writings.
About language, identity & play.
Meaning and sense are born out of our interaction with others. Through it we build an image of ourselves, of our identity. By sharing a common code, our language and all it can transmit, we recognize ourselves as being part of something larger than the individual.
Play, as an act of creativity, allows for metamorphosis and interaction. It permits the articulation of seemingly opposites into something new, something with an identity of its own. It doesn’t deny differences and underlying tensions. Rather, it opens up the possibility of multiplicity by overcoming pre-established boundaries, bringing forth originality and uniqueness.
Language is acknowledgement and perception of being. As we explore the pre-established map it lays before us, and use the logic of imagination, we stretch the limits of communication to encounter uncertainty and ambiguity: that which is foreign to us. We enter a world full of new possible meanings, of multiple senses and identities.
Without avoiding paradoxes, without expecting to find “truth”, we can explore and create a new code. We can search for an enhanced way of sharing and communicating. One that will allow us to inhabit metaphors, the plurality of who we are, and the plurality we can become.
(August 2005)
On “ Body Work”
Body Work, as I learnt it, encompasses the following disciplines, techniques and methods amongst others: energetic, Eutony, Sensorial-Perceptive, expressive, theatrical and play. Its goals are: general improvement of the quality of life; prevention and treatment in the health field; involving the body to facilitate learning in the educational field and developing the person’s creative and artistic potential.
A person’s Body Image is the representation of the body. It’s internal, a metaphor of who we are. It is simultaneously composed of unconscious past and present relational experiences; it is dynamic, in constant construction and de-construction of the multiple images it admits.
Expression through language, modelling, painting, music and movement helps this dynamic process to take place. Loss of the ability to put one's Body Image at play (variation; construction/ de-construction) is possible sign of pathological processes; such as is an obstinate attempt at maintaining an inflexible and rigid internal image of ourselves.
Body Work helps us find new meanings and metaphors for the bond we have established with our body, our emotions and our surroundings.
(August 2005)
On the multiple shores of the bridge (that has no shores).
- “I feel stupid speaking like this, like the book wants me to.“
- “Learning is artificial, until it becomes natural.”
- “I took you apart, I interpreted you, I told you, I left you and I don’t even know if I put the pieces away before leaving.”
- “Is it me who’s getting all this, or am I just receiving it on behalf of the group?
I must have left some space for them to come close.”
I look back on my tracks. So many changes of focus and perspective.
People I get skin from, people I give skin to.
Disgust for those who don’t create - risk of cancer? unreasonable precaution?
Neither vomit, nor excrement.
Mutual warnings.
Mutual intimacy.
Intersection.
I cross over myself, like my own bridge.
I am crossed over by others, on their way somewhere else,
and they drag me with them,
but I also remain where I am.
Bridge.
Bridge without shores.
Millenary ghost bridge.
Today I discovered my body is a bridge,
and that not only I cross it, they do to; they prowl;
they wear out my wood; they stain it and disfigure it.
How can I still say it’s mine?
How can I doubt it...
Mists and darkness from which so many countenances arise
...where you are to be found as well.
31/10/2004 - This text was written during the seminar on “Group Coordination, Body and Intervention”given by Patricia Mercado (Social Psychologist) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Can the body be here and now?
Sometimes another persons’ radiation is like the H Bomb.
Instant aging, unavoidable infidelity.
Shifting of the horizon through friction; and in spite of it.
Walking down our own evolution and retracing our steps.
Living “ahead of time”, as if such a thing were possible.
Experiencing wisdom we know is not ours.
Repeating the unrepeatable.
Layers of gauze, which provide consistency; rigidity; numbness; repertoire.
They don’t however, mount up; nor are they hollow.
They penetrate, but they’re not material.
They coexist and are diverse; yet they can also become indistinguishable.
We possess them and they possess us in return.
Can the body be here and now?
Thank God for our skeleton!
10/2004 - This text was written during the seminar on “Group Coordination, Body and Intervention”given by Patricia Mercado (Social Psychologist) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Reflexive verbs, my black cat and the sound of silence.
Writing about absence...
The song in which Simon and Garfunkel speak to darkness comes to my mind...“Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again...people writing songs, that voices never shared, no one dared... to break the sound of silence.” I can’t remember the lyrics very well...
Taking a break from typing, I look at my cat and speak to it. It’s black, it doesn’t answer (it tries though, it purrs) and I wonder what difference there would be between talking to the dark, talking to my cat and talking to myself... talking to someone who’s absent. Imagining a conversation with my sister, who lives far away. She’s absent, but present within me.
Talking to myself, looking into the mirror... or not. Talking to myself, to someone faceless, imaginary; or talking to a clearly identified person, not physically present however, but recalled.
Absence = virtual presence?
I think that what these situations have in common is that both the questions and the answers come from inside of me.
It’s like reflexive verbs, look at myself, listen to myself, talk to myself, ask myself, answer myself, lose myself, find myself, reflect myself. The point is: what are the ingredients to those verbs? Encounter, fantasy, delusion? Do I make them up alone, or are others present, in spite of their supposed absence? And when others are physically present, do I stop talking to myself, seeing myself, etc? Or is it like talking in front of a mirror, but with a temporary change of face? Does that face contribute with anything new, or will everything always be from within me, outwards, and inwards once more?
Perhaps the secret lies in that moment outside, whether what returns has been modified or not and whether I’m capable of distinguishing.
What is the cartography of communication?
18/11/98 ... the sound of silence...
(This text was presented during my official training as a Body Work Coordinator at the Instituto de la Máscara, B.A., Argentina.)
Sad is the fate of the body that ends up a clown, Jester of king and court.
Shaped by demand.
Dismantled and taken to pieces.
Transformed into an old whore who follows empty choreographies.
Choreographies become vacant though stereotype,
senseless repetition.
Gone are the days of glory, of dexterity.
Gone is the pulse, the swimming in the flows among the crevices.
Arm strokes which lack direction and movement,
undermining support, filled with polyester.
10/2004 - This text was written during the seminar on “Group Coordination, Body and Intervention”given by Patricia Mercado (Social Psychologist) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
