PUBLIC BODY
By Valeria Primost
Even in the most intimate actions of our bodies, the public realm is present.
Because we all know what those actions are about and because in terms like public health and family planning the activities of sex and defecation are included, we know that that intimacy or privacy is relative.
Public and private are terms invented to delineate interests within a particular system, they are cultural concepts that don’t apply to every human culture.
Public Body is a research on the way public space, as a collection of cultural, political and commercial values, conditions our bodies. This going so far as for the bodies to become public space themselves: a place where public interests meet.
My dance is one more possible action of my own public body. To transform spaces of transition in spaces to inhabit, is a way of making visible the options they have to offer and of revealing patterns of behavior and created relations.
During my residency at AIAV, I have applied this ideas and practice to three public spaces I encountered: a place in the city, a place in the mountain and a place within one building.
Through the difference of these three places, I enter a new layer of my concern for the body as public space, now not anymore limited to its relation to urban public spaces. I am starting to look at nature as a public space, in terms of how it´s behavior can affect our health, the health of citizens and therefore the public health. Whether we live in the city or in the country side we are obliged to hold an ID card which proof our condition of civilized legal people, so by bringing our bodies to nature, we bring with us: public space, to the point that nature becomes: urban.
What I find out I am trying to do with this process is to shorten the distances and broaden our awareness of how fictive it is to think urbanity as detached from the rural or natural, especially today when Earth quakes and Tsunamis come to remind us, that we are part of a geological system and we must accept that if we want to survive and be consequent to our actual possibilities.
By turning terms around I bring back the priority to what actually rules: the nature of things. Assuming there is no private space, there is no private body, there is no nature that has not been made public, we have no other chance than to work for what we need in the realm of the public.
VP.
Is a transitive dance through the No-make Alley, in Japanese Suppin Douri, a back street in the city of Yamaguchi, a collection of small alleys connected in a 20 minutes walk to arrive from the north of the city to it’s market. It’s name is owed to it’s use in old times by the women who wanted to arrive to the market without wearing any make up.
Today this story might be no more than a myth recalled only by a few people.
Even the alley’s exit to the market has been blocked by a new bush, and it’s path interrupted by open and transited new streets.
But the untold stories remain there and continue to be created by it’s inhabitant’s backyards and windows, it’s abandoned houses and watch dogs.
THE BACK SIDE is a transitive dance, collecting the back side of daily life.
Shot in Yamaguchi City, February 2010
With the collaboration of Roman Ljubimov in moving camera.
Inspired by the article: The Alleys of Yamaguchi, by Yumiko Nakayama. In Diatxt./Yamaguchi – YCAM, November 8th 2008.
21 m. video
Started as a relationship between body and stone in their different way of living time.
In my first visit to Akiyoshidai Plateau I was touched by the texture of it’s stones and could recognize it as a movement that has taken place at a much slower pace we humans are able to even imagine. But if we would at least try, the awareness of being one more element of the geology of the earth comes to us as if we have missed a step walking down the stairs, yes: “ups”.
This public bodies video at Akiyoshidai Plateau is collecting this idea and making it material through image. The narrative or aesthetic consequences where not thought in advance. The work wants to take what the material wants to offer.
With the collaboration of Takehito Shiina.
15 m. video
Is a public dance for the particular architecture of a building where it is made, in this case: Akiyoshidai International Arts Village, by architect Arata Isozaki.
Rolling, as the basic action of relating to material and form the place is made of, develops into action and movement in dialogue with context.
The existing sound is included in the dialogue, as it changes the materials of architecture and body.
The proposal is to investigate movement speech as it’s allowed by the place where it happens and the boundaries existing in the dialogue between this particular place with it’s dynamics and this particular body.
12 m. video
