“I'm with the fists clenched, oriented towards the ground, towards the beach, the right one not so much anymore, to be able to write this. I feel some remains of a fighting energy. Head and back bent, shoulders tense. I feel closed into myself, defeated human, defeated humanity. I accentuate the posture, going down, my fist relaxes a little, my shoulders too. It is also an acknowledgment and acceptance of the world in this falling. It's like my body resonates with a greater collapse. Usually this resonance is buried in the body and manifests as rigidity and anxiety. Even if we are not aware, or in denial, the extended collapse is affecting us. At some levels our bodies register this phase of terminal "civilization" in which, after depleting and destroying the environment, our bodies, life and death are the ultimate resources to mine and collapse. Now I feel my posture connected more with the sea than with the world. The tide is coming closer and closer to my feet, like saying "it's ok, everything will be washed away soon." I'm collapsing completely on the sand. My hand with the phone too. I'm sideways fallen with my right elbow in the sand and the rest of the body contorted. I'm like a stone waiting for the tide to arrive. The sea is a being. I'm down, my head is touching the sand and I look through the arch of my left leg to the inverted sea. The sea is an angry sky, it's coming for me.” (note from inside Collapse Yoga, 6.03.2021, Praia dos Beijinhos)
Collapse Yoga, together with works by Cătălina Gubandru, Giles Eldridge, Alina Popa, Ana-Maria Pop, Eliza Trefas, Adriana Gheorghe, Sibi Teodorescu, Cosmina Moroșan & Anticorp Solar, Virginia Negru, Kira Valentina, Smaranda Gabudeanu, Denisa Duran it was part of Art Opening 7 (Group Therapy) at Artworlds Bucharest on March 11.
As usual at Art Opening, you're invited to bring works (any medium), practices or just yourselves. And as usual, the event might go towards exhibition, performance, workshop, discussion, but this time maybe also towards a more or less explicit group therapy. Art Opening aims for temporary zones of possibility, for art openings at the levels of formats, contents, functions and aesthetics.
As artists, we might be disappointed with artworld's trends and environments. We might suffer from lack of invitations. Maybe we feel unrecognised, unseen. Or maybe we're "successful" and yet we feel that the institutional machine kills us inside. Maybe we lost our trust in what we do. Maybe we cannot anymore stand the drain of applications, of bureaucracy. Maybe we're burned out. Maybe we're stuck. Maybe we lost our passion. Maybe we ask ourselves what's the point? Or maybe we are thriving and can inspire others. As public maybe we lost interest in art, we might see it as too removed from our embodied experience and too much ideology and spectacle. Or maybe we love it and want to stay close. And probably we all have or can think of some practices, tools, tricks, thoughts, perspectives, artworks that can help a bit with the ills of our (art)worlds.