Relational Encounters in Urban Public Spaces: A Feminist Posthuman Autoethnographic Becoming of a Site-Specific Performance

This paper presents a reimagination of urban public space through a site-specific performance. The work is transdisciplinary, engaging architecture and art practice, and is documented through a feminist posthuman autoethnographic approach. Urban spaces are reimagined through coalescing the author’s performative encounters, informed by collaborations with female Ewengki/Evenki shamanic practitioners from northern China, and female Rongoā Māori healers in Pōneke Wellington, Aotearoa, New Zealand. The performance, Healing Matrix, unfolds as a journey, traversing tangible and intangible relations in public spaces at the edge of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington Harbour, where the city meets the sea. Complex moments of becoming are drawn out as the performance moves around the harbour’s edge, captured through feminist posthuman autoethnographic techniques: through mapping sensory impressions, improvisations, presences of other-than human entities, such as Taniwha (spiritual beings), and the researcher’s embodied shamanic perceptions and experiences. These techniques are influenced by the female indigenous Rongoā Māori and Ewengki/Evenki collaborators. The research subjectivity is decentred, and intricately connects to a relational, embodied collective of women, colonial urban sites, indigenous multi-species traditions, and technological entities. The Healing Matrix performance attempts to capture complex relations within urban public spaces that are present at the cusp of awareness. In encountering these evasive conditions, and giving agency to them, the work suggests new ways in which urban public space might be understood. This paper positions feminist posthuman autoethnography as a way to understand such complex relations, emerging from creative performances, and shows how these might prompt a reimagining of urban public space.