Let me try to make sense of where I am from and going towards, with words, stories, and bodies.
It’s not possible to pin point an exact event. It probably started when I was very little, reading out loud at home stories about kids, adults, animals, and strange, mysterious beings. Or, it was from those everyday moments when I tried to make sense of every single word I saw on wrapping paper, product boxes, old magazines, including my father’s dictionaries. I still read and write from that same curiosity, and try to keep building the texture of reading and writing, and constantly asking what it means to read or write at all.
Writing isn’t the cosy practice some people romanticise. It’s messy, demanding, and contradictory. I’ve come to learn that this practice must be part of one’s own survival strategy – a way to come to terms with what it means to speak, and sometimes, to name, or to [re]claim if necessary. In a world saturated with ‘content,’ I believe we must take writing even more earnestly, more personally. So words feel more alive. So we can offer something beyond derivative text churned out for an algorithm. Writing for me is not a seamless archive of knowledge nor a performance of it. [Please no.] It’s the evidence of one dying to understand something impossible to perfectly put into terms.
My relationship with words has continuously transformed as my relationship with the world(s) have too changed. Still, I have faith in this humble practice, so I write — and indeed rise [thanks to the spirit of Maya Angelou].
How about bodies? Well, I started from movements way long before theories. I simply love dance – it’s my unrequited love, and I have learned and earned soooo much from it.
We all learned to move before knew how to speak, to write. It’s much more instinctual. I didn’t succeed much in a proper dance studio, but perform much better in an open space where no rule matters, I can have a whole energy to move. For me, free dancing is the most genuine way to be in touch with one’s own body – and at times, our shadows, our shame and guilt. In those moments, we can dance without past, without future, without need, without witness. It is one of the rare acts that reveal how one really feels to themselves. [For this reason, the dance floor is fieldwork on humans’ psychological complex!]. I often feel that dancing can carry us closer to the idea of freedom than any political ideology could ever convey. The presence it awakens can be as powerful as death, …at least, that’s how I understand it.
The body also carries immense and mysterious memories cannot be named, I have been trying to understand it through my words as much as my walks which are, of course, far from being a smooth and even path. Yet I have not been so satisfied with the idea of ‘the body’ as a singular concept, squeezed into the only idea of body. Sometimes, dance discourse, somatic practice, and psychoanalysis assume the body that feels too fixed which, I believe, still demands deeper interrogation.
I write everyday, and publish only on certain occasions, for specific reasons. I earn a living as linguistic expert for the development of AI. I also translate, edit, releasing works deliberately slowly either through my platform: soi (now in hiatus), and collaborations initiated elsewhere.
Since 2023, I started training in traditional Thai and integrative massage-herbology. This practice has elucidated and deepened my years of research on bodies in the context of contemporary art. It is this way that humble hands and plants have brought me to the vitality of life I had long neglected.
Feel free to contact me for works not linked or not provided here.
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Judha Su 