“If a truth is never communicable as such, it nevertheless implies, at a distance from itself, powerful reshapings of the forms and referents of communication.”

(L’ethique: Essai sur la conscience du Mal (1993), Alain Badiou)

 “…the whole of modern thought is imbued with the necessity of thinking the unthought…”

“ Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action- a perilous act.”

(Les Mots et les choses (1966), Michel Foucault)

About


My ongoing interest in the body begins with the theoretical exploration of the singular body’s feeling anatomy and its historical determinations.  It extends to the articulation of its precise, idiosyncratic, though heterogeneous responses.  Encountered are responses apparently drawn from the deep well of the unconscious movement storehouse – the hardly readable impulses and unpredictable reactivity chains, and those striving towards and mimicking preexisting representational significations.  The experience of the body with its propensity to movement, and the inner realities contingent on the influx of speeds and technological extensions of modernity, serves as a locus for researching history of the human as a corporeal presence, aesthetic phenomenon, and a vast conceptual field.  Or, rather, it finds its elusive origins at the spot where many paths diverge, and where particularity strives to define its unique trajectory against the generalized conceptions of collective motion.  Thus, the body that I investigate is a field of phenomenological examination, a symbolic and representational matrix of different movements and characteristics repetitively united in unique ways by an urge to relate to the world as the ultimate construct of the thinking mind.

I propose several questions which in their very formulization challenge any insistence on the unequivocal solutions.  How does a gesture of the body communicate meaning allied to the subjectivity of a viewing other?  And, what is the dominant modus within a historical situation through which original meaning-intuitions engender, perhaps via repeated attempts to understand, critically assess, integrate, justify, and explain the observed, multiplicity of answers preconceived, and subsequently recombined within the interpretation labyrinth?  How does the Pandora’s Box of interpretive language, with all of its accompanying, often unsettling, non-verbal reactivity manifested as the residual affective response in the viewer, alter, deconstruct, challenge, reduce, or expand the mysterious non-verbal movement/thought vocabulary that has had, in its initial proclivity towards motion, the ineffable as a concealed aspiration?  Can we learn to notice the contours of the mentioned processes together with the shadows arising from the imposition and apparent arbitrariness of the inner/outer dichotomies in the relation to the mystified depository of the inexpressible accumulated during the development of an individual phenomenon?  What kind of potentials for simulating natural arise with the emergence of the maze-like organization of divides that outline the subtle movement of a particular body, thus separating it from  the full-blown, outward manifestation of the world this body inhabits?  Once, the relational structures surface as the result of an effort to read complex sensorial information, the imaginative grammar of what at first might have been perceived as spontaneous locomotion emerges as a new condition for the continued exploration shaped by, on the one hand, invisible, and on the other, fully perceptible structural landmarks.

My work probes “zones of intensity” in which viewer and the viewed, in their inescapable encounters, set off creation of vocabularies of feeling/ sensations, varied emotional responses, gestural signs, and movements away, towards, and in-between perceptual objects.  Crevices filled with material and psychic remnants of the past are exposed and reactivated once the edges that separate theoretical understanding and physical practice lose their observable definitions.  The work with the moving, thinking body, experimentation with mental states, and keen interest in the behavior patterns that comes about through the artistic labor, had led me to commence a historical inquiry of associated meanings and interpretative frames.  The analytic experience appears as a result of a modern propensity towards precise, detailed examination, and execution of sequential actions.  Through this understanding gained by the way of analysis one becomes aware of the errors in relationship to the binary structures, to the contextualization of these errors, and to the existence of the factual and fictional causal chains which allowed them to surface, and which could engender their conceptualization.

The fascination with the notion and enactment of not-normal (pathological), with that which moves against or away from the norm, brought me to the investigation of madness as a phenomenon, to a conceptual field which haunts the common desire for unified, pure and consistently applicable positivity, in the way we see, represent, and deal with the self and other.  In my archival research, thematically, I look into the contested notion of madness, the genealogical pathways moving from its association with the overblown religious sentiment to its transformation during the development of modern rationality, when it became linked with the vagabond artist functioning on the edges of the public discourse.  Through movement work I propose questions about the semantics of gestures, positions, distortions, transitions, pauses, silent intervals, and disappearances.

My recent research includes the physical space of asylum in the nineteenth century.  Out of this materialized ideological formation through which thoughts about the unnatural otherness became reified into the authoritative truths and enclosed into an organized space, specific relational dynamics were born.  These dynamics have initiated creative investigation of the analogies and intersections between mental and gross body motion; bodily isolation and singular thought occurrences; forced silences and articulation of the inner life through subtle movement; and internalized social codes and surreptitious forces with origins in rituals, habits, private myths and social beliefs from the underexamined history.