Geographies of being

Geographies of being is a workshop on performance art or action art conducted by Marina Barsy Janer x Isil Sol Vil.

Five sessions to recover corporeality and its presence and to link the artistic expressions that derive from it. A forms, common and essential of creation, that are collective and visceral.

Objectives:

• To understand "the body" as a political-affective geography of the body.
• To use the corporeality we inhabit to expand or overthrow what we have been prevented from doing.
• Reconnecting with the memories of our bodies as the raw material of our actions.
• To develop communal entities, passing through the individual or unipersonal.
• Establish an intuitive communication with the object.
• Obtain tools to carry out live performance actions, both individual and simultaneous or collective.
• Activate unconventional spaces through individual/communal presence.
• To create and live in a new community within this world around us.

Structure:

The laboratory is divided into 5 days, 3 hours per day. Different blocks-worlds intertwined with each other are proposed: 

• Matter, corporeality.
  Activating communication with matter, our Being in the world, body-geography, internal-external body communications, defragmenting the ego, transition rituals.  

• The community, the collective.
  Being and being in community, common space of eXtreme listening, construction of a memory of all, the limit of the relational as a social construct, transformation of links, mimicking otherness.

• The (in)animated object.
  Establishing an intuitive and direct dialogue with the objects to be used (or that use us) in an action. To link ourselves in an affective and sensorial way with the object. To create with, for and towards this other matter: the (in)animated object.

• The "real" space.
  Extrasensory connection with the environment, negotiating risk, the private is public, other worlds are possible, activating energetic communication, decolonising the body-matter-environment.

Image: LATIRSINCRÓNICO sinfonía corporal. Marina Barsy Janer x Isil Sol Vil. 2022. Photo Vanessa Hernández Gracia.

By Marina Barsy Janer x Isil Sol Vil

Marina Barsy Janer x Isil Sol Vil (Puerto Rico x Catalunya) are artists, curators, researchers and performance pedagogues. Directors of the space of creation and radical pedagogy MATERIC.ORG. Curators of MAR DE ISLAS Caribbean performance encounter and EMPREMTA international performance festival. Isil Sol Vil has a degree in industrial design (Escola Massana) and Marina Barsy Janer has a PhD in art history and theory (University of Essex) and is a lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts and the Gender Programme at the University of Puerto Rico. They began their work together in 2015 following a philosophy of AmOr Subversive and eXtreme Care. They have presented work in Europe, Asia and the Americas in festivals, museums and galleries such as Viva! ArtAction (Canada), Tempting Failure (UK), Centre de Cultura Contemporànea de Barcelona (Catalonia), Santa Mònica (Catalonia), Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico), Festival International d'Art Performance en Martinique (Martinique) and Organ of Critical Arts-OKK (Germany), among others. Their work forms part of the archives of the Live Art Development Agency (UK), the Art Exchange Project (UK), the Museu de l'Empordà (Catalonia) and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Netherlands), among others. They have taken performance courses as part of the Independent Studies Programme at MACPR - Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, for Massana Permanent at La Massana Centro de Arte i Diseño in Barcelona and at the Fine Arts Departments of the University of Puerto Rico and the University of Barcelona.

Her individual practices converge in her understanding of art as a transgressive act. This transgressive act is evidenced and manifested through the intermingling of their own psyches, bodies, sensorialities and eXtreme affectivities, thereby eliminating the dual conception of the self. Through mimesis they trace the path to the suppression of the ego, and to the emergence of the anonimal being, disinherited of any individual or differential title. They understand mimesis, not as imitation, but as a link towards the deconstruction of the modern notion of the (neoliberal) individual.

Their artistic practice takes to the eXtreme the mimesis of bodies in a specific space and environment. They explore alternate sensibilities that defy imposed historical chronologies and destroy the dichotomy of male and female. Their pieces are framed by the need to establish the same connection and bodily rhythm of pure listening. They are not two bodies, they are not two artists, they are the body in a space, a time and a presence. Their point of union, as a vanishing point, is a constant beat where the pluripresence of the body, the border destruction and the decolonisation of the body is an act of rebellion and subversion.