Porous Body: Performative practices as research in contexts of socially-environmentally-engaged art 

by Walmeri Ribeiro

Presentation

            By discussing the effects of colonization and the overexploitation of natural resources, the climate crisis, and the need to change contemporary lifestyles, this proposed performative practice is guided by the emerging methodology of actions and projects carried out by the Sensitive Territories Platform ( https://www.territoriossensiveis.com.br), a platform for research and creation in the arts and sciences, which brings together temporary collectives of artist-researchers, scientists and local communities so that together they can act in a performative and collaborative way to investigate and build dialogues between the arts, society and environmental issues.

           Created in 2014 by Brazilian artist Walmeri Ribeiro, the platform aims to (re)think artistic practices of creation and fruition, investigating ethical-political-aesthetic ways of making art, as well as the social and environmental engagement of the arts in the face of contemporary challenges. By believing in the political dimension and the sensitive power of artistic making, acting in the construction of fields of affection, it seeks to stimulate ways of imagining, dreaming, and acting in the construction of other worlds, of new and possible modes of existence and coexistence between humans and non-humans.

           Developed in the form of research and artistic creation laboratories, the actions are based on concepts such as emergence, processuality, experience, porous body, embodied knowledge, embodiment, and emplacement. Based on performative, immersive, and collaborative actions, performances, site-specific interventions, visual, sound, and audiovisual works, installations and publications unfold.

            For some years now, our focus of research and creation has been on acting in ruined territories, intensely devastated, polluted, and affected by the impacts of a modern project of "civilization", centered on extractivism and progress, which "blinds all vital sensory organs and creates insensitive bodies, accustomed to violence" (Aráoz, 2020).

           How, then, can we re-sensitize our bodies? How can we create ways of [over]living, imagining, and dreaming amidst the open veins of the Anthropocene?  How can we make our bodies "porous bodies" (Ribeiro,2021), activating all their power to act in the face of contemporary crises? How can this practice present us with sensitive aspects of the territories, encouraging the emergence of questions that can only be asked through an embodied experience?

Becoming a porous body

Performative proposition By Walmeri Ribeiro

Part I 

At this moment, I would like to invite you to carry out this performative experience in a place where you are living or where you are staying at the moment.

….

Take off your shoes.

Sit down in a comfortable position.

Take a deep breath.

Be in an upright position.

Close your eyes.

Breathe…

Inhale and open a space in your body. ....

Exhale and I realise …I am just here and now...

 This is a practice of how to be present.

....

Look at the movements of your body.

Keep these movements flowing.

They will become deeper and slower.

…

Keep breathing for eight minutes.

…..

Open your eyes slowly and carefully.

Keep your breathing active.

We're now going to do a little performative mapping. Please, put on your shoes and coats and follow us.

In silence.

…

This is a practice of being present.

This is a practice of connecting and creating territories-bodies and bodies-territories.

This is a practice of feeling, listening, smelling, and establishing a new form of relationship between your body and the biosphere (ecosystem?). 

This is a practice of transforming our desensitized bodies into porous bodies, capable of perceiving more than human actions, voices, sounds, and presence.

This is a practice of being in a performative state and of creating other modes of existence and coexistence.

This is an event.

Porous Body

      A porous body is a way of being in the world. A porous body is not an everyday, automatized body, nor is it just a body in dislocation, in movement.  But it is a body that seeks another self, a self that builds, that connects, that creates zones of contamination and contagion, without borders, without hierarchies between species. A porous body is an available body, permeable, in a state of full attention. A body capable of feeling, listening, and absorbing (becoming body) micro-movements, micro-sounds, tactilities, and temporalities, as well as macro-movements and the amplitude of the whole in which it is inserted. The porous body is therefore a state of being and acting in the world. A state of being in a poetics of otherness and the construction of other worlds. (RIBEIRO, 2021, p.57)

 Becoming a porous body

Performative proposition By Walmeri Ribeiro

Part II

As you walk, keep breathing by paying attention to the movement of the air in your body.

Inhale and exhale.

....
As you walk, observe the movements, the little things, the small non-human bodies, the human bodies, observe the sounds, the smells, the micro-movements of your body, and the micro and macro-movements of your surroundings. observe and perceive yourself being observed
....
When we find our place, we will stop there, together.

Just look at the landscape for a few minutes.
Take a deep breath.

Inhale and exhale.
....

When you're ready to enter that landscape, go there and try to become part of it.
Stay in the here and now. 
Hold your breath. 

…..
Take your time.
Through being in the here and now, we are building a community
human and non-human.
Take your time.
….

When you want to go out, go out and observe the changes in yourself and the surroundings.

Look again at the landscape. Now, can we call it a territory?

Notice what has happened in your body when becoming a territory or look at how such a territory-body relates to you.

 ….