For this is my body e Do not touch me. Identity and border. This is the exercise that holds the parts of this calendar together. The body is the territory on which this dance takes place, between knowledge and self-expression, relationship and encounter with the other, and the inevitable encounter with the limit which is the sacred space that allows the dance in which each person rhythms the movement , towards himself and towards the other, in the theater of existence. For this is my body e Do not touch me: we have stolen two expressions from the register of the sacred to enunciate truths that pertain to the mystery of the body that each of us is, in ourselves and in relationships. We attempted to write about the body, through the photographic work of Barbara Cucinotta and Cristina Latini. A body investigated, searched, felt, touched, an attempt to overcome the threshold, an attempt to adhere to the mystery that the body is, whether it is mine or that of another. Because it is true that the body and I are two demonic dancers, they seek each other, escape each other, limit each other, desire each other, betray each other.
My body, anatomy of my existence, symptom body, emotion body, body often unknown or silenced: the photographic diptychs of Barbara Cucinotta address this body, in a courageous exploration of the self, which attempts to know itself by searching for similarities in world. The body of the other, an expression of a feeling which we approach, in a double register of envelopment and limit: this is the experience offered by Cristina Latini who photographs the dancer Alessandra Cristiani in the performative act, capturing Alessandra in the moment of maximum adhesion to one’s body, entering its sacred space and returning a gaze which, in the attempt to grasp the other, sees the border emerge, the point of tangency where I touch the unknowable which remains the mystery of the other. But it is on this border that we meet and recognize each other.
The body that we are trying to describe is a body that returns to itself, a body that is inseparable from the psyché – psyche, spirit, soul – of which it is, according to Ortega y Gasset, an expression, manifestation, symbol. A body no longer objectified, whose nature is not only physical or biological, but also biographical, psychic, as a topography of intimacy, tectonics of the person, manifest symbol of a hidden reality, hieroglyph, metaphor. A psychobiographical depth of the body put at risk by its overexposure which reduces it to a thing among things, or to a performance space, a limit to be expanded or compressed, manipulated, forced.
Violate. Instead, considering the symbolic nature of the body, its complexity, safeguards its humanity. For Ortega y Gasset, the body is the meeting point of everything that exists: «Our body is interposed between the universe and us like a sieve or a lattice that selects, through its sensations, the immense accumulation of objects that they complete the world. But doesn’t the same thing happen for intimate perception? At any moment we perceive of our Self only a small number of thoughts, images and emotions which we see pass like the flow of a river before our inner gaze.” Our body is a huge perceiver. This is what we can experience in meditation, when we bring our attention to the breath and access bodily awareness: «The breath that unites body and mind, heart and vital spirit, does not only encounter emotions: unexpected and often unwanted, they are I also encounter thoughts, with their load of memories, considerations, judgements, claims, pains… » (D. Melloni).
Perception is everything. «I am that animal of perception and movement which is called body», Merleau-Ponty would say, understanding it as a primary source, a first and unavoidable place. There is no thought, no concept that can be formulated regardless of or outside of corporeity, understood as one’s own body or, more profoundly, as flesh, chair, always in relation to a world. Therefore, all our openness to the world, to others, even dialogue and conversation, everything passes through the flesh. There is nothing that can be said, thought, expressed, that can ignore the flesh that we are. What does the body do? He sees and touches, he is seen and he is touched. «It is a silent and imperceptible hinge between itself and the world and lives in the dialectic of knowing how to feel, but also letting itself be seen and moved. The soul is “the body as emotion and emotion”: there is always a movement, whether there is emotion or emotion, what touches us, moves us and in this movement the body is alive. It is in this movement that body and soul vibrate into each other. And that’s when we witness an incarnate ego.
l touch – touch as Jean-Luc Nancy would say – it is a gesture that is never neutral or simple, and brings with it the experience of limits and thresholds: the experience of encounter. On the threshold I experience the inexhaustible spacing between intimate and foreign, with its inevitable trail of confusion: when we meet on the edge is it day or is it night? the poet asks. It is confusion, a necessary reformulation of the border, otherwise we risk psychosis.
In order to give itself, intimacy needs a separating element that ensures everyone has their own place. Every relationship – be it love or social – leverages this interstitial space, it exists only thanks to the margin of a distance. This is my body. Do not touch me…. The untouchable becomes an infinite movement. And we are alive in this movement. And this is perhaps the secret in which every relationship finds its grace.
#body #protagonist #Kromato #calendar #identity #border
– 2024-04-21 10:32:05
