^{Loreto Valenzuela}

Tracing the poetics of movement, matter and memory.

[works] [practice as research] [collorations]

Meditations on the practice of movement.

Tracing Awareness — Loreto Valenzuela

Tracing Awareness: On Consciousness, Movement, and Artistic Research

Loreto Valenzuela · Freiburg · 2025

Writing about movement is a form of inquiry: a way of noticing how gesture, language, and attention co-produce experience. In my practice, drawing, performance, and documentation do not represent an inner idea; they enact a field where awareness becomes tangible.

1. Movement as Inquiry

When I work, intention and contingency interlace. The line often arrives before the concept that could name it. What remains after the act—a trace of graphite, a rhythm in breath, a shift in weight—marks a meeting between perception and form. In contemporary philosophy of mind, this encounter brushes against what David Chalmers calls the “hard problem” of consciousness: the qualitative feel of experience that accompanies any cognitive event (Chalmers 1995; 1996). Artistic practice does not solve this problem; it stages it. The studio becomes an apparatus in which the invisible texture of experience leaves visible residues.

The work does not illustrate awareness; it makes a place for awareness to reveal itself.

2. The Body as Language

Phenomenology offers a vocabulary for this. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the body is not an object we carry but the very subject of perception—our general medium for having a world (1945/1962). Gesture is therefore thinking in action, and expression is not secondary to thought but co-originary with it. Jean-Luc Nancy radicalizes this intuition by describing the body as being-exposed (Nancy 2008): the site where existence touches, appears, and becomes shareable. My research takes place in that exposure—where material, skin, and attention negotiate meaning without necessarily arriving at a statement.

3. Awareness Between Philosophy and Buddhism

In Buddhist thought, vijñāna (consciousness) is not a substance but a continuum of knowing that arises when conditions meet; it is relational and impermanent (Rahula 1974; Thompson 2015). This aligns with the enactive view of cognition developed by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch: cognition emerges through embodied action as world and mind co-arise (Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991). What appears as randomness in making—the misstep, the smear, the hesitation—often signals emergence rather than error: a local articulation of a wider field of awareness.

Enactive research: meaning is not found; it is brought forth in contact.

4. Research as Lived Method

I think of research not as extraction but as attunement. Action, observation, reflection, return: a recursive method where documentation is a second loop of awareness, allowing perception to study its own traces. This resonates with neurophenomenology (Varela 1996), which couples disciplined first-person reports with third-person investigation. In artistic terms, the artist becomes both the situated subject and the instrument of inquiry. The aim is not certainty but clarity; not closure but a reliable sensitivity to what appears.

5. Toward a Poetics of Consciousness At the intersection of these discourses, artistic practice becomes a poetics of consciousness—an ecology where care, material, and relation compose meaning together. In moments of deep making, the distinction between self and world softens: perception is no longer about something, but with something. This is perhaps what both philosophers and contemplative traditions indicate by “consciousness”: not a property inside the head, but the event of awareness in contact. Research, then, is a practice of staying with that event—tenderly, precisely, and with enough patience for emergence to show its form.

References

Chalmers, David J. (1995). “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3): 200–219.
Chalmers, David J. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1945/1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge (trans. Colin Smith).
Nancy, Jean-Luc (2008). Corpus. Fordham University Press (trans. Richard A. Rand).
Rahula, Walpola (1974). What the Buddha Taught. Grove Press.
Thompson, Evan (2015). Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. Columbia University Press.
Varela, Francisco J. (1996). “Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(4): 33–79.
Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, & Eleanor Rosch (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.

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This work engages a philosophical framework informed by Alain Badiou’s notion of the event, Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, and Husserl’s phenomenological reduction.
Each image and movement is treated as a site where the conditions of appearance — perception, duration, and relation — can be examined.
In Badiou’s terms, the act of creation is a truth event that interrupts the given order, proposing new coordinates for experience.
From Heidegger’s perspective, these gestures enact a poetics of being-there (Dasein), while Husserl’s phenomenology offers a method of returning to the immediacy of perception itself.
Through this triangulation, the project investigates how artistic practice can articulate modes of existence that are both embodied and reflective — visible and concealed.

Loreto Valenzuela

Meditations on the practice of movement.

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^{Loreto Valenzuela}