Stranger’s body. Strange Body. Foreign. It’s the body of a foreigner. (I see through your clothes) ‘MUM’.
The body of a woman.
The roars of the body.
To be saved you need to be born again.
Insects. Eran pájaros en principio. (there’s no place like home).
2 sem
Reflections on the performance sequence “Strange Body, Foreign Body” consisting of three actions and developed for Body in Perform, international platform founded by Ayça Ceylan and directed by Emel Pilavci (Turkey), #takemehomewhereibelong (April 2020), and the consequent series for the ongoing project “Excercises for Sleeping”.
Going through this quite singular moment, quarantine0, 2020, where the experience of our place and time puts us on the very perspective of a most feared/awaited struggle, I think of the absence the body has become since probably some of its most ancient representations. Also, the question of what we call “home” and belonging as complex question becomes even more actual, indeed, with no definite answer but the hints left by the transient character of human experience… All of it mediated by that body1 (the search, the quest, the flight and the return)…
Speaking of this particular setting as a performative excercise I guess the sense of performing those personal experiences is aimed to be intently a-body2, without the limitations of self-conditioned response, or even the expectations subjected to the idea of being seen by an “audience”. To me it reveals a very vast world of possibilities that I consider unnecessary to classify -I don’t know if the actioning taking place during performance could be called “altered state” or ritual-, but there’s for sure a pre-verbal character realized and fueled by a whole system of perceptions, sensations, thoughts and beliefs and first and foremost, multi-sensorial, sentient and spiritual as the body is, though Art world has been all eyes from the beginning, inevitably.
I definitely feel the body (and Home for real) are places of resistance (the body, the will are political) beyond individual differentiations; there’s a plurality of expression following the drum of any intimate questioning and that’s why on reading the piece that gave origin to the actions for Strange Body, Foreign Body3, it came this recurrent theme of the mirrors, as the archetype of a “first encounter” with our image, -that is also a perceived one-… as the awareness of an “other”. Putting the mirrors and the cameras face to face and being there in such an infinite sandwich I was confronted back with the need of the written word, somewhat blocking that self “image” with letters and thoughts to find myself alone and also reflect on otherness4, paradoxical as mirrors facing, reflecting even the “blank”.
In our long collective talks (extensive) during these times, we always point to the need to consider the multidimensional sense and also the so many layers (meaning, gesture, space, timing and relations) of performing. Anyhow that’s how human life works even on its “simplest” form so I don’t want to be pretentious, I think what
makes this different from tryig to act it out (which also has other very important considerations revolving on presenting
and setting a character) is that we strive not characterising anyone, even not ourselves, but intently be “A-body”; in such sense we try to divest ourselves from anything but the body, and deepen on those very intricate and complex and sensitive and spiritual human
experience levels.
Also inevitable in performance (at least for me, who don’t play as a dancer or a musician, distant to all the features closely related to those practices) is the need to establish relational elements. That’s the tricky part because it seems like again visual takes on the action so for me it’s a game to signal, as the fantastic Samuel Beckett did with language, the pointless of trying to be “understood”; again looking lot alike life itself, making this a “happening”. Telling it with the freedom of a very experiential approach, quite from the margins, for I don’t really care too much about the rigid set categories in the artistic realms rather than explaining a bit of not just my thoughts and inquiries but the process on getting a performance done (which in most cases involves an undoing, an un-happen, an absence first).
Not by any means in the views of any authority on it, it’s my body here, to manifest something I don’t even know -but it does-, so I just like to think and speak up those locus, which become somewhat of frustration because they’re not made to fulfill any story at all, but to be the site of seemingly pointless actions, just for us to be present there maybe as objects are, in our absence. Thus in action 3 in particular the architect knows what I don’t and the thing is everything I could’ve imagined wasn’t at all what I was about to experience, so if I should summarize what performance is all about, that’s it. Take it as if you knew, love it or hate it, that’s the way it is.
Everyday actions taken to an expressive core and intent can become performances… You just need to be intently A BODY
22 April 2020 19:19, mum.
(Not any-body, some-body, etc.)
So now I have my own talk! And I just can be grateful for this beautiful opportunity which slowly and in extraordinarily odd times brings our hopes of community to life!
The actions for “Strange Body, Foreign Body” took place during the quarantine 2020, so they were performed in a corner with a good source of natural light into a room at my family’s house (Pasto, Colombia). The previous process took a week, it was presented 21 April and the live actions happened on 22 and 23 April, between 9:30 and 11:30am Colombia (5:30 to 7:30 Turkey). The materials used were writing and drawing, and a few relational elements (chair, paper, soft fabric, threads, mirrors, stone, fruit), myself. Sostengo esas Piedras (from where it comes most of the images on this post), work developed from 23 to 30 June, is part of the ongoing performance series developed since 2014 (“Ejercicios para Dormir”) as a triptych based on a dream and done in enclosed spaces (classrooms and now home).
REFERENCES:
0 The COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing global pandemic. The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January 2020 and a pandemic on 11 March, the reason most countries were declared on quarantine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic
1 The human body is everything that makes up, well, you. (Answer to the question: what’s considered a body? https://www.livescience.com/37009-human-body.html .)
2 The expression Intently a body, which gives title to this post, was thought while discussing performance and its relevance in Art practices on 22 April 2020 19:19.
3 Strange Body, Foreign Body (Bogotá, 2014) is originally a short writing piece reflecting on spirituality and the body, honest and vulnerable as it is; performance and the ultimate care, how we all need a home (understanding it not just as a physical place, but a place of belonging, compassion and love).
4 Considering the terms the Other and Otherness from the perspective of phenomenology and its psychological and social effects (the Lacanian language structure of the unconscious). Anyhow I find also relevant for this writing the definitions by Jean-François Staszak on International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2008, Elsevier: “Otherness is due less to the difference of the Other than to the point of view and the discourse of the person who perceives the Other as such. Opposing Us, the Self, and Them, the Other, is to choose a criterion that allows humanity to be divided into two groups: one that embodies the norm and whose identity is valued and another that is defined by its faults, devalued and susceptible to discrimination.” Other/Otherness
On behalf of I.D. collective I deeply thank the warmth and support of Ayça Ceylan, forming bonds and breaking barriers in order to creatively express feelings, concerns and ways of seeing and living. Thanks @bodyinperform for building community!
Mónica A. Quijano López
Artist | Co-Founder at IDPC
m4quilo@gmail.com | @m4quilo
Review posted at Gazete Sanat
20/06/2020
I.D. Performative Collective 