Unimages in Fictions my body at CNDB Bucharest soon (December 9, 19h)
2023
October 14, flight Bucharest - Warsaw
My index finger wants to enter the glass of water on the table in front, the gesture changes in just pointing towards the water. My hand alternates between the two intentions. A few seats back someone is looking very focused at what I'm doing. The person across is also trying to figure out. Now my left hand, my right hand with the phone, and my right eye are all going toward the glass of water. When they were almost there, I suddenly turned my head and I caught again the guy watching me very focused. I continued the move towards the glass with my right ear. Now my hand with the glass of water is moving, a slow abstract dance, in the center of the aisle. A stewardess was passing, watching me intrigued. My hand transformed the gesture into an abstract drinking toast towards the person a few seats back watching me. It moves the glass towards the floor now. A woman that was passing was looking intrigued and a little concerned. My glass came back and is slowly moving towards my mouth. I drink and write this at the same time. Eliza is laughing. My hand is now moving with the glass in the aisle, like a sort of exercise, with the glass up and down. I caught another passenger trying to hide that he was looking at my exercise. My hand with the glass automatically went towards him in a toasting gesture, he averted his gaze.
June 6, Centrale Fies
In one month and 10 days, Unimages will be presented here, in this Comando room. I wonder if the energy of Unimages can accumulate in a space, if it will be easier to do it. There is this theory of morphic fields – if you introduce a new form in the world it will be easier to redo it. The strange thing is that for the others too. My left hand, and through it my entire being, affects and gets affected by this massive mountain. This charged state alternates with a casual one that feels like returning here. Unimages needs witnesses, as soon as I thought that, I started to feel as if performing for a future audience. Now my gesture and presence transformed into something utilitarian, my hand grabbed the window handle with an attitude like trying to open the window, and suddenly my body entered into something abstract, feeling like a charged form. Some energy from the window is passing through my body and out through my phone to the future audience, and to Eliza, who is doing Unimages too. If I give it time things start to complexify. No matter what I do, things start to deviate in terms of presences, affects. I exit the image, the behavior and its plausible reading. Things go smoothly, unimages appear in everything I do, if I trust my body and give it a little time. Sometimes I cannot sustain this faith and try to control the situation, to put my body to do unimages, and they disappear… When it works, unimages are possessing my body, rather than me doing them. All my work is to get out of the way, which is very difficult. The process is about fortifying the faith in Unimages. The activity of writing with both hands on the phone transformed into magnetizing the phone, or I don't know how to say this, it feels like it functions as an attention trap, just for the imagined people from the future for now. I went through multiple gestures, presences, intentions and attitudes, we call this material the scramble suit – the body quickly initiates and immediately sabotages multiple possible readings. Now it stabilized itself again in relation to the massive mountain. I feel it in my chest. My body alternates between the scramble suit and the mountain-body presence lock. Attracted by the mountain I approached the window, and my body shortly entered again the utilitarian, window opening image-attitude and then the abstract form presence, and then the affect passing through my body to the phone to the future people and to Eliza, which looks caught in some unimages herself. She saw me and started to laugh. My body played with capturing and moving her attention from one place to another. Unimages continued for a while, at a too-great speed to write about.
2022
September 24, flight Brussels - Bucharest
There are people next to the toilet, close to my seat. My hands and in general my behavior is like a low-key performance. I feel that I can capture their attention with small details. My body does all kinds of slightly weird or awkward gestures and immediately corrects the meaning, the attitude changes, the gestures are normalized, and then again unnormalized. My body is strangely bent, especially the head, I'm facing diagonally up. My prolonged weird posture is sometimes normalized like I'm looking at the panel above the seat, or by entering a serene, calm attitude like it's totally normal to sit like that. The state becomes weird again. A passenger looked my way, I felt his gaze and slowly my hand moved towards him, almost by itself, this caught his attention even more. I retracted my hand to write this, but now my right hand is again starting to slowly move towards him. The stewardess passed and accidentally kicked my hand. The hand started to have some weird slow movements, in between expressing something and relaxing in strange postures, like it's completely normal to be like that. Now it moves toward the passenger that it's diagonal in front, across the aisle. It automatically retreated when another stewardess was passing. Now it's moving on my face and forehead. It's an abstract movement, it doesn't make sense. My hand feels autonomous, it goes to my chest. The passenger who sits at the window looks my way, but he quickly retreats his gaze and just checks me from the corners of his eyes from time to time. The passenger across the aisle is doing the same. I'm in this posture in which I can barely register them from the corners of my eyes. I don't want them to notice that I notice. Now my hand slowly moved up on the chair in front. The aisle passenger looked at me directly, intrigued, he couldn't control his curiosity anymore. Both of them now. I feel that my movements are read as absurd, maybe crazy. Probably because I thought that my fingers went to the table lock as if wanting to release the table, but then they stayed there while the two passengers were captivated and intrigued. My movement there continued but my attitude changed into something like "I feel your gaze, it's all good, I'm not doing anything weird, what's the problem?" They turned the gaze away. My hand is now floating towards the head. And when the window passenger looked at me the movement transformed into scratching my head. Because he maintains the gaze I maintain the scratching weirder and longer than normal. Now my hand goes towards the family-on-holiday commercial on the wall in the back of my seat. The back of the hand caresses the husband. The stewardess passed by looking intrigued at my activity. I stayed like that until another one came and urged me to fasten the belt for landing.
February 3, Supermarket, Bucharest
My movements between these stands are like dancing. Now that I'm bent like looking at a product on the lower shelf, I'm feeling my posture as a yoga posture. And as an abstract dance posture, when someone sees me. Now I'm turning around like looking at products, but at the same time I'm writing this and feel my movement as a sort of dance. I keep turning around, bent over my phone, writing, and from time to time, looking preoccupied at the products. My body entered a meditative state. I bent to pick up my basket and my body stopped right before grabbing it and stayed like that for a while.
2020
October 15, Aether Sofia
I reach for the phone on the table, but on the way something changes and, instead of grabbing it, I just rest my hand on it. I stayed like that for a while. For a while I kept moving my fingers slowly, above the keyboard, without writing, enjoying the moment in my fingers. I stretched out my palm, floating at a little distance parallel to the screen. This reminded me of doing therapy with my hands and I started to transmit healing energy through the screen to this text and you the reader. I realized that this can be ridiculous so in the same posture my presence became like an abstract dance. I'm very sensitive to this posture. Now I just stay casual in it, finally writing all this. I start to relate to the phone as something very abstract like I have something alien in my hand and the movements of writing are more and more astract ad alen to, shs sj nydg fgfj
Florin Flueras, Unimages (2017)
Unimages are deviations from plausible body states and self-presentations, performative anomalies that affect automatic readings and perceptions. Representations are not allowed to stabilize, actions withdraw from images, constantly escaping readings, playing tricks with our minds and bodies. The capacity to see and understand, to form coherent images about what is in front of our eyes, may be questioned and refreshed. Unimages are inserted in contexts where something else is already happening, adding an extra layer to their ordinary function (art spaces, supermarkets, trains, airports…). Meetings are produced between two types of audiences, attention, situations, performers. We tend to conform to personal and cultural images about ourselves and reality, to the known, becoming images and identities in the process. Unimages explores ways to move outside body images, identities, and outside our minds sometimes. It intervenes in the implicit process of transforming reality into images and certainties.
It feels like we're more and more forced to admit that our normalized habits, the current images, representations, certitudes on which we try to control ourselves and the world, should be changed. Even better might be to exit altogether the mirage of images, to abandon the society of spectacle in which "everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."(Debord) According to Deleuze, for thought to not be anymore "crushed under an image", we need sensible, affective, perplexing encounters that force us to think. This could also mean that we need to explore outside the main territory of images and representation based art. Unimages are affect and presence based – embodied, perplexing experiences that might jolt the bodies out of their image controlled daily choreographies. How we are in the body determines the atmosphere, the affective environment, the perspective, the feeling of the world. Unimages might scramble our experiencing, the implicit patterns of forming reality, unfamiliarizing us with the world and ourselves. Unimages can appear uninvited at some venues – Unofficial Unworks.
Performers Eliza Trefas, Martina Piazzi, Florin Flueras.