Songs from the Navel to the Spine (Studies on Squats III), 2022
Yon Natalie Mik
Curated by Zasha Colah and commissioned by Archive Ensemble, Pirelli HangarBicocca
Performed by Yon Natalie Mik and students of Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA) with public audience participation. Choreopoethics Program presented as part of the Milano Re-Mapped Summer Festival.
Photos by Lorenzo Palmieri
Studies on Squats examined the bodily posture of the squat as a performative archive of cultural, affective, and political data. Using the “Asian squat” as a central mode, the project approaches posture as an embodied information system through which histories of migration, illness, resilience, and collective survival circulate. Rather than treating the squat as a static cultural sign, the work explores how the body encodes and transmits knowledge that often escapes or resists dominant sociotechnical frameworks.
The piece investigates how certain gestures become legible, misread, or rendered invisible within public infrastructures and broader data cultures. Field research, relational movement practices, and choreographic mapping are woven together to reveal the squat as a tactic of care, endurance, humor, and resistance — a posture that unsettles normative expectations around how bodies should appear in public space.
Positioned within contemporary questions of data literacy and sociotechnical realities, Studies on Squats considers movement as a mode of political interpretation: a way of reading, storing, and transforming information through the body. By foregrounding the Asian Squat as a living repository of embodied intelligence, the work invites audiences to imagine forms of agency and futurity grounded in gestures that exceed algorithmic or institutional definitions of what counts as legible movement.
Handouts (Studies on Squats II), 2021
Yon Natalie Mik
Commissioned by Torrance Art Museum
Performed by Yon Natalie Mik with the public visitors as part of the NOMAD art show presented by the Torrance Art Museum, California
Photos by Daniel Kim
Empty Chair (Studies on Squats I), 2020
Yon Natalie Mik
Curated by Rina Nakano, presented at Treptow Atelier
Photos by Michele Caliari