Personal Information
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Given name: Joachim









Surname: Ben Yakoub









Email: joachim.benyakoub@kdg.be









I understand that by submitting this form, I consent to the use of my data for the purposes of the 2026 Forum on Artistic Research'.: Yes









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Your contribution
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Title: Finding Ceremony.  Dancing nearby the Guardians of San Words and Worlds 









Format: Project presentation (2)









Main language: English









Abstract:
This paper, presented by choreographer, dancer and artist Moya Michael and dramaturg and researcher Joachim Ben Yakoub, examines our collaborative artistic research for the sculpturance It is like a Finger Pointing a Way to the Moon, co-produced by KVS and Wiels in Brussels in 2024. Departing from Moya Michael’s artistic journey in performing arts, searching for relations with her San lineage and ancestrality, this research explores the power of movement, sculptural installation, storytelling and transmission.  The San people are historically the most over-researched Indigenous people. They were also the first target of colonial efforts to erase Indigenous knowledge systems, and ways of moving and being in the world. Ways of relating and co-labouring with these communities are in dire need of re-invention. Reflecting on our distinct roles as choreographer and dancer on the one hand, and dramaturg and storyteller on the other, we will account for the various reasons why our artistic research refuses the frame of extinction shaped by anthropology, and the impulse to understand artists as ethnographers. These refusals aim to be generative and make space for the idea of transformation as a way of continuation, by finding ceremony, dancing nearby the guardians of words and worlds. Making kin with the San in Namibia, it explores ways of finding ceremony and dancing nearby through embodied listening, all the while diffracting the ethnographic, modern and colonial gaze, undoing their stereotypes and embedded forms of violence. This research hopes to inspire methodological conversations on ways to overcome historical power relations and doing justice to all the  lifeforms dwelling in their cosmovision, but also impact the debates on collaboration in artistic research, on dance, movement, and gesture as minoritised or endangered embodied knowledges, and in this ways prop










Link to the Exposition :  (https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-exposition?exposition=4210227)









Image: https://www.sar2026.ie/system/files/webform/submit_contribution/364/20240417_214619.jpg









Short biographies of the presenter(s):
- Joachim Ben Yakoub is an art worker, sometimes operating as writer, sometimes as curator or dramaturg, mostly in the Kitchen, a collective study and workspace in Brussels. He works at Sint-Lucas Antwerp, where he promotes and conducts research in the arts as part of the SLARG research group, and where he teaches aesthetic theories. Joachim Ben Yakoub also works at erg in Brussels (École de recherche graphique) where he facilitates research in the arts.
  
  
  










Previous presentations or iterations of the research:
Moya Michael is a dancer, performer, and choreographer born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. Moya is interested in ‘performing the self’ and developing projects with other artists and artistic fields. She has an ongoing commitment to process and discourse. She continues to evolve as a creative maker of live performance.  As a skilled performer, Moya is interested in all forms of expression and identity with the use of mixed mediums.














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