Research
My research investigates how movement, sound, and performative practices function as carriers of diasporic memory and Indigenous knowledge. I explore embodied coalitions as relational practices that mediate collective histories across cultural and terrestrial contexts. Through performance and artistic inquiry, I explore the ways in which bodies, rhythms, and the environment carries sites of knowledge and remembrance.
MA Thesis: Shifting Perspectives through choreography
A study on bodily rights from an Indigenous perspective
This study examines how Indigenous choreographers use dance to address land exploitation, displacement, and colonial legacies. Through testimonies from three choreographers, it explores how choreography weaves ancestry, indigeneity, and bodily rights together with struggles over land. Positioned within critical artistic practice, the work highlights how dance can serve as both activism and a means of reconnecting with ancestral memory, ritual, and Indigenous identity—offering pathways toward repatriation, recognition, and renewed human-earth relations.
In this dialogue, we are presenting the collaborative work of Hector Palacios,
Stella Blanc, and Elena Suárez. Together, they created ‘YOLLOTL’, a choreographic piece rooted in the Nahuatl concept of the heart—not just as an organ, but as the energy that connects all things existing within and around us.
Elena, drawing from her Mexican background, explored questions of family, care, and cultural identity. Guided by Hector and Stella, the process became both structured and deeply personal—transforming movement into embodied practice. The piece unfolds in a circular space with no clear beginning or end, creating an intimate, shared experience. Through YOLLOTL, they offer a space for memory, resilience, and the understated power of carrying other voices through dance.
YOLLOTL
Relational Geographies - Choreographic Dialogues
across mexico and sweden
Image by Hector Palacios ©
Classes & seminars 2024-2025:
Stockholm University of the Arts (recurring guest teacher)
Royal Academy of Music, Stockholm (2025)
’Dances of Resistance’ workshop, La Manufacutre, Lausanne (part of DDE research project)
’Dances of Resistance’ workshop Dansehallerne, Copenhagen
’Dances of Resistance’ workshop, Jillat - Sámi Dance Center
Seminar, Hurricanes and Scaffolding Umeå University,
Through repetitive movements, we escalate through time and energy. The intensity of the body increases as several memories manifest in our dance, through rhythm and joy.
In this practice, we will address various conflicts in our way of learning dance in the context of the contemporary. Our starting point is from the ancestral body, to find our own rhythm and practice listening from a decolonial lense, where our histories and dance-geneaologies joins in a common circle. Then we will be weaving rhythmic movements together with the other bodies in the room through a practice of collective imagination. The whole workshop is built on improvisational guidelines with rhythm and choreographed elements in order for us to have a taste of dance as a communal practice of enjoyment. The dances are linking ancestrality to dance as resistance and community.
Workshop: ‘Dances of Resistance’ - Kurdish Halparkê
Photo by Arnaud Beleen ©
2019: Ainu - Sámi Cultural Exchange
In 2019, Marit Shirin was granted a 4-week residency at Izumi Sakamoto/AIRY Artist in Residence in Kofu City. The aim was to create a solo performance based on her research on the non-repatriation of indigenous bones. She focused on helping the Ainu, the Indigenous peoples of Japan, by highlighting the disrespectful and morbid action of the Japanese government experimentation on Ainu bones. The performance solo aimed to evoke questions on the taboo of the Indigenous body, the lack of knowledge on ongoing colonisation and exploitation of Indigenous culture and to create a dialogue between Sámi and Ainu organisations on activism and art.
Collaborations:
Ainu Womens’ Association in Sapporo, CEMIPOS research Centre, Izumi Sakamoto, Hokkaido Shimbun Press, Sameradion/SVT Sápmi
The main study conducted is through the corporeality of humans’ relationship to soil, challenging the stereotypical views on the indigenous peoples’ relationship to nature by materialising the body in memorial space, examining the concrete aspects of the body despite cultural connotations. The background behind the creation of the project was to bring forth the idea of freeing oneself from formed identity by modes of power and instead show the direct consequences of how exploitation of land and resources are directly affecting living and dead bodies in indigenous communities.
The project collaboratated with Ainu Womens’ Association, Sapporo Japan and with CEMIPOS research centre where Marit Shirin had her premiere in AIRY artist-in-residency in Kofu City April 2019, and further developed her project with a performance in Sapporo Pirka Kotan (Ainu cultural centre) in Hokkaido in May 2019.
Video: Human Remains
(Marit Shirin): My main choreographic study on bodily rights started in Hokkaido, where a collaboration initiated together with Pr. Hiroshi Maruyama and Masumi Tanaka, on the non-repatriation of Ainu bones. By drawing parallels to the discourse within Sápmi and the significant number of human remains still kept by museums and institutions world-wide, the need for retribution was paramount to my own reflection on the body. The taboos on death, bodies as museal representations as a result of horrid experiments by these institutions, were the main catalyst to my work as a choreographer and activist.
Video by Marit Shirin, a visit to Hokkaido University, and the first international collaboration between Humans & Soil and Japan
Collaborating Researchers
Dr. Kelsey A. Fuller
Kelsey A. Fuller is a ethnomusicologist with her previous Ph.d attained at the University of Colorado Boulder. She recently finished her dissertation about Sami popular and contemporary music, cultural politics, and gender; Sounding Sápmi in Multimedia: gender, politics and Indigenous solidarity in contemporary Sámi music.
Kelsey is also a musician, photographer, and enjoys working in libraries and archives.
She met Marit Shirin in Ubmejen Biejvieh, Sámi week in Umeå 2020, and is an ongoing co-writer with Humans & Soil. In May 2021, they both presented their first introduction to a new series of writings named Indigenous Autonomy, Ecological Advocacy, and Creative Exploration, The Humans & Soil Project at Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, SASS Conference, Seattle
CEMiPoS research Centre
On September 4th 2021, Director Hiroshi Maruyama and researcher/artist Katarzyna Pastuszak of CEMiPoS participated in the seminar “Indigenous Bodily Rights in Choreography”, organised by Norrlandsoperan and the Re:think Festival in collaboration with Humans & Soil, led by the seminarʼs initiator and moderator Marit Shirin Carolasdotter. The seminar was held live at Norrlandsoperan Konsertsalen and online.
Together with Marit Shirin and the Sámi choreographers and dancers; Marika Renhuvud and Liv Aira, the CEMiPoS representatives discussed the potential of choreography and performing arts to address Indigenous bodily rights.