THE OUTLINES
The videos were part of a larger assemblage installation, alongside the fabrics used to cover the floors during the performances, a pile of the clay left over from the process, and stills taken from the videos. The videos themselves were accessible via QR codes.
The installation was presented as part of Unearthing, a group exhibition by the Art School MAA collective, at Levyhalli Gallery, Suomenlinna, Helsinki, in August 2020 — while still under Covid-19 restrictions.
VIDEO PERFORMANCES & INSTANT SCORES
Documentation from video recorded during three home residencies in Helsinki, during the Covid-19 confinements of March–May 2020.
I learned to work with clay with sculptor Olivier de Sagazan in Marseille, 2018. Where his work uses clay to transform the body, I became interested in how clay transforms perception. Once my senses are shut in by the clay, what do I use to relate to the world, and to myself?
The stress of the clay work — breathing turns difficult — eventually gives way to deep relaxation, and with it, memories and yearnings long stored in the body surface as movement. Some familiar, some unforeseeable. My daughter and our cat occasionally wandered through the frame, grounding an otherwise intangible inner landscape.
The questions driving the work: can I perceive the world past my own constructed filters? What moves me, if not social conditioning — the rules of dance, gender, language? What stirs when the dominant is kept still?
What shapes and what moves us when the dominant is suspended?
A first layer of ongoing research, and a gathering of practices from my years as a dancer and art student. The Outlinesworks with the 'body-field' as a thinking structure — a relational topography connecting to a wider discourse, choreographic and philosophical, on what moves us.
The starting point: tuning into the body's underlying frequencies, like listening to a 'body-radio' — a conscious limbo close to falling asleep, where tension releases and myoclonus, the brief twitches of relaxing muscle, can surface with vivid images.
This is linked to fascia — the fluid, fibrous tissue connecting muscle to skeleton. Once dismissed by science as mere packaging, fascia is now understood as a nerve-rich, self-organizing architecture: flexible, resistant, constantly reorganizing itself around how the body moves. A geometric field, animated — in constant listening, and morphing.
Just as a body adjusts its posture around repetitive external forces — a tree leaning its growth away from a building in its path — larger bodies of people shape themselves around the pressures placed on them. Borrowing, and distorting, economist Albert Hirschman's three responses to oppressive systems — exit, voice, loyalty — I found the same negotiations at play under the clay: to break away and breathe, to let a voice leak out from beneath the surface, or to stay with the discomfort and see what it yields. What shapes us, and what moves us, are never separate questions — and neither stops at the edge of one body. Which leads to a third: what shapes our collective movement?
