LA MER LA NUIT
A performance emerging from an artistic laboratory led by Ingrid André and Thierry Heynderickx
The world is woven from constructions and relations — between bodies, cultures, languages, spaces, classes, constructed identities. And yet bodies are also equipped with connective tissue, which allows them to connect according to conditions other than the usual constructions.
What happens when these two relational maps meet — the constructed, and the not-yet-known?
What connections weave themselves at the border of bodies? What invisible mediations play out there? What might become possible beyond our learned tendencies, if we don't simply repeat the patterns we know? To practice what we don't yet know, so that it might become possible.
On consent as practice
This opens onto a form of consenting practice. Consent here means SENSING TOGETHER, SENSING WITH. What does it actually take to be a consenting body? How do we keep consent as an ongoing, complex practice — one we cannot fully control? How do we navigate between needing agency and losing agency, in order to reinvent relations as we go and creatively go where we don't expect ourselves to go?
´The context
The Michel Journiac Art Gallery and École d'Art de la Sorbonne issued an open call for performance titled CORPS COMPLICES (Complicit Bodies) and curated by philosopher Barbara Formis and artists Pascale Weber and Davide Napoli. The call questioned the notion of complicity and its many forms: Who is complicit? What are the different natures of complicity?
How does complicity structure bodies, how does it put them at risk? How is complicity a performative working tool? How does complicity shape material and plastic devices? How might complicity become an existential prototype? How might it become a source of political critique?"
The practice
Between touch, words, and traces left on the floor, the artists stay in sensory contact and let the bodies reveal themselves — their histories, their blind spots, their becoming. The bodies co-poeticize, questioning relational topographies as they go.
Improvising from a posture of listening to an unruly silence, within a quality of enacted reciprocity, they try to stay present to what is given to be lived — what runs through them, thinks them, inhabits them, and binds them to the world.
The performers practice a specific sensory complicity aimed at staying present to the living manifestations of the body's connective tissue. This becomes possible through a tuning between sensorial bodies — an embodied reciprocity that builds a shared perceptual field, beyond the relations already constructed within our biographical bodies.
The traces
The traces left, in immediacy, by bodies put to the test are directly linked to the resonance of the impulses and inner states of these collaborative singularities. They reveal what emerges between the KNOWN and the UNPRECEDENTED — the mediations and creations born once the field of listening has widened.
These traces are briefly exhibited in a post-event gallery: the only visible element of an attempt to radically listen to otherness as a terrain of consent and autopoiesis, rather than as a polarizing dichotomy.