In 2024, NMRG presented 'Bodies: Art, Architecture and Archaeology', a one-day in-person event featuring presentations and practical workshops across the fields of art, architecture, and archaeology on the theme of bodies. The event promoted human and non-human readings of the subject, expanding beyond normative understandings to consider social, economic, and institutional bodies.
Presentations included 'The Early Modern Visual Culture of Wounds and Stigmata' by Prof. Cordelia Warr and a paper on anthropological absences and non-destructive material analysis using X-Ray Florescence Spectrometry by Dr. Lenore Thompson. 
Workshops included, a participatory workshop on traces of bodily-spatial relationships facilitated by Dr. Xristina Penna and 'How can you create bodies in a new materialist way using clay' facilitated by Dr. Rebecca Howard and Dr. Victoria Sharples. 
This poem, titled Bodies, was inspired by a participatory workshop (facilitated by Dr. Xristina Penna) drawing on Morgan Meyer's 'Placing and Tracing Absence: A Material Culture of the Immaterial' (2012). Using keywords from the text and additional terms contributed by participants, we placed these words inside a piñata, which was then collectively smashed open. The fragments were arranged into prose that later evolved into this poem. The workshop was both spatial and performative, inviting participants to physically engage with concepts of presence and absence.
Bodies
Vessels to hold matter,
heavy, held, holding
A crucible body
grounded, old,
scarred envelopes.
Structural use,
a malleable building,
fabricating silences
into a resonance economy.
Spatial material,
a framework of absences.
Immaterial temperatures
cutting bodily soil,
cloaked traces.
Collaborators touch
willing objects
institutional hands climb
toward an absence.
Touch molecules
that hold memory.
Hold, stick, fold.
An armature of skeleton traces
history, stigmata,
fabric gestures.
Structural temporality.
Process.
Time weeps,
weeps,
wept.
Map individual expression.
Miscommunication.

Builders excavate,
crack, dig, uncover.
Absences support,
connections unmake
objects.
Stab
implied meaning,
infinite draft.
Mark-making,
non-human clay
to be strongly non-human…
is there such a thing?
Wounds
to be poked, used, cracked.
Material violences,
gut frameworks,
tentacular objects
falling down.
Make-up,
make a mess
by adding and subtracting
textures and residues left,
human reminders.
Map non-human space
absence,
absence.
Make process.
Imprint from what is missing;
use
the gap.
Artefact:
place-making hands.
A wound:
spatial
and structural violence
came to be.
Spatial material,
absence,
framework,
absence again.