De-canon is a socially engaged research project that combines elements of performance and collaborative artefact creation. The project aims to deconstruct the subject-object relation and create non-hierarchical connections both in the decolonial perception of the Central Asian female identity and in the artist-viewer relationship.

Primary research will be conducted via a continuing series of creative workshops with Central Asian women who have experienced migration. By analysing and deconstructing memories that represent a wider migrant experience, the project will experiment with translating verbal stories into abstract sounds and artefacts that trigger tactile, visual and olfactory senses. The methods will rely on phenomenology and decolonial aesthesis.

The workshops are designed to subvert the role of skin as a shell, repurposing it as a foundation on which we layer re-evaluated meanings that were previously suppressed. Our findings will manifest as a tangible ‘archive’ represented by a series of ever-evolving wearable sculptures. The sculptures will only remotely resemble costume and, when worn, will limit the capabilities of the body, dictating the wearer’s physicality as well as augmenting their empirical perception of reality.

These ‘wearables’ will remain unfinished and will be modified during each successive workshop. This approach reflects the impossibility of uncovering the problems of marginalised communities with a one-time artistic statement, and emphasises the need for a long-term systematic approach to the questions of decolonial embodiment and praxis.