Issue 15

Gunpowder Body

24.06.2019 - 23.09.2019

Co-edited with Lorena Tabares Salamanca

In light of the complexities of the body in action, nothing can be taken for granted. In the vastness of the field of art related to the live body—performance, action art, live arts—presence is embodied through the artistic exploration of the gesture, whose existence is unfolded in the momentary simultaneity of the here and now. In a nutshell, movement is presence. Today, embodying is an act that corresponds to a plural universe of practices and coexistence. While this universe corresponds to the composition of community, it forces us to question the possibilities of the gesture itself.

We started this editorial work from a paradigm, that of a reflection that goes beyond the centuries, a phrase so powerful that it wraps around itself and conceals its own inwardness in contemporaneity: Spinoza’s question What can a body do? is still a nuclear reference in artistic practices that take form and body as its subjects. In this volume, we present a dialogue and a point of correlation from the opacity implicit in the live body to the possibility of disrupting it—the Gunpowder Body, referring to the echo of inventive power and the expansion of the limits that we take for granted.

Modernity came to de-territorialize and de-erotize the body, from the basis of science, where knowledge appears as a form of control and domination. Nevertheless, in this scenario of correlation with life, between repletion and difference, “power is not [Cartesian] knowledge.” This is why we attach ourselves to poetics and the play of language, beyond questions of rhetoric, to talk about the expansive power of gesture as a possibility of the common.

In this geography invented America, a region of multiple regions, we inhabit a contradiction: we are, but we have never stopped discovering ourselves. In the sociocultural realm, the individual has been pierced through by corporal and semantic participation as a strategy to rebuild the social threads broken by so many dictatorships and entangled by so many development projects. Reacting to the imposed limiting traps—decisive when talking about the internal circumstances in time and space that affect the collaborators of this volume—the body becomes memory. This way, a body always implicates other bodies: communing.

In this issue of Terremoto, we ask ourselves: Does a possibility of communing exist in the poetics of expansive presence? Is the power of the body a detonator for the re-signification of language and memory? Does the archive of the artistic practices of the live body—performance, action art, live arts—enable a questioning of the symbolic and cultural capital of a society?

15
2019

Luis Garay, "Fisicología", 2013. Image courtesy of the artist

15 2019

15 2019

15 2019

15 2019

15 2019

15 2019

15 2019

15 2019

15 2019

15 2019

15 2019

15 2019

15 2019

filter by

Category

Geographic Zone

date