Spill Writing
Spill Geist: Breathless, imprisoned bodies
Over the past few days we have amassed memories from and onto bodies (and it’s Remembrance Day, and with all its complex politics, it acts as a frame, a gesturing echo). And amongst these, we’ve encountered condemned bodies, imprisoned bodies, narrative and subversive bodies. And today, when we begin with bodies encased in latex and end with a burning body, we consider our own relationships to structures and frames, to mediation and engagement.
I think of the confrontation with breath in Adam Electric’s The Tomb, the outlines of bodies in latex, sculptural and liminal (from womb to tomb). The uncomfortable encounter with this sealed, exhibited space of the other (in equal measure controlled and loose, living and dead), which both enacts and blocks affect (who are we, hearing this body and its cries, this dramaturgy of life and death and narratives of breath). The breath and voice become the poetics through which the confrontation is staged, as we consider the pause, the interruption, the being in between. This is a spectacle of struggle: in order for the vacuum to be maintained, breath needs to flow outwards and as it does, our relationship to the bodies changes.
The Tomb is both monument and sculpture; it is made by and through breath, which provides our own space of confrontation. I am confronted with suffocation (and its embodiment), with working through the body, with agency and invisibility, with these outlines that are constantly abstracted by the material, with their own howls and calls for response. (And I think of processes of life and death, of communication and shared languages).
- Diana
for full piece: http://spillfestival.com/spill-geist-breathless-imprisoned-bodies/
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