7 parallel projections and loudspeakers

“Three Grades of Foreignness” monographic exhibition, La Fabbrica del Cioccolato Art Foundation, Switzerland, April 22 – September 23, 2017

Concept

In opposition to the medical term, the “foreign body” in this equation is the human body, who intrudes, violates and artificialize nature, and in consequence looses its oneness with nature, becoming an external element to the “body” of nature. This relation could be seen both on a macro level (humanity-nature), as an individual relation in which from childhood we loose our animal state for a civil state hence becoming external to the nature around us, which is being reshaped constantly hence moving further and further.

The deep dissonance and the gap between being one with nature and being hostile to nature create an inevitable tension entangled in modern identity, a prison made of mind (both organic as computerized), of opinions, of manners, exhausted with overflow of quick information - a tension that sounds of pain, not sorrowful but plain, dry, speechless.

Remote from nature we resent nature, we resent our bodies; our solitudes or/and our communities to become silent sculptures of a state in which we’re caged, as if in a spider-web equation we stand both as trapped victims, both as carnivores of our own self.

This in the macro area in which develops FOREIGN BODIES, an icon sonic installation for 7 parallel video projections, 14 loudspeakers and visuals, which takes a utopia to use it against itself, where the human figure, placed in the purity of nature, becomes the inversion of harmony around itself in a shape of a tense trembling sculpture. Lonely figures, animalistic, mechanic, blending and disturbing at the same time.

Work with dancers

Even though the work had involved seven remarkable dancers/choreographers, arriving from contexts of dance excellence such as Teatro alla Scala, in reality there is very little “dance” in it. Every still or moving state had been carefully chosen and stripped of technique, aesthetic paradigm, style.

Avital chose a very intense and quick mode to work which allowed the performers very little time (if any) to think or prepare. Not wishing to ‘fix’ or choreograph anything before the filming, the shooting itself had taken place in a 2 days full immersion, for each dancer was briefed on spot and started a one-to-one dialogue nearly on set.

Departing from very simple starting and ending positions (almost archetypal), identical for all dancers, Avital had created with each soloist an inner scenario that she needed to develop through her own actions and reactions to Avital’s real-time indications within a movement/emotive “score”.

Each scene of Foreign Bodies was chosen carefully as a container of multiple meanings - their histories and mythologies, man/nature interactions or violations, vectors of water paths or human paths - creating a situation in which these landscapes don’t function as backgrounds but rather as NATURE BODIES to which the dancer is foreign.

Making of