the known I 
starts to disappear. The process of letting go serves experimentation and 
discovery, since it encourages us to let “it” move us (Skinner 2005), and 
instead of perceiving things to become the perception (Skinner et al. 1979), 
that is, to go beyond the expected and known. 
Furthermore, the embedded multi-directionality of the corporeal —  
in which each direction has equal value, no ups and downs exist — and the 
spatialities of corporeality, like the valleys formed by the hip or the window-
-like space in the spine, along with immersing oneself in and becoming the 
images offered by SRT (Dempster 1996; Skura 1990; Skinner et al. 1979) 
erase the boundaries and contours of corporeality and the surrounding 
environment. During SRT classes, while lying on the floor and experiencing 
only imperceptible movements, and immersed in poetic images akin to 
those in haiku poems, one’s corporeal materiality is transformed into, e.g., 
a shadow, moss or mist. Surrendering to the images offered, their lived 
experience can be felt as timeless, even if only a few minutes has passed. For 
example, the image of floating in a crystal clear pool and merging with it so 
that one’s outer edges become the outer edges of the pool (Skinner 2005) 
creates powerful moments with its own lived temporality that overshadows 
clock time and in which the known I has momentarily disappeared. 
The instant readiness, porousness, and availability of corporeality to live 
though such images leads to other realities and their temporalities and makes 
it possible to approach the spatial-temporal dimension of, as in the present 
instance, memories of mental hospitals. Barbara Bolt states that “theory 
emerges from a reflexive practice at the same time that practice is informed 
by theory,” (Bolt 2007, 29), and it is from that connectedness, along with SRT 
and the theory underpinning it, that this research also stems. Practicing SRT 
has cleared a space for these written memories in my corporeality, and my 
orientation to memories has emerged slowly during the months, and even 
years, that I have spent in listening and pausing. Moreover, in this process of 
exposing oneself to memories and sites, the ruptures, gaps and discontinuities 
that belong to corporeal sensing have blurred, and hence also the borders 
between the inner and outer, past and present, and the other and oneself.
Kirsi Heimonen
32
INTERVAL: RELEASING INTO TIMELESS DARKNESS 
I use the term interval to refer to a state where the spatiality of 
corporeality has become intertwined with the notion of temporality, and 
the customary orientation between spaces and tenses is lost. Hovering or 
meandering in an interval, such as a pause or break in activity or as a space 
between two things, are gaps that relate my lived experiences with SRT 
to others’ memories of mental hospitals in this artistic research project. In 
reading memories or fleshing them out in movement, I have slipped into a 
timeless reality, encountering surroundings that are both human and non-
-human, and at the same time breathing the realities of others in mental 
hospitals across different decades. These realities are transparent  
and layered, yet remain perplexing. 
The term interval also refers to corporeality as a passage containing 
various spatialities through which events and the passage itself have passed. 
Corporeal immersion in memories has produced a kind of thereness and 
hereness, a disorientation in which one becomes a stranger to oneself. It 
has meant meandering in the descending darkness, where the strangeness 
inherent in corporeality encounters patients’ memories of mental hospitals. 
Thus, instead of producing (non)implicit knowledge by conducting a corporeal 
experiment, this essay concerns the not-known, allowing thought to emerge in 
praxis and as praxis (Borgdorff 2012, 173; Mersch 2015, 11). In this process,  
a slippage into obscure prolonged temporal-spatial moments of  
(dis)orientation occurs.
Etymologically, the term interval derives from Late Latin, where it refers to 
the space between palisades or ramparts. It also refers to a temporal or spatial 
space (Online Etymological Dictionary). Here, the term interval acts as not only 
as a metaphor but also as a lived notion with which to approach the gap in 
time and space that hangs in between tenses and spaces inside and outside 
of the corporeal. The idea of the interval may help the reader to relate to the 
experience of being momentarily lost; a fall has occurred and being appears 
as non-being (Heimonen 2020). It also refers to the notion of non-knowledge 
that emerges in artistic acts outside of words and experienced in the bones. 
The word interval does not tell us about its duration, about how long each 
occasion lasted; instead, the depth and the length of the lived gap is unknown. 
In this artistic research project, it marks an obscure area and time of a lived 
experience and its significance. When one is lost, momentarily or permanently 
Kirsi Heimonen
33
(Cf. Blanchot 1995, 64), time as duration disappears: instead, there is only  
a pause in space with no end in sight. 
However, to slip into an interval entails anxiety and darkness and the 
invasion of corporeality, where the meanings of lived spatiality have faded 
and time has disappeared, as present, past, future and unknown presents 
and pasts have fused and melted away. The process of surrendering  
to written memories through corporeality and the unfolding of the ways in 
which corporeality aligned with selected memories and sites during  
the making of the short film form the focus of this essay.
SOMEW(HERE)
The making of the short film Here, Somehow, involved writing the 
script, planning and making several visits at different seasons of the year 
to the former mental hospital of Lapinlahti4 in Helsinki, Finland. These visits 
created a tension between attraction and abhorrence, something that both 
appealed and was repellent. However, the sites for each scene were chosen 
according to the quality and intensity of the memory fragment chosen; 
something about a memory drew me instantly towards it either inside or 
outside the mental hospital. This added another layer to the situation, in 
which my corporeality was attuned both to the inner and outer spatialities 
and materialities when sensing and perceiving forms, shadows, textures, 
light and color as well as inhaling the past and the present that is always 
already absent. Absence in presence is also related to forgetting oneself as 
the known I and becoming a vehicle, a passage through which something of 
these patients’ lived memories may resonate with the spectator. 
What, then, were the haunting fragments of memories that insisted on 
being heard? Some excerpts on the topic of temporality included in the script 
and as part of the spoken soundscape of the short film are given below. 
 
My first contact with the mental hospital was very frightening, because back 
then I guessed I would end up in here for the rest of my life. (SKS 353) 
4 Lapinlahti is the oldest mental hospital in Finland. It was founded in 1841 and it was used until 2009  
for treating psychiatric patients. 
Kirsi Heimonen
34
The thought of an eternal stay creates a powerful impact on corporeality 
in the form of dark distress in which no room exists for one’s personal  
matters or thoughts, a feeling which retained its hold throughout the artistic 
process. The resonance of white walls, gloomy corridors and memories  
in which temporality is taken as an eternal, frightening condition triggered 
an expectation of experiencing something untoward. Such lived experiences 
resemble art as described by Levinas (1989, 131–132.): “It is the very event  
of obscuring, a descent of the night, an invasion of shadow.” A shadow 
entered into the spatiality of corporeality, the usual way in which time passes 
was delayed or paused. Through seemingly endless sensuous moments  
I fell into a sense of the eternal duration of the interval Levinas describes as 
“the meanwhile, never finished, still enduring — something inhuman  
and monstrous” (Levinas 1989, 141).
For the first few evenings a sense of emptiness ate away at me. Here I am. 
Again. The rooms, corridors, hospital slippers, the locked cupboard, everything 
seemed to taunt me, “here you are, you’ve failed again”. (SKS 484)
In these fragments, the material objects and historicity embedded in 
them remind the writer of a previous visit(s) and generate acts, sensations 
and affects. Materiality is firmly rooted in this writer’s corporeality as an 
agent of control and judgment. And in the interplay between the artist and 
her materials, the smooth stony stairs, tiny windows, and the corridor weave 
themselves into instant choreography. The materials have agency that 
Kirsi Heimonen
Images 1-2. Raimo Uunila, Here, Somehow, 
short film.
35Kirsi Heimonen
tacitly and explicitly informs the artistic acts with the artist’s sensibility and 
experiences to such an extent that it is difficult to discern the producer — 
who or what — of the work (Heimonen & Kuuva 2020; Rouhiainen 2017, 148). 
In this scene, the materiality of the memory as writing is enhanced through 
its interplay with the slowly decaying materiality of the site. In attuning to and 
fleshing out this thought, I was only able to move on a low level.
In line with materiality, by moving around the grounds of the mental 
hospital, my sensibility was intertwined with the destinies of patients who 
had dwelt and walked in the same sites, as, sensing the ground — gravity 
passing through my feet to the ground or the floor — I avoided the possibility 
of being completely lost while moving. Levinas trusts the sensuousness 
of corporeality in describing how the standing position is “different from 
‘thinking’”, further explaining how “the bit of earth that supports me is not 
only my object; it supports my experience of objects.” The earth thus formed 
a groundless ground in which sensibility blossomed “beneath reason” 
(Levinas 2005a, 138). 
I felt like a pineapple preserved in a tin (…) Life in the hospital was  
mind-numbing, just waiting for mealtimes and lying in bed. A complete  
waste of time. (SKS 487)  
Image 3. Raimo Uunila, Here, Somehow, 
short film.
36
In the scene, the tiny site invited merely stillness and changes of position. 
No need to do much here. Routines and the notion of waiting are familiar as 
they belong to practicing and art making, although the excess of time, with 
mealtimes as milestones, is overwhelming in the extract. 
The notion of waiting as the absence of presence, in which there is both  
an excess and shortage of time, and where according Blanchot (1999, 51) there 
is also an absence of time, allowing one to wait, resonates not only with  
the above fragment and related movement but also to this research process  
as a whole. Furthermore, SRT, in which the underlying notion, even in  
the midst of movement, is ultimately about releasing by allowing oneself to  
be still, even in darkness, in the ground of not-knowing, continues to influence 
and challenge me. The different temporalities — memories from different 
decades, the history of the site and my own layered historical corporeality 
informed by SRT and other movement techniques — overlap in moments  
of prolonged, frozen absence-presence. The thickness of these temporalities 
unfold in the space in and around me, and my sensibility reaches towards  
the unperceivable. Corporeality becomes paler and more transparent than 
ever, as the experiencing subject becomes constituted outside of itself.
The excerpt cited above also raises the question of the economy of time 
in mental hospitals. Another writer remarks on how time passed more slowly 
the healthier one became (SKS 502). During shooting, as an organizer, I felt 
pressure to stay on schedule and remain within the film’s limited budget. 
However, immersing myself in each fragment of memory and inhaling the 
materialities and immaterialites around me, experiencing the feeling of being 
lost between steps and positions intensified with the overlapping dimensions 
of time. Moreover, my corporeal knowledge of the time needed for each shot 
taken from a different angle was precise, even though the movement material 
was not, since it emerged in and with the ambient conditions of the situation, 
such as the changing light and sounds. Perhaps my notion of the duration 
of each scene was oddly known (without knowing) through the sense  
of time embedded in a trained corporeality. 
Below, the first temporal fragment of the research material was  
reported by a patient who had been in an isolation cell, and the second one 
concerns medication. 
Kirsi Heimonen
37
I was forgotten about, all alone in a timeless space.  
Worse still, if felt as though I’d moved into the next life,  
this was distressing too because it felt like there 
was no end in sight. (SKS 390)
Kirsi Heimonen
Image 4. Raimo Uunila, Here, 
Somehow, short film.
My heart raced, my mind was filled with comfortless thoughts, 
my entire life seemed to be hurtling towards eternal 
perdition. Life felt completely pointless. It felt like I’d finally 
fallen. (SKS 256)
The feeling of being lost in a timeless reality resonates with lived 
experiences, such as during the practice of SRT when a fall into darkness has 
happened (Heimonen 2020). Although uncertainty about our lived moments 
connects us, the suffering caused these writers by the feeling of being lost 
is on another incomparable level. The horror of unending existence imbues 
the memory fragments cited above; it is almost as if the possibility of dying 
has been obliterated and replaced by a monstrous otherness. However, these 
two excerpts can be read as having a connection to death, a situation where 
the subject no longer has mastery and has ceased to be a subject  
(Levinas 2005b 70, 76). 
The encounter with strangeness was corporeally evoked by reading others’ 
memories and by wandering outdoors in the grounds as well as corridors  
of Lapinlahti. All these lines of memories, sites and shabby corners invited me 
38
first to pause and to take notice, from which later this movement emerged. 
Pausing was a necessity. The anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis writes about 
stillness as “still-acts” in the encounter with the forgotten, buried or discarded, 
and how historical dust is wiped off in the awakening of the forgotten 
corporeality that questions the flow of time (Seremetakis 1994, 12, 23–43). 
Dust shifted when the sedimented layers of memories awoke, resonated in 
my and the memory writers’ corporeality. The notion of dust is familiar in SRT, 
since through kinaesthetic cultivation, in which movement is more skeletal 
than muscular, there seems to be a space between the joints and limbs, and “a 
suspended relationship to gravity which can be likened to the suspension of a 
dust particle in a shaft of sunlight” (Skinner et al. 1979). In this artistic process, 
to pause and to be still, even in the midst of movements when encountering 
the strangeness and unperceivable, enable dust as the forgotten and unknown 
to linger in one’s corporeality and suspend the temporal flow of movement.  
Kirsi Heimonen
Images 5-6. Raimo Uunila, Here, 
Somehow, short film.
39
The moments of falling in between intervals, in which the density of 
the sensible intensifies and the known ‘I’, now attuned to the situation, 
movement, and each memory at hand disappears, have been breathed 
as timeless. One’s uniqueness or singularity is formed in listening through 
corporeality, as being “at the same time outside and inside, to be open from 
without and from within,” as Nancy (2007, 14) describes it. According  
to Levinas, the singularity of the subject emerges when one is faced by the 
other and backed up against oneself, although this singularity is far from 
being identifiable but rather it is about the passivity of the exposure (Lingis 
2006, xxxvi–xxxvii). In the making of the short film, I experienced a temporal 
disorientation, in which the written memories, the reference literature of 
the history of psychiatric care, and corporeal sensations in the grounds of a 
former mental hospital were interlaced, entangled, hovering in and around 
my corporeality. As if time paused, and I was left and trapped in between 
temporalities; meanwhile, I was lost between here and there. And I was not 
lost. I was floating in the net of tenses and (non)senses. 
Hovering in between intervals, tenses and sites underlined the 
impossibility of grasping the passing of time in all its intensity. Nancy speaks 
of a landscape in painting, poetry or on the screen, describing how it opens 
into the unknown, and how it is “the presentation of a given absence of 
presence”. The land depicted is occupied with opening, since there is no 
presence, and there is “no access to an ‘elsewhere’ that is not itself ‘here’.” 
(Nancy 2005, 59). In attuning and moving in the empty rooms, corridors and 
park of Lapinlahti, I was enveloped by strangeness, in which the materiality of 
the former mental hospital’s main building, the weather conditions, and the 
surrounding trees momently revealed elements of a multi-layered history with 
its lost presences. It was as if I were on a threshold, somehow somewhere 
just there, where the spatiality of corporeality met the surrounding sites and 
realities. The landscape as an opening of space in which absence happens, 
or the suspension of a passage that happens as a separation, has access  
to something that remains inaccessible (Nancy 2005, 60–62). Nevertheless, 
the strangeness prevails as the tension is introduced in the form of an 
interval (remaining obscure, revealing little). 
This whole artistic process is about entering a dark room or a  
field, bare and vulnerable, where one just acts. Art is understood as an event 
where one’s being darkens, and as a way of bringing things back in their 
Kirsi Heimonen
40
fundamental strangeness (Bruns 2002, 220). Facing strangeness is at the 
core of this experimental process, in which SRT insists on one questioning 
one’s habits, thoughts and modes of perception while at the same  
time intertwined with and embedded in the surrounding materialities  
and immaterialities. 
Lived moments in planning and shooting the short film as well as the time 
spent reading others’ memories can be linked to the tradition in performance 
projects of the artist’s perspective altering time. Since the Happenings in 
the 1950s, various deployments of altered time have shifted the spectator’s 
experience of temporality to de-naturalize the sense of official, clock time 
(Goldberg 1988, 128; Heathfield 2000, 107). One example of such a durational 
work is Annette Arlander’s series of twelve one-year projects called Animal 
Years, based on the Chinese calendar. She visited an island once a week for 
a year and documented it with a video camera, and even revisited one of the 
series of events, the action of walking on the shore, 14 years later. The videos 
show the landscape as a process, yet the transformations in time can only 
be detected by attending to repeated actions of relatively short duration 
(Arlander 2014; 2018). Her focus was on performing the landscape through 
cyclical time in the course of different seasons, not on her experience  
as a performer; my attention is embedded in transpersonal corporeality, 
through which some dimensions of the spatial temporalities encountering 
the human and non-human pass, leaving traces to follow — or leading  
to a gap, an interval. 
WRITING: THE IMPOSSIBLE ATTEMPT TO DIVE INTO 
THE LAYERS OF TEMPORALITY 
The impossibility of writing through corporeality in artistic research — 
and yet still to write — forms one (unresolved) problem, in which naming and 
un-naming, rewriting and erasure produce on each occasion a certain kind of 
temporality through which something from the lived, sensuous experiences 
of moving may continue to resonate, as in this essay. Doubt remains:  
has this writing been sincere with respect in transposing or inscribing this 
fleeting phenomenon — can it ever be? 
As the singular individual is firmly tied to time and space, the danger 
exists of abstraction through thoughts. The affective and sensuous states, 
 
Kirsi Heimonen
41
 the incompleteness, the unsaid and unheard that are valued form  
an airy spacious support in corporeality, as the research object is not taken 
into possession. However, the tension in encountering otherness in the 
written material, the sites with their particular atmospheres in the process 
of making the short film and writing grows. How do I let the unnamable 
and vague yet lived resonance with its temporal intensity in corporeality 
blossom, and much do I argue for and justify something that is grounded in 
darkness, ruptures and gaps? Time flees, appears, disappears, the effects of 
its absent presence while writing is felt in the bones. 
To circle around the phenomenon, to write with and through it, to repeat, 
re-enter and retreat, to add and erase, is a way of approaching temporality 
that avoids determinations yet trusts the layers of movement, space and 
silence that words carry. Writing acts as a passage to the unknown, and yet 
demands the writer be attuned and exposed to the rhythm of the writing 
while not being wholly aware of what the written corporeality writes, forming 
an exploration with others’ memories, and eventually slipping into an interval. 
Furthermore, the spiral process in the practice of SRT that has spread into 
writing does not cohere with this linear way of putting words on a line that 
would need more space around it or drawings such as those introduced by other 
choreographers (e.g., Fahlin 2018; Bauer 2018) that invite another temporality in 
reading, as the eyes follow the curves or empty spaces. However, can something of 
the nature of temporality be brought to light in this essay despite of the  
demands imposed by its structure? 
Inscribing the processes of reading memories and moving has led  
to a reality of its own that entails an attunement and waiting for words to arrive 
that might carry a connection, even if a vague one, between the corporeal 
experience and the experience of writing. In the act of writing, the resonance 
of words and movement is crucial, since although moving and writing differ 
in their realities, something leaches from one to the other (Heimonen 2009, 
296). Valuing the immediate sensuous contact of memories and sites 
before conscious thought is crucial. Thus, the connection between the lived 
experience and language is important here, since language is not present 
merely to inform or define a phenomenon but is about meandering, and thus 
its resonance may offer something beyond individual experience (Pylkkö 1998). 
A non-personal intensity in experience, moving and art making is part of 
this artistic research, since artistic processes have led me into obscure and 
Kirsi Heimonen
42
contingent realms, where the boundaries of corporeality are constantly shifting 
and disappearing. These realms entail temporality that is about forgetting, 
releasing, and entering a reality where clock time is absent, where one falls 
into the sediment of the lived histories of others and of one’s own. Writing may 
capture movement, yet only by ungrounding the author, choreographer, or 
dancer, as a self-conscious author, while, similarly, the choreography exceeds 
the intentions of choreographers, dancers and audiences (Allsop and  
Lepecki 2008, 7–8). 
Writing is about falling as failing to provide answers to the question of 
temporality in this project, since corporeality produces a multitude  
of questions with inaccessible answers, and the now is always already gone. 
However, it is important to approach the inaccessible. In Body Weather 
performance training, Joa Hug has taken the call for articulation and 
unfinished thinking by Borgdorff (2011, 60) seriously in his artistic research, 
and has embedded linguistic reflection in a touch-based body practice called 
the Manipulations, in which the practice itself avoids the division between 
conceptual and non-conceptual language (Hug 2020). Such commitment 
to movement practices takes time, often decades, and it is only through 
practice that each technique, with its background thinking and theories, 
becomes engraved in corporality, while practice needs to be continuous 
to keep the unfolding, shifting, surprising process alive. Ben Spatz (2015) 
and Borgdorff (2011, 46) both stress artistic and bodily practices, from 
which understanding, insights, knowledge, and products emerge, in the 
artistic process. However, different bodily techniques also have different 
vocabularies and ways of using language. In SRT, drawing or/and writing 
are done at the end of each class with the aim of integrating the lived into 
one’s life-world. Thus, moving and writing/drawing are not seen as separate 
or hierarchical and the uniqueness of each mover’s temporal process is 
valued. Strokes or (in)comprehensible words drawn on paper may open up 
something of the lived experience, escaping words yet relating to,  
obscuring, enlarging or questioning the reality one lives. 
What about those who wrote their memories of mental hospitals? Did 
they relive the events they described such that traces or wounds induced by 
these awoke in them and spread to their writing? Was their writing about a 
tearing, cutting movement, as Blanchot (1993, 28) proposes, reminding us that 
etymologically the tool for writing, the stylet, was also a tool for making incisions? 
Kirsi Heimonen
43
The following fragment shows the weight and the unpredicted power of  
mental illness on the self and the whole life span.  
The life of the lunatic asylum did not really belong to my plans. (…) Insanity cuts 
off years, studies, fingers, and the spine. (SKS 467)
The damage wrought by the illness pierces and spreads into the writer’s 
past and future, eroding corporeality; the violent cutting and the spatiality 
of the various scales on which it occurs in this excerpt impact strongly on 
my corporeality. For some, writing about their memories was too painful, 
while others appreciated the interest shown in them by the research project, 
and writing seemed, through the cutting process, to clear an opening 
for possibilities to deal with past events. For my part, writing with these 
writers’ memory fragments and my immersion in them through corporeality 
acknowledges the alterity in them and in myself, and leads me to question the 
ethicality of my (artistic) deeds throughout the research process. 
And yet, writing hovers between the saying and the said, notions used 
by Levinas that belong to answering and taking responsibility for the other 
and that aim at being sincere to the phenomenon in writing about it. When 
something is said, something else retreats. There is something radical in the act 
of saying; it is directed first of all to someone as a corporeal exposure and goes 
beyond being thematized to reveal something which belongs to the sensible 
and corporeal before openness and intentionality. In contrast, the said belongs 
to the domain where everything can be known and determined. However, the 
saying must be said in order to make it understandable, while at the same time 
it is betrayed. The act of saying emerges from this constant movement (Levinas 
2006, 5–6, 49; 1996, 22–23). The tension between the saying and the said 
keeps movement and the sediment of the past, present and future alive. And the 
more incomprehensible the writing, the more loyal it is to sensuous corporeality, 
although the act of saying challenges the demands of communicability. 
As, etymologically, temporal refers to such notions as the earthly, secular, 
proper time or season and the stretch of time (Online Etymological Dictionary), 
I attune through the sediment of corporeality to write with and in the earth, in 
this season, while inviting the events lived in the process of making the short 
film and innumerable re-readings of the research material to dwell  
corporeally on one morning in September. 
Kirsi Heimonen
44
The radiating gloominess of the walls of the mental hospital, echoes of 
whispers, of touch and of cries along and in the corridors crawl along my skin. 
They are palpable in the silent grey of the morning that enshrouds this room, my 
shoulders and my brow. Raindrops sparkle on the window, the bigger ones flow 
heavily downwards. In a moment their trails have disappeared. The distance 
from and intimacy with the warm days in August two years ago during shooting 
coexist without conflict. The firm and gentle touch of memories of snowfall and 
the light of February intermingle with the ever-shifting raindrops striking the 
window, becoming transparent and eventually, perhaps, sliding into oblivion. Or 
perhaps not, since they may continue sparkling intensely, reorganizing memory 
and forgottenness, the stony steps of the staircase with its shabby corners 
and metal bars engraved in the flesh on re-entering this room. Can thoughts 
and artistic deeds related to others’ memories be lightened and eased by the 
wailing autumn wind? Or has my time spent with these memories permanently 
changed something in my corporeality despite of the evanescent nature of 
permanence? The dust moving in and around memory and corporeality creates 
space; it is about to change from lingering into a condition of almost landing  
on a page or on the earth as a token of its presence. Only almost. Lived 
temporal intensities keep on stretching until a break, forgottenness, shame, 
oblivion, sadness, anger, boredom, relief occurs. Do these lines of words tend to  
pile up and then curve again to prolong (almost) the inevitable farewell in this 
season of farewells? Sitting at the table and looking at the script written on 
the wind makes me wonder if I can ever let go of temporality, since the touch 
of materiality and immateriality in and around, present and past, that of things 
in my lifeworld and that connected to the project have eroded, engraved, 
cut, pierced into my corporeality, and their traces will continue awaking and 
disturbing me by their contingent tempo. And now, as I am tightly wrapped 
round by the notion of temporality that has rippled through my corporeality 
demanding even more space in it — am I face-to-face with death, the supreme 
condition of temporality? 
These lines illuminate an experimental way of approaching writing as 
a method of inquiry, in which attuning to the memories, sites, corners and 
corridors of a mental hospital through corporeality with its spatialities 
affects the writing process during particular hours of the day and seasons 
with their light and shadows. Only in the act of writing, not before it, does 
Kirsi Heimonen
45
one get to know what one knows. All these factors comprise a layered field of 
perceptions, sensations, non-hierarchical affects imposed by the duration, 
closeness, or distance from the event. Writing, engaging with language and 
words through corporeality and movement seeks to go beyond discursive 
logic (Gansterer, Cocker & Greil 2017; Hug 2020). And here, writing is 
excessive, abrupt, as it searches hopelessly for modes of knowing, relating, 
and aligning with the temporality of memories. 
DISAPPEARING PRESENCES 
The situation of being lost in an interval is an essential feature of this 
experimental artistic research project. Pondering temporality engenders 
loss and solitude in the sense of having to face one’s decisions and (artistic) 
acts, and the inevitable approach of death. Arlander (2014) asks whether 
attending to cyclical time, with its seasonal changes, instead of linear time 
strengthens the static notion of time and one’s world view. Notions of time 
affect the way in which one aligns with temporality in each instance. For 
me, wandering among sites and written memories and awareness of one’s 
investment in the cultivation of corporeality through somatic practices over 
several decades have all shown how the artistic process unfolds, intersects, 
transposes, and reveals something while hiding something else. Moving 
corporeality is a passage through which time passes and which makes  
time in choreography. 
The notion of time has altered one’s corporeality rendering it even more 
obscure and strange, and far from linear. Levinas sees time as “the very 
relationship of the subject with the Other” (Levinas 2005b, 39) or ”infinite 
time” (Levinas 2005a, 268) both of which resonate with SRT in this artistic 
process in which the alterity of the other — memories, sites and oneself — 
that cannot be known, grasped or held onto is emphasized. Temporality 
creates an other that cannot be possessed without losing its otherness, even 
if its recognition has needed words, sentences. 
Through practice, by being attentive to corporeality and being 
interwoven with others’ memories, the history of a mental hospital and the 
on-site atmosphere, the layers of temporalities become alive and porous 
in one’s corporeality. At the same time, encountering strangeness in them 
and in oneself, the singular self has been revealed, its way of being in the 
world, and how place and time are also singular when they meet each other 
Kirsi Heimonen
46
and the individual. Furthermore, communication may take place through 
the short film, if artworks are understood through the flesh, from a singular 
place that offers the chance of an encounter and shows the significance of 
experiencing a particular phenomenon (Varto 2012, 153–154).
The loss of something that will never return grew intensively when the 
shooting of the short film was over. Several months of reading the material, 
the year needed to finish the script and the shooting left me with a feeling of 
exhaustion and the void. A temporal passage in and around me had opened 
and it felt abandoned when the shooting was over. Time spent on the project 
had altered my corporeality and left a lasting imprint on it. Or perhaps the 
traces and wounds in my corporeality will fade, erode, and pass away silently 
or continue making their noise. Perhaps all this can be described as gravity, 
as the pull of momentousness, risk, solemnity, and urgency. 
And yet, do I lean on the past because the present is already absent, 
while nevertheless carrying the need for endless future productivity at 
unbearable speed? Or, instead, would doing less open the artist up to the 
temporal dimension (Kunst 2015, 192)? Is it not so that the intensity and the 
length of time invested in each project leave something in the corporeal that 
is hidden, unnamable and obscure? Is this the risk to be taken, or is it enough, 
when stepping into the darkness, to trust an unknown corporeality, and give 
it the authority (cf. Bataille 1988, 7) to lead the artistic process? Trusting 
uncertainty might sound adventurous and bold, yet it entails fear, suffering, 
suspicion, doubt. The subject needs no gratification; the absence of the ego 
and the passing of time allow layers of lived and written histories to unfold at 
a fortuitous pace. My corporeality has been a carrier of memories; they have 
been given a space to dwell whatever the “end product” turns out to be. 
The slow releasing of the intoxication induced by fates, memories and 
sites, the letting go of exhaustible realities and eternities are to be hoped for. 
Darkness as non-localizable temporality remains, and is darker than ever.  
In the midst of a disappearing presence, I align myself with the lines written 
by Blanchot (1999, 84), which resonate with this state of curving  
discontinuous pondering:  
“They went, motionless, letting presence come. — Which, however, does not 
come. — Which, however, never already came. — From which, however, comes 
any future. — In which, however, every present disappears.” 
Kirsi Heimonen
47Kirsi Heimonen
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