Studies on Squats, Book, 2024
Text and Images by Yon Natalie Mik
Published by Archive Books and Stuttgart Fine Academy Arts
Supported by Akademie Schloss Solitude
Photos by Rina Nakano
Studies on Squats is an evocative exploration of embodied resistance and political movement, using the multifaceted posture of the “Asian Squat” as a lens through which broader concepts of public protest, migration, illness and resilience are examined. In Studies on Squats, the body—in its most vulnerable and potent states—becomes a speculative site for reclaiming agency, crafting new forms of protest that draw from care, ancestral strength, humor and eroticism. This posture, rich with cultural and historical resonance, serves as an entry point to imagine ways the body can engage in acts of defiance against systems of oppression. Studies on Squats invites the public to consider how dance, poetry and choreographic strategy can serve as tools for envisioning futures where artistry empowers those enduring systemic social injustices to transform their realities.
Studies on Squats also considers the squat as a form of embodied data — a posture that stores, transmits, and transforms information across generations and geographies. The work approaches movement as a kind of literacy, asking how gestures are read, misread, or rendered illegible within contemporary data cultures and sociotechnical systems. By attending to the subtle transmissions embedded in a single posture, the project highlights how bodies hold forms of knowledge that exceed classification or institutional narratives. In this sense, Studies on Squats proposes the squat not only as an act of resistance, but as an alternative mode of data-making — one that resists extraction and centers lived experience as a critical site of political intelligence.
The book is available at Archive Books