Space is a body

 

I spend part of the year at the southern tip of a southern country. And it is there that I came to stumble upon a statement by Da Vinci: “human body is the measure of everything”. Maybe all we ultimately have is our bodies.

 

A body as a home, a house, a place to live.

 

Also as an identity (it’s usually the first things we like or dislike from someone else). We are body. And it is thanks to our bodies that we can perceive the world: infinite sensations, maybe just a slight brush, a touch that can make us happy. I feel that I understand the world from my body. And from that standpoint, I ask myself:

 

What if we think that the space is not where our bodies inhabit, but a body in itself?

 

What if we conceive space not as an environment, but as a living organism?

 

In the research and making of many years, I have understood that a sensorial space must be created from the inside out, like a body blooming out. It is our body which gives birth to something that is ultimately an extension of it.

 

I believe in our body as a starting point and as the final goal. And I believe that space, at any scale, is a living body, an organism which us –another organism- can encounter and explore.

 

But not all spaces are alive. Only a living space can facilitate an experience. In that way, every encounter is a birth where a memory, an idea, an emotion or any other form of life, emerges.

 

That why to me, to create a space means to create the possibility of an encounter between two bodies. That moment when we feel the most is when we meet another body. When I create a sensorial space, I build a living organism, that transforms over times, over seasons when touring, that mutates and evolves with each traveller’s experience.

 

As a performer in a sensorial installation or “inhabitant” as we usually say in the craft, “you make the space and the space makes you”. That I have learned over the years. But it is only possible in a living space that provokes you, invites you and transforms you. Emotions, memories, smells, lights and shadows, a flow of energies in and out, passing through… each encounter brings life and movement.

 

Space, as all living things, has a past, a memory, a breathing present and an expectation of what is to come. When we do it right, it feels as if the space was constantly shifting and adapting to another body: that of the traveller.

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I believe this is related to the core of the energy and the limits or shapes that it takes. The more open the limits and the more authentic the imaginary universe, the more alive will the space be.

 

But yet I am not sure. I must continue to explore.