DSÍ-EMBODYMENT A video installation by AnaVitória Directed by: AnaVitória and Leticia Monte Performer: Carolyna Aguiar The video installation DSÍ-embodyment proposes to experience through…
Participation in exhibitions
Lygia 100 years
Pinakotheke Cultural Rio de Janeiro (Oct – Dec 2021)
Lygia 100 years
Pinakotheke Cultural São Paulo (dec 2021 to jan 2022)
13ª Bienal do Mercosul
Porto Alegre (sep to nov 2022)
Pinakotheke Cultural Rio de Janeiro (out a dez 2021)
The performative exhibition ENCRUZILHADA was born from encounters – from Artistic Residencies in villages and communities from the North to South of Portugal – with women that live in the context of social silence and invisibility, and on the borderlines of their cities’ cultural events, who bravely and generously shared their stories and memories about their matriarchal heritage and legacies for this project.
Affective (re)learning – memory and autobiography to recover affection It’s an investigative system inside the performing arts field, createdand directed by the choreographer Ana Vitória,…
This work is developed by university institutions in graduation andpost-graduation courses, study and research groups, creativecollectives; as workshops in dance, theater or visual arts festivals, art-
education seminars, clinical art, body therapy and somatic practicesevents; as training course to many fields linked to corporeity; asprivate and collective body practice treatment; as body training foractors and movement direction to theater plays, choreographiccreations to dance companies, groups and performers.
What’s at stake in the performative act where life and art unfold and touch each other in the space of dance? Body itself? And what…
The dancer metamorphoses into another body. Corpse, fetus, flower, stone, tree, insect, ancestor. To welcome this chaosmos, it needs to become an incandescent emptiness crossed by alien forces and intensities. The dancer sends signals from a funeral pyre that has already turned to ashes.
But my body is not mine! He has a memory. Geological body. How to access this memory that life’s earthquakes have thrown from the top down in the deepest layers? It ages invisibly every second. Not the wishes. Our bodies that are not ours accompany us from afar carrying our lives that are not ours. It always passes to the side, on the blurred periphery of the field of vision.
The ballerina does not dance. Dreams of a body another. We are part of this dream and in the end we no longer know if she dreamed of us or if we are dancers dreaming. Now there’s only one body dilated to the entire space. And suddenly we’re breathing the same air. We all breathe the same air over and over again. Mouth to mouth. Melee. Apnea of life.
INSTALLATION DSÍ
What is at stake in the performative event where life and art bend and touch each other in the right space of dance? The body itself? And what body is this?
DSÍ challenged us to encounter this other space in the body. Underneath infinite layers of skin, we seek incessantly to touch the subtle surface of a preverbal, imaginary, perceptive, potent and sensory body.
Along this path, memory, its real or fictional marks and the moments of a life destabilized places in this body to reconnect it to new states in the here and now.
Mirrors of the self, reflections of the other that cross and perforate the thin layer of the performative action, mix and disintegrate into light particles that repulse and attract the moment of the gesture that is gestating. And the experience remakes itself.
AnaVitória
Poetic of Pulsion AnaVitoria presents us a work that, ultimately, questions the possibility of dance. It’s obvious that this questioning wouldn’t make any sense…
The first question discussed in “Pulsão do Laço” is related to space. As she presents us a stationary body, attached to the walls, she engenders the question – there will be dance? How this body – tied to the visible web that apparently hinders her every movement – could dance? We know for sure that somehow there will be dance; nevertheless, the awkwardness aroused by this first moment operates as to denaturalize dance as an act. Typically we would probably be in front of an empty stage, waiting for the show to begin; maybe we could find the body (-ies) motionless, but in a scenery suitable for dance – that means free spaces, open to movement. Here, the situation is different: the body is there, the space is there, but there seems to be an overwhelming tension between them both.
Dancing is only possible after an invitation. “Would you help me dance?”, asks AnaVitória to the audience, beginning thus a double procedure: first, the deconstruction of the space – by the ones who, tearing out of the walls the ribbons that tied down the body, will create the space where dancing is possible; second, the movements negotiation – as the body is subject to strength and action from the ones who detain the ribbons and thus determine the possible gestures. It’s obvious that, under this conditions, dance may or may not be performed: it’s possible that the body turns unable to move, suffocated by extremely close and dominating presences, by restrictive forces, by unavoidable tensions; or, in the opposite case, that dance happens by a conjugation of efforts, generating a harmony conditioned by the multiplicity of unpredictable movements.
AnaVitória’s work aims precisely to an agency of corporal pulsions that, aesthetically arranged, converge to an artistic experience. In this case, the ‘pulsion’ time doesn’t have to be understood in a specific or restrictive sense; it’s enough to rescue its etymological root – the latin verb pulsare, that registers, as possible definitions, ‘to propel’, ‘to expel’, ‘to vibrate’. The poetic of pulsions conceived by AnaVitória are built upon autonomous bodies, whose movements are not subjected to prior request; they have their plain right to movement safeguarded – they should vibrate, they should let their impulses outflow: only on the basis of this fundamental freedom can Ana Vitória deal with the imprevisibility that, entwined to the creative act, creates dance. To the poetic of pulsions, the singularity is essential.
We should observe that even though all of this happens in the physical space, it is in fact the reflex of a process that happens in the cognitive level. As a matter of fact, the negotiation between the bodies mirrors a negotiation of meanings that constitutes dance itself – more than that, it constitutes all art forms as communicative events. To make art possible, the game of senses proposed by the artist must be accepted by the one who is before the artwork: they must somehow engage as participants of the artistic experience, allow to recreate it from their own private repertory of significations. When this doesn’t happen, the incomprehension that blocks sensibility emerges; the art fails to be achieved – either by failure of the artist or by hostility of the audience. On the other hand, when the negotiation succeeds, the art that emerges is a singular experience produced by the complicity between artist and audience. What AnaVitória makes is give concreteness to this exchange that, usually, remains invisible.
However, the breaking point is inevitable. Ana Vitória keeps to herself, secretly, a pair of scissors: which she uses to break the ties, ending the experience she had created on her own. It’s a necessary action, as the return to de daily routine can’t be forever postponed. To interrupt the negotiation doesn’t mean, however, to end the symbolic act: this, internalized by the acting-audience (in an even deeper process, precisely due to the active role that was given to them), remains registered – not only by memory, but also in the body surface, precisely due to the participation in the creating gesture. Once participants of the dance, the body pulsions don’t leave them: they keep repeating them secretly – making the bound that once united them to Ana Vitória eternal.
Henrique Marques-Samyn
For years and years of our existence, we have the privilege of one encounter. Every month, we are shown from the inside out. This incarnated…
These bodies build their freedom: a (feminist) interpretation to Ferida Sábia
For centuries, women have remained condemned to their biological destiny. Repeated androcentric values – many times openly misogynous – crystallised a “difference” where the feminine, always in the condition of the opposite side, inferior and peripheric, remained determined by deviations inscripted in its bodily surface. How could this supposed weakness not lead to dependency? How could this proheminent sensitivity not lead to unreasoning, even madness? How could reproduction, as inevitable destiny, not entice confinement disguised as care?
This is how the idea was built, bringing women closer to nature – wild, puzzling and dangerous – determined as men’s duty the exertion of domination: in a supposed “war of sexes”, men had the civilizatory task to handle.
To tame women, to control them, keep them under firm rein: this is how the violence over female bodies that was (and still is) perpetrated countless times was validated; a violence both physical and symbolic. How could he not cover her, who – lustful and subject to an unstable nature – could attract the man to the shadow of her dark breast? Over the whore’s skin, the saint’s mantle was thrown, veiling her, supposedly to her own sake. Casted away from public space and from power, condemned to the undergrounds, an image was coined to woman as damned, femme fatale, avatar of every damnation. However, there is no power without resistance; and over the centuries, the silenced ones started to make themselves heard – with screams that would echo louder every day.
Because it’s necessary to take into account that the starting point here is the body – or, to say it in a more specific way: a corporal state, meshed into a net of significations where the multiple shapes set it up; that, in different cultures, it has been associated to the “feminine essence” as spontaneous manifestation of its proximity to the untamed “nature”; that on this basis served to the patriarchal order to assure the “impurity” of women, her damned condition as someone (or something) to keep distant based on their sinister and annoying aspects. Nightgowns, undergarments and underskirts operate as indexes of this conceived femininity based on the biological dimension, that insists in putting the blood eclosion as an evidence – a sign, for its part, androcentrically associated to violence, as a manifestation of a natural state where the borders between woman and beast is graded (“Ferida Sábia”: night gowns held by bull’s bones), or sees the woman as a mere manifestation of her natural cycle (“Ferida Sábia”: association nightgown ~ cherry trees ~ period blood).
On the other hand, what does Ana Vitoria dare to do when registering and exposing her period blood, but to denounce the biological instance to what women is reduced by essentialist speeches, simultaneously violating the rules that makes the period blood an object of shame – something to be hidden by principles that, using “hygiene” as a subterfuge, create a group of practices and artefacts destined to confine in private spaces everything that violates the aesthetics from masculine spaces? That’s where the set of items gathered by Ana Vitoria takes us – basins, second skins – shaping the place where everything that shelters, protects or symbolizes this body converges. A body damned, by the patriarchy, to never get dissociated from the biological referent to what it’s allegedly reduced.
This collection of objects, placed in the installation space, is an exterior reflex of a materialization of femininity that is also inscribed in the body, where it erupts as a repertory of gests mobilized by Ana Vitória in her choreographic structure. The prison where patriarchy shaped the feminine body is turned into a wreck when it conquers its own freedom. The sewing practice – that is so intrinsically associated to women and at other times served as initiatic rite to girls when they got their first period – reveals itself as another metaphor: in “Ferida Sábia”, the bodies in conviviality are dedicated precisely to unwind the threads that have entangled them before, thus alluding to the emancipatory feminist process; not by chance, this is the beginning of the coreography, which developement will mirror a progressive liberation. Stuck in the beginning to ritualized movements, the bodies break their shackles of tradition through dance; and conquer, simultaneously, the right to a voice – that, at first, is reduced to lines that were crystalized by centuries of oppression, and afterwards shows its singularity, precisely where the sexist dispositives have put only instances of an unchangeable “feminin” condition.
Therefore, this is what Ana Vitória makes: denounce those traditional structures that have built women’s bodies and destinies and reclaim a new order, patriarchy threatening, where women are allowed to build new meanings to their own bodies; a new order where these are places of experience, not oppression. All of this is Feminist for sure, and it all also points to a Transfeminism to the extend that it gives the basis to the body to materialize its own gender expression, in a way that women can freely build their feminility. “Ferida Sábia”: not a “feminine” art, but a feminist art – and thus audacious and liberating.
Henrique Marques-Samyn
DA COISA CORPORAL?
What is behind the corporal thing?
Therefore we pass from a motionless opposition of shape and matter to a mid-dimension zone, energic, molecular, that lets us perceive an energetic matter in movement, carrying singularity or hecness, that are implicit shapes combined with deformation processes.
Art, as performed in this work of Ana, consists in following matter fluxes, consists in offering our feeling capacity the possibility of capturing invisible forces, of showing the metamorphosis moment. When searching the evidence of time in the body, the artist reveals that eternity, as matter in movement and not as transcendent emptiness, points to life as artwork, a sensorial mass product of experience, where memory and desire compose their existential upgrades.
Hélia Borges