Collapse Yoga at Centrale Fies
Collapse Yoga that, unfortunately, always resonates with what's happening in the world
Photos and documentation as text from inside Collapse Yoga in the Naked Word exhibition at Centrale Fies that recently ended.
June 14, Centrale Fies
There is a slight anxiety in my body, maybe because I have to send this text tomorrow, so this should be good. My body follows this anxiety and slowly collapses here in the gallery close to where my work will be. While my body continues its work, I mentally mark on the wall the position where the poster with this text should be, to produce a similar posture in you while reading it. By immersing in it, my body arrived at the other side of anxiety, to a sort of relaxed pleasure. The asymmetry and collapse in my body enhance my perception. The gallery is very peaceful at this very late hour. The wrapped up artworks lying down seem deeply asleep. You can still make out their contours through the packaging. They create a dreamy atmosphere, being here but hidden enhances their power, somehow. They're asleep and they will wake up for the opening. Mine, the opposite, is awake now, I'm doing it right now, at the wrong time, in pre-exhibition, yet, hopefully a light aura of it will still be here in the exhibition, in a similar way as the asleep works are present now. As I wrote this, my body accentuated its posture, like trying to instill this affect in this place for the future visitors that will step in my form here. I kept staying in this asana, my body charged, spilling out its presence in this spot and the rest of the gallery, and into the future.
June 13, Centrale Fies
I'm in the gallery, in the place where Collapse Yoga will be shown. My body is in a pleasurable collapse. I figured out how to tilt and install this text in such a way that if you read it here, you might be in a similar spot and posture. Because of this bodily correspondence in time and space, you might even capture something from my state. My body is out of its form and this enhances its sensibility. For some reason when the body exits its "normal" form, sensibility wakes up. The exhibition has a perfect sense as it is now in this deemed natural light of the evening, faint birdsongs outside, the artworks lying wrapped up on the floor, dismembered, with "don't touch" written on the packaging. There is also a big sarcofag with probably other works. Beautiful. There is just an aura of these artworks wrapped in mystery, an atmosphere, a light feeling. Not dissimilar I hope with the vague, light affect that is reaching you where you read this, maybe in the same spot where I am, just later. If you're here, I hope that something from my state, amplified by the strategic presence of the work here at the beginning of the exhibition will affect the way you are experiencing the rest of it, the rest of the day, the rest of the week..
June 8, river close to Centrale Fies
As I slowly collapse, I start to see things, to be here. I've been on this big boulder in the river for a while, yet I just arrived. Before collapsing, I was and I wasn't here. I appreciated and recognized the beauty of the place, without experiencing it. It was a beautiful image. I needed to exit my body image, to exit the landscape image. I'm collapsed, in this precarious posture, somehow managing to write this on the phone. Now the river, the trees around, the massive mountains are present to me because I'm present to myself. I feel them because I feel my body form. Usually, human bodies are stiff in the environment, cut out of it, seeing images of it. My body went through a series of micro-collapses, affective more than physical, exiting its human form. The body's anti-affect armor melted. Because my body is free from its implicit normality, it can communicate with all the things and the beings that are also free, not enclosed in images of themselves and their worlds. Now my body belongs in this place and this world.. I'm getting closer and closer to the cold water, it's calling me. I will enter it, one way or another, maybe without the phone, if this text arrives at you.
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Extra-note
March 11, Madrid Airport
I'm crushed, on my spread knees and my left temple, as much of my body as possible touching the floor. The phone is very close to my right eye, the other eye is blocked by the floor. Almost impossible to write. The airport becomes a nonairport, the flight announcements just dimmed noise. I hope I am not losing the plane. There is also an audience for what I'm doing. The feeling is not that different from performing in a museum. I'm standing up now, but my state stays the same. The space is more 3D, if that's possible. Things are more contoured, and somehow everything seems to be in focus. My hearing is accentuated too, and I register the details clearly. The woman drinking her coffee here and the faraway mountains covered in snow that I see through these big windows are equally present. It feels like I succeeded in taking off without a plane. It's a mystery how just by disjointing my body, the perception changes so much. What would happen if I go deeper into this?
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Collapse Yoga mixes Yoga with possible "negative" states as sadness, illness, anxiety, hopelessness, worry, renouncement, exhaustion, grief, boredom, decrepitude, pain, failure, fear and their traces in the body. It collides Yoga's aims for coordination, balance, strength, straightness, flexibility, alignment, control with the body's deep desires for asymmetry, incoordination, weakness, relaxation, freedom, unbalance, abandon, collapse. It affects the normativity of the human form. Collapse Yoga is sometimes practiced next to intimidating buildings, monuments, in charged public spaces associated with cultural stiffness, harmful ethics or bad politics. It can tune our bodies with natural, social and personal collapsing environments, affecting maybe some of them. The relation with our bodies tends to extend to the entire reality – there is a correspondence and influence between the body's politics and society's problems.
(performance, video, prints)