Ola, can you share how you began developing this piece? Where did the idea come from, and how did you work on it?
Chronologically speaking, FIGURY (przestrzenne) in English FIGURES (spatial), made in 2022, marked the starting point for The Second Body (2023), and it was where most of the artistic decisions were made back then. FIGURES (spatial) is a pivotal project for me artistically. It’s a project structured around revisiting my past work, its patterns, questions, research methods, and affinities.
After working with the serpentine dances for more than 10 years, I wanted to dialogue and follow the echoes of that imprint. My goal was to produce material for the body that would connect with the serpentine dances and yet function independently of it. The result was a solo dance performance for outdoor spaces and museums. Another goal of this project was to propose a new reading of Fuller’s ‘dancing dress’, focusing on the reflection around the body-object presence.
After framing the idea, I invited Alix Boilot to collaborate on the second part of the project. She is a visual artist, together we started from, first; the existing body of work, and second; imagining new reading what that new object would be like. The discussion started with what it is not. Not a sculpture, nor a scenography, tool, or a prop. In our dialogue, I anchored on artistic affinities with Simone Forti’s dance constructions, and I made some links with Franz West adaptatives, Tadeusz Kantor bio-obiekt, Lucinda’s Childs’s very first works, to build on the specificities of the mechanism body-material co-partnership in the future direction of our collaboration. The shape of the ice form was proposed by Alix. I was mainly working outdoors in the parks and forest to build the solo performance. It was important to acknowledge the presence of the organic environment, so the question of materials was pre-determined by that process. Materials such as tree parts, sand, wax, plants, and ice, were on the list to navigate throughout the tests. Ice was my preferred material because it tests the duration of the gesture and by doing so it resists the unnecessary. I wanted to focus on one specific action verb, which is; to handle and to endure in terms of extended duration. Once we agreed on the verbs; to handle and endure, shape; scapula, and the material; ice, I could start developing the choreographic sequence as a preparation for the film document in which we see me in a dance studio activating this biomorphic form made in ice, about 10 kg, the size of my upper body.
The initial idea was to keep it as a film document. But soon after filming, we all realised for different reasons, that it needed to be performed with the public. The Second Body leaked out of FIGURY (przestrzenne) film document.
The Second Body is a strong and almost radical visual proposal, as is often the case in your work, but it also has a strong bodily and sensory effect on the audience. What are your thoughts in relation?
Visuality in my work is there to play with the performativity of our gaze. The public is invited in a process of navigating through its different mechanisms. It’s only through duration that a certain type of complexity emerges that interests me as a material. One of the parameters for the body-object relation was that I liked it to dematerialise or disappear symbolically at some point. I was interested in the double temporality, not in terms of display; body next to ice, but as an empathic transfer.
Simone Forti once said; that what we know of things through our bodies, it’s an important phase for me, as it taps into thinking, learning, and sensing about things through our bodies, both on human and environmental levels. The ice melting and the body’s presence are not separated but interconnected in quite a complex way, by watching the ice melting we get closer to the narratives of the body and the limits of human experience. And the other way around.
The frozen body of water and the human body on stage are affecting each other throughout the whole piece. As one melts the body heat of the other, the other gets burned by the cold. How do you look at this co-dependence of the human body and body of nature, at disappearing bodies?
Even if the ice seemingly disappears it is present elsewhere and that’s how I like to see it. The drink you had before the performance is already a recycled form of water that came from somewhere else. The humidity we absorb becomes part of the tears we cry. I am quite intrigued by the recycling capacity of the body of water, and how these two seemingly different performers co-evolve. Somehow it puts things in perspective. Bodies are just a small part of the waste world we are part of, constantly shape-shifting…