Writings

“The body is material. It is separate. Distinct from other bodies. A body begins and ends against another body. Even the void is a very subtle kind of body” Writes Jean-Luc Nancy in 58 hints on the body, emphasizing the density of the body, he describes a body that is a container and also a limit, that functions as a barrier between other bodies. Nancy continues: “A body is immaterial. It is a drawing, it is an outline, it is an idea”, and so it seems that the body moves in a relationship of opposites, between the material and the immaterial, although what is proposed is rather an experience of the body that conceives it both in its density, in its containing function, and in its capacity to open itself to the outside and to be modified, as a drawing, as an idea.

Performance art is an artistic discipline where artists choose their own bodies as support and main instrument, it is ephemeral and puts in check the traditional ideas about art. Where is the work? in the body of the artists? in the action? in the registration? The very word performance is subject to several possible interpretations that are modified depending on the context, since it can be related to visual arts, theater, ritual acts and political protests. What performance art does is to explore different conceptions of the body, proposing new relationships, both with our own body and with the environment.

Roma Vaqueros Diaz and Florencia Sosa Rey are two performance artists who came together in Aconquija, Catamarca for the Raíces residency. From similar perspectives, with differences and points of convergence in their work, they explored through performance art the possible relationships between body and landscape. The works that emerged after 15 days of intimate coexistence with the landscape of Aconquija revolve around the following questions: How is a body constituted? Where are its limits? What does art contribute to the relationship between body and landscape?

Roma Vaqueros Diaz is a performer who lives in the City of Buenos Aires. The project she carried out in roots revolved around observing how body and landscape affect each other. During the residency she worked on several actions located in different areas of Aconquija and in the final exhibition she presented an installation where two videos of performances (Acción para encontrar una madre en la tierra and Acción para acariciar las montañas II, the latter in collaboration with the other resident Florencia) dialogued with photos of actions in the river, scores placed on wood placed on the floor, soil extracted from the place on which she spread symbolic elements, and the canvas that was used for the actions in the river. Each element that was part of the installation kept parts of the landscape and the link that the artist established with it.

In general terms, a landscape is defined as a surface where different elements interact. In Roma’s works we see her body interacting with the wind, the river, the mountains, the earth and the stones, creating a new subjective landscape that emerges from that relationship. Nancy also proposes that the characteristic of a body is exposure, being exposed to contact with other bodies, then, a body is defined precisely in the relationship with others. A body is an unfolding, an exposure, a capacity to be affected and to affect: to inhabit a body implies being exposed to affection. In her works, Roma investigates this affective relationship between her body and the landscape, explores the interstices between bodies and wonders about the changes that this exposure produces. The artist works with a conception of the body as a totality that includes memories, knowledge and bonds; in Acción para encontrar una madre en la tierra she performs a kind of ritual with an antenna built with found elements (a branch and a stone) and puts her knowledge and her family history in interaction with the landscape, in an attempt to hear her mother’s voice in the wind; in Acción para aciciar las montañas she decides to invite Florencia, the other resident with whom she shared her stay at Raíces, and thus explore the new bond generated. Taking as a tool the relationship of the bodies with each other, each one loaded with experiences and knowledge, and the dialogue between the bodies and the mountain, the score written by the artist describes the action as follows: “At sunset/ head for the hill/ accompanied by a friend/ share mates, words and tangerines/ Then/ perform together/ action to caress the mountains.”

One thing that Roma’s and Florencia’s works have in common is the contemplation of the landscape as a starting point, a contemplation that turns into actions that rehearse sensitive ways of inhabiting through small gestures. Florencia Sosa Rey presented three video performances in the final exhibition: Te devuelvo la mirada, failure to be received and choreography for walking: ovejas, these three performances proposed the encounter with different elements that make up the landscape of Aconquija and reflected on the tensions that can arise from it. Florencia worked with the idea of identity in relation to the landscape, of Catamarca roots but born in Canada, the artist came to Raíces with a series of questions: What questions come to light in the process of remembrance? How can distance from family and its cultural practices shape identity? What are the limits between embracing my heritage, creating kinship, extractivist practices and the exoticism of my culture? In the actions carried out during the residency, Florencia works from these concerns.

Te devuelvo la mirada is a video that arises from rehearsing ways to approach some horses in the area, the artist tries to connect with the daily practice of horseback riding of her family, the result was several attempts to establish a bond with the horses. In the video we see the artist slowly approaching them, offering them food, trying to somehow gain their trust. We perceive that this is a failed attempt, but the action resides in a body that unfolds towards another body that is as unfamiliar as it is familiar. The same happens in Failure to be recieved, where the artist tries to accommodate herself to eat a tangerine on a stone, looking for a position where her body is accepted by it. How to get the acceptance of these distant bodies? How is this new identity landscape shaped between the inherited and the acquired? Florencia carefully observes the landscape, analyzes the elements that compose it and with her body performs small gestures trying to merge with it.

The work done and the works that emerged from this edition of roots, had the body as a central axis, but a conception of body that carries with it memories, knowledge and questions about identity that blur the limits and open the possibilities of it, proposing art as a bridge between us and the world, as a tool to create new landscapes.

Cecilia Vega, Aconquija, 2022

How many bodies go into one body is not a question, but a certainty. There is no concrete answer because the possibilities are inexhaustible. Bodies person, bodies stone, bodies flora, bodies that are landscape. Roma Vaquero Diaz proposes us to feel again that we are part of the territory. We, the plants, the earth, the others.

How is it possible that we continue to perceive ourselves from our individuality? Are we not just a part of a whole?

That whole can be the gesture of approaching another to feel its strength. That whole can be re-arranging a garden so that the absence becomes the body. That whole can be rehearsing movements to inhabit a mourning.

In the landscapes we discover waters that circulate between rocks, flowers that emerge from the sand, cheeks that are a point of loving, sensitive, powerful contact. Each dyad supports and needs each other in the same way.

In all these relationships the skin appears as a first layer that lends itself to the other, permeable, tender. We are invited to ignore the limit, to occupy the landscape, to encourage contact.
Roma’s body is present, this time through the camera’s lens, letting us know that her performance is intimate and in need of that attention. Her arms hold branches and the opposite, her torso feels the weight of the stones, her hands spread, furrow and caress. It is a process of passing through the body those elements that keep a history so that this memory is transferred from the object to the affectivity. Moving, sowing, removing, writing, touching. Small rituals to surrender to absence and, above all, to change.

In touch there is continuity, edges are erased, life is amplified. These spaces, now common, are linked territories. A mirror that gives us back the image of a power of life that is only sustained through the contact of each of the parts.

Lucía Seijo, Buenos Aires, 2022.

They (the hands) knead, they (the skins) embrace each other, they (the yolks) shred, they (the viscera) remember, they (the witches) tell ancestral secrets that they (the witches) have always carried in them (their lands).

Do we know how the earth we tread on tastes?

The gesture, the memory, the skin, the attachment, the bonds, the feeding, the healing, lead us to meet with all that drive of life that capitalism has not yet been able to capture. An affective memory that undulates between the folds of the body and speaks of caress, cloth, sun, corn, smile, encounter.

Are we aware of the memory that our touches carry?
A nakedness offers its folds. The skin and the universe inside our hands, our mouth, allow us to know the sensations of the world. The temperature and texture in each and every thing. We look inside a big mouth, she sheds us and her hands, which have the sun in their fingertips, transform bodies into the color of love.

Within these-our bodies we are becoming aware of a force. Through our body-earth circulate knowledge and incarnated memories that link and expand our desires in a communitarian way. Both patriarchy and capitalism discredit this power, make it invisible, exploit it, and appropriate not only the subjects, but also the history, the imagination and the affections of a territory, in a ferocious process where the alienation of women and the destruction of the earth go together.

Open layers of volcanic beings open with our fingers when we dive into the body-book-memory. And here the magic, we are invited to enter the skin, to caress its intimacy, to touch in silence its finitude and to let this body rest in the infinity of time. And in the memory of our fingertips will have become visible the invisible force.
I am the earth, the earth lives in me, because that is what I will be when I am no more.

Margarita García Faure, Buenos Aires, 2019.