CARE is a relational installation in which the space of the church of San Severo al Pendino becomes an ideal place to isolate an experience of communion and listening.
CARE is a poetic and political action of resilience that invites us to drop the superfluous by laying down the weapons of action. The installation is designed to strip us layer by layer from the inhibitory brakes, from the expectations that guide us. It slowly leads us to lose time.
We enter San Severo al Pendino to look at something but in passing through the fabric portal we are greeted by a voice that draws us inward to the sensation of a body. But which body is it? Ours, yours.
Five performers are installed in the church, inhabiting it for 10 hours a day. They are performers chosen for their ability to sustain emptiness as an ecological act and necessity in the present world and in art. They form an inoperative community for two weeks.
Their quality of presence is like a cushion on which to rest and rely. They are arranged in the space to accompany anyone who feels like it to lay down something of themselves: their body, a word, a drawing.
The installation consists of a printed fabric, a body in action, a video, sound, smoke, and several spots where the participation of the viewer reveals to himself and to the observer two aspects of the same reality. A visible aspect, as deposed bodies and their companions compose sculptural groups which are every time different. An invisible aspect experienced in the deposed body, a kind of revelation that exudes and transforms.
CARE is the collective search for an ecosomatic art. A humble observatory of the abode of life that is us.
CARE is an installation space designed to slowly leads us to lose time, to let it flow without running after it anymore. Time reveals the imperceptible. The stillness, the feeling of the constancy of movement, the perception of pre-movement, the interstitial space of the vibrational infrabody.
All my work and research for years has been based on the need to restore to the body its immense sacredness and absolute poetic hegemony.
Poetry is everyone’s ability to retrace existence in creativity and vitality. And yet there is no vitality without its counterpart; stasis, death, rest. CARE draws on three different death postures called “shavasana” in the yoga world and offers them to the viewer as a key stage of the visit. “It is like descending the last steps of this space,” allowing oneself to be led down to the ground and waiting for something to emerge from that surrender.
Then, perhaps the subtlety of the imperceptible that underlies the work is revealed.
I have encountered restorative yoga with Audrey Favreau. A teacher of life and care, she deeply inspired me to the point of generating the desire to transpose and revisit the restorative techniques into a work focused on slowness as a relation to oneself and to others.
But a space alone is not enough, just as an intention does not make the action.
It takes people. Presence alone is the condition for the feeling of care to slide in and revive in everyone the memory of their own sacred place, the recomposed image of their unity.
Laying down the weapons of action. Doing nothing. What happens when I do nothing, what is left of the movement when I keep myself away from any action? Non-acting does not necessarily mean not engaging in action but it requests great attention, a sensibility to small perceptions.
There are movements in us that are not only our own, they are of the body itself. Fed by the soil from which the great insurrection might arise.
CARE is a participatory installation: at the center of the work is relationship. Our quest is to share a state of calmness inhibited by the hectic and productive society. Meeting each other, looking at each other for no real reason, allows us to rediscover a common factor that acts in spite of ourselves: the body. We explore a sensibility that turns away from conventional fashions and from society. We use tenderness, we use touch, we use silence to intercept what lies within perception. CARE is a collective work where art is not visible because art is you. Art becomes body.
CARE is the desire to create a space consonant with the poetic experience of the individual and collective body. A place that belongs to philosophy when philosophy becomes a body. A place that only in the quietness of a silent and loving space, unfolds itself as an image of the invisible.
The sensorial infinity of space is at our fingertips.
Touch allows us to rediscover boundary zones. Tenderness, the feeling of the other, an almost erotic sensibility that measures the distance between the beginning of our sense of self and the chaos of deeper emotions.
The spaces I contain: the mouth, the trachea, the rib cage, the lungs, the intestines….
The attention focuses on what has no name yet, sometimes microscopic experiences, sometimes atmospheric ones, sometimes so intimate that one is lost in the invisible, sometimes so collective that one can hardly understand what could really be experienced. The body is a space shared by dance and philosophy. “Penser depuis la danse” means learning to see the world, human and superhuman phenomena, ecological and political phenomena, through the body.
