Touch(ed)

Bodies are mountains, bigger and older than you can imagine. Sometimes, it can happen that, without change, everything can become totally different. If we can fall together here, we can be sure it's forever. 

Choreography: Chloe Chignell
Performance: Ellen Söderhult, Lisa Schåman, Gry Tingskog and Chloe Chignell

Performed at DOCH, Stockholm in 2016

Laying Down: Horizontal Proactivity
A SCORE

This score positions horizontality, or laying down, as a way for body/ies to not only claim space but also produce new territories, environments and ecologies. Laying down—often considered a position of passivity, or soft resistance, here becomes a proactive approach to rethinking the relationship between territory and the body. In laying down cozy-ness and a complete lack of urgency can become primary conditions for action.

This score can be undertaken individually or through collective imagination. It is not a matter of representing or becoming but through thinking the body/ies take space. This imagination does not ask for self-transformation or a moving towards the qualities of the landscapes; it is that the landscapes, through thinking, emerge as the body/ies. The imagination is thus a way of producing and participating in that, which is outside of the possible.  Thinking into being offers as a method a kind of radical assertion, “I laydown and an entire mountain range becomes my body”, it does not guess at or try out, but simply does.

Lay on your side, close your eyes and imagine your body as a mountain range. If you become uncomfortable adjust your position, new peaks and valleys might emerge.

Lay on your side, close your eyes and imagine your body as the horizon. You can spend time letting your body spread into flatness. The horizon extends past the walls of the room and the boarders of the city. Your body is the perimeter of the earth, the edge of the visible and the threshold of the possible.

Lay on your side, close your eyes and imagine your body as an iceberg. Your body is only the tip of the iceberg, below you is the rest of your body.

Lay on your side, close your eyes and imagine your body as a desert-scape. Your body is rolling sand dunes in constant formation and deformation by wind. 

Lay on your side, close your eyes and imagine your body as an island. Your body is a landmass that makes no contact with any other landmass and is partly submerged in water.

Lay on your side, close your eyes and imagine your body as the ocean. Your body is in soft and continual contact with every landmass.

​

INTIMATE CARTOGRAPHY​

If here I can address intimacy as the proximity between things, between people or otherwise; then I would like to propose intimacy as a method of mapping the world— mapping yourself into the world. The task of mapping is seemingly to orient yourself to space or to organize space in such a way that you can navigate it, territorialize it. But in fact mapping can also be a way of creating space and producing new kinds of organization and relations. 

As space is the primary material for mapping I want to expand upon the kinds of spaces with which intimate cartography takes and/or creates space.  (Of course mapping also happens through time and with time, but here we can focus on space).

PHYSICAL SPACE: concrete bodies, objects and places.

EMOTIONAL SPACE: the expression of space, feelings, sensations, maybe also vibe.

CONCEPTUAL SPACE: Thinking, or imagined spaces. For example: a mind map.

​Each of these different spaces offers different kinds of materials to organize, different things, and others for which relations can be made. It also becomes possible that we could, through intimate cartography, map between these spaces. A map traversing across materials and producing relations where before there might not have been.

The map is not absolute it is only a representation of how something might be. If a map becomes too fixed, If I were to print it in a book for example, then quickly it would just become an image of a map and no longer a map for forming relations. In this sense the map must be weakly made, it must be a bit fluid, and must be participated in by those that it organizes. Intimate cartography is then inviting performance, the map is somewhat more similar “to a theatre than a factory”.

“Always when a world comes to an end and a new is initiated, is the time of the map. Map-times stand for the transformation from one order (of space) toward another.” Schlögel Karl, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit, p.87.