PERFORMING SURGERY – Movement Research in the Operating Theater

The artistic research endeavor Performing Surgery examines operating hands. They are regarded from two perspectives: as motoric precision tools and as for the bodily reality of another human being empathetically feeling organs. While operating touch and movement in interpersonal contact are inextricably connected. In the operating theater with video gathered movement materials operating hands serve as the foundation for the development of drawings and choreographic works. The endeavor is inspired by the responses on a video installation that was created in recent years in the context of plastic surgery. A series of three Hand Movies (Lammer 2012, HD videos à 5), www.corporealities.org/hand-movies/, was discussed at a variety of occasions both at home and abroad. The Hand Movies offer a starting point. We the visual artist Barbara Graf, the choreographer Doris Stelzer and I, the sociologist and videographer Christina Lammer are particularly interested in the physical skills of surgeons and how they are achieved. In our understanding the operating hands are organs of interpersonal contact. They articulate a unique language of the Leib (body). They the hands and their moving vocabulary shall be explored with the help of drawing and choreographic methods. A book of movement (Doris Stelzer) shall be created. We work with video, drawing and choreography, unfolding the body language in the operating theater in order to make it accessible for a broader public. Parallel to the participant observations of moving hands in the operating suite video interviews with surgeons shall be carried out. Experiential narratives. Oral histories. In these conversations sessions of reenactment shall be involved. The physicians are asked to show and draw exemplary operations in front of the camera. Barbara Graf apprehends hand movements with a pencil. Her drawings are based on the idea that the process of drawing, culturally regarded, has a lot in common with performing surgery. Further sources of inspiration are atlases of surgical operations and sketches of surgeons. Theoretically we particularly refer to the philosopher Henri Bergsons Function of the Leib (body). Doris Stelzer and I rehearse the gestures of surgeons in order to develop performative works. www.corporealities.org

The artistic research project Performing Surgery investigated the body language particularly hand gestures during surgeries. Christina Lammer (project leader) video filmed forty operations at the Medical University Vienna (MUV) and at the Private Clinic Confraternität. Her observations with the camera in interventional radiology, the medical area where diseases on the blood vessels are diagnosed and treated image led, provided access to cardiac surgery for the ethnographer and filmmaker. She studied the working processes, the orchestration of hands of the team of surgeons and scrub nurses, while they performed surgery on the open heart. The result of this case study was the first part of a series of six analog 16mm black and white short films, each three minutes long and silent. The title of the work is Matters of the Heart. Are the surgeons` hands commonly associated with the handiwork of particular surgical techniques, a team of fine artists, Barbara Graf and Artur Zmijewski, the choreographer Doris Stelzer, and Christina Lammer, sociologist and filmmaker, investigated interpersonal aspects of the surgical performance. Starting with the thesis that various body parts and organs are treated in different ways, Christina Lammer observed interventions in heart, abdominal, thoracic, plastic and reconstructive, brain and orthopedic surgeries. She made analog and digital recordings of the operations. Selected scenes served Doris Stelzer, Artur Zmijewski and Barbara Graf as basis for the development of their own artistic works. Graf sewed a larger than life glove and drew animation films. Stelzer reenacted selected movement patterns, which she found in the video and film scenes. She put together scores. Zmijewski invited Lammer to participate in a 16mm film shooting with seriously ill persons who are confined in their movement capacity. The use of analog film material as pendant to the human body that needs careful treatment became a central issue. Beside numerous national and international participations in group exhibitions, festivals and conferences, Christina Lammer was invited to present a large scale video installation of Performing Surgery at the Austrian Surgery Congress 2017 at the Trade Fair in Vienna. Finally Lammer was artist in residence at the artist-run center OBORO in Montreal (Canada) where she presented and discussed the research on hand gestures in surgery. For this Lammer collaborated with the Montreal based art historian Tamar Tembeck and the Viennese cardiac surgeon Wilfried Wisser. Together they did a movement workshop, led by Tembeck, and painting actions. The intention of this collaboration was to elucidate the individual expressive vigor of the surgeon`s performance.