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make/unmake us a body
'you hit it with the paintball, and now it’s your responsibility’
Single-channel video, Duration 3'47"
Sound sourced from defibrillators
Sound sourced from defibrillators
Stemmed from the medical gesture of resuscitation, the domestic labour of processing materials and cooking, observations of playground relativistic scenarios, and how touch is oftentimes seen as a gesture of care, the work is a (re)consideration of different forces at play in dilemmas concerning life through the gesture of touch and applying pressure through our own hands. There is something in challenging a body and physically and metaphorically pushing it to its limit; provocation and the degree of justification are laid bare. It considers the symbolically loaded nature of an action, especially of those bodily oriented processes, and the semantics of such questioning.
Since food in the form of processed meat is used in analogy as a signifier/euphemism/dysphemism for the subjected body (no live animals, human tissues, or live biological tissues were used in the production), the actions of touching, pressing and squeezing subsequently could be perceived as affecting the cycle of consumption built on the sacrifice of other(ed) bodies. Touch in this scenario is expanded into a spectrum of intensity, verging on the subtle as much as the forceful. Ice is sourced for its amorphous quality, ubiquity, malleability, and its transition of states (from liquid to solid) as a requisite for its weaponisation. Seeing that ice is unsuspected and 'invisible' (between transparent and translucent), and yet a lethal, untraceable instrument, this references and gives new meaning to the notion of ‘be like water’ in the rhetorics of duelling, martial arts, and liquidation (in terms of both killing and business assets, often used as exit strategies— exiting the present, the [corporate] body, etc.). In such ways, the work parallels the futility of bodies, the resistance against, and the defence of them on a larger scale, revealing and integrating with its Sisyphean cycle.
How do we resuscitate bodies in perpetual open season?
© Vyvyan y. L. | 2022