2021, video-performance and installation, 02:14. Temporal, San José, Costa Rico

Video available until December 2, 2021

Text by Sofía Villena Araya

 

Synthetic composition with underwater frequencies,

computerized rhythm of high-pitched sounds and intermittent hums,

invest the natural light with strangeness

Diffused, she rests on the horizon that closes in on itself:

turquoise sky blurred in a light-blue sea

circumscribe a tubular world

The light gives the horizon transparency and merges it with the internal space

A back and forth between background and form takes place

Immersed in this tubular world, a hand subtly emerges without haste

The hand flows lightly like a plant under water

With undulating movements, it withdraws to converge with the horizon

Multiplicity of worlds reveal themselves one by one:

Of these worlds we not always have full views,

yet we notice that they are made up of the same matter:

air and water as malleable fabric-surface-images

that fold and unfold into diverse flat and three-dimensional structures

From these other worlds, more arms and legs peek out with curiosity

In their gentle contortions they resemble a mixture of plants and animals:

swans, algae, perhaps snakes or turtles. Arms and legs take on a life of their own

to suggest themselves as new beings

Strange mixture of humans and more-than-humans form a common universe

The horizon-worlds may well be their surroundings, but also

each world is a corporeal extension of the peculiar beings

Immersa motora blends limbs and trunk, habitat and body, world and surface, matter and shape, form and background, outside and inside in a universe of new possibilities. Ingrid Cordero's video-performance animates worlds-horizons elaborated with textile material. The piece translates the tactile dimension of the fabric and brings us intuitively closer to the worlds: attracted by the familiar-foreign beings, cautious but curious, we can insert our limbs through the holes that plunge into the horizon. From that immersion, we can re-emerge as new beings, transforming our bodily phenomenology.

Immersa motora poetically materializes a version of the promise that Judith Butler manifests in Bodies that Matter (1993). In that book, the materiality of bodies tends “to indicate a world beyond themselves” and this “movement beyond their own limits [...] seems central to what bodies ‘are’.” The argument is woven through a sharp critique of several psychoanalysts and philosophers, among them Lacan, who secures bodily limits or contour as a privileged way of signifying the world; in his theory, the subject, by recognizing itself as “whole” in front of the mirror, formulates its bodily ego as episteme.

Butler criticizes the essentialisms in feminist political struggles and denounces the idea of psychosis as a pathology that guards bodily boundaries to sustain an ‘identity coherence’. Differently, the author points to unstable constitutions of the corporeal and questions how and why some bodies can, and others can’t materialize and obtain social legibility; this very promise of a livable, perhaps pleasurable, psychosis is what Immersa motora encourages.

In a conversation I had with the artist about the piece, Ingrid told me about her interest to create a space of rest. The space of rest achieved motivates to let go, activating an epistemo-poetic exploration of limits to re-signify the corporeal through curiosity, movement, and play.